What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.
GPS is pretty damn precise, especially once you add local ionosphere corrections (via WAAS or similar) and get to use the military signal. It's certainly good enough for navigating an airplane, because it's more accurate than what was in use before GPS (VOR).
Yeah. I'm not a pilot but am a bit nostalgic for "the old way". A modern autopilot system that's linked to GPS will let you type in waypoints and then it will just fly to them, keeping the heading adjusted to account for the wind data it gets from a satellite weather uplink.
I believe what happened was that some hackers went to known locations on the planet, listened to the signal, then used these pairings to reverse engineer it.
GPS is pretty damn precise, especially once you add local ionosphere corrections (via WAAS or similar) and get to use the military signal. It's certainly good enough for navigating an airplane, because it's more accurate than what was in use before GPS (VOR).
Edit: relevant diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Accuracy_of_Navigation_Sys...