Another near death by GPS story

D.E.Bishop wrote:
I find it amazing how this thread is so dramatically negative about the use of a GPS. Where are the names of the manufacturers of the units and the programmers that sell these death machines. I think most of the references are a friend of a friend stories and there are no references to the hundreds of millions of people successfully using a GPS.

There are many members of these forums that say they rely almost entirely on various electronic gadgets for planning their trips and decry the use of paper maps. As was mentioned in replies, you need to use your common sense first, don't blame the GPS for these silly people who court death on their own.

I quite like GPS navigation both for land and marine use. When I lived in Maine and ran a workboat for a friend who was a commercial diver, we used GPS and my laptop for the work we did for NOHA, national fisheries, university research folks and even burials at sea. It was a valuable tool that I still use on the water. But, as mentioned here in several posts, "common sense" is an important key to successful and dependable use of this tool. Far too many leave that behind when they venture out which gets them in trouble when combined with a lack of basic understanding of how their GPS works.

Common sense tells us an airplane can't fly when it runs out of fuel. Makes you wonder what they were thinking while their GPS told them exactly where they were.