The Garmin AT CNX80, formerly UPSAT, will be WAAS-ready by the end of 2003.

by Paul Bertorelli

When the FAA first rolled out GPS approaches in 1994—yes, it has been nearly a decade—we thought that to be a good thing. Last July, the agency officially turned on the Wide Area Augmentation System that makes GPS more accurate and more reliable and opens up the vast majority of backwoods airports to IFR navigation, including precision approaches. So that’s got to be better yet, right?

Definitely. But that doesn’t mean every owner should rush right out and buy a WAAS box. While it’s true that WAAS can be called revolutionary technology, it’s also true that its impact on flying IFR is likely to be evolutionary for quite some…