Aug 4th 2011, 19:37 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES
IT IS annoying enough when you board a plane in New York bound for San Francisco only to end up in Los Angeles because the Bay Area is fogged in (which has happened to your correspondent twice). It would be downright unnerving if it happened because the air-traffic control system directed the plane there by mistake. The “NextGen” air-traffic control system, which uses GPS satellites to pin-point every plane’s precise position in the sky once a second, plus onboard radios that let each aircraft continually see (and be seen by) all others nearby, is to be rolled out in 2012 and fully implemented by 2022. Replacing today’s patchwork of ground-based air-traffic control radars that sweep a small arc of airspace every 12 seconds—and lose aircraft between scans and as soon as they go out of range—with a blanketing mesh of GPS satellite signals should allow planes travelling busy routes to steer clear of one another, while flying in tighter formations though crowded airspace. The aim is to save fuel, time and lives, while handling an ever increasing amount of air traffic (see "Unfriendly skies", November 9th 2007).
And so it would except that, due to regulatory haste and shortsightedness, GPS coverage of America could soon go dark in places and become patchy elsewhere. Not only airlines would suffer. There are over 500m GPS receivers in use throughout the United States. Motorists, mobile-phone users, boat-owners, television broadcasters, the police, the armed forces, the emergency services and even farmers would be adversely affected.
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