alt Hacker News> Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho.
Then what are you supposed to do when your GPS craps out on approach in low visibility and heavy weather?
Obviously the answer is "fly the airplane". Which means you look at your artificial horizon, set trim and power for max climb, get to a safe altitude and figure it out.
If you're paying attention you already have your chart folded to the airport you're landing at, so it shouldn't be too hard to orient yourself and figure out what's next. Either you'll be making another attempt at this airport without GPS or you'll be going somewhere else.
There's never an excuse for failing to fly the airplane. That's basic airmanship. You need to be able to do it regardless of whether your GPS is working.
It's very easy to write this comment when you're not the one getting behind the plane in the middle of the night with multiple simultaneous challenges (speaking from experience; I can feel the anxiety writing this comment from similar "white knuckle" experience), and I agree, keep flying the plane. Systems fail, that is the point of investigating incidents to improve systems. Humans are always the weakest link. I agree that an experienced pilot should be able to safely land on an approach assuming a loss of GPS.
(General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel, tracking at roughly 1.0 to 1.1 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours. Statistically, GA's per-hour fatality rate is about 14 times higher than driving a car, carrying a risk profile comparable to riding a motorcycle)
Edit: My hot take is more communication and training needs to go into "As the pilot, you should be prepared to lose GPS at any time at critical moments in the flight lifecycle." Are we letting folks fly in potentially adverse conditions leaning too heavily on GPS leading to potentially avoidable accidents? I don't know, the NTSB is likely better informed to say so or not. If I was a flight instructor, I'd probably include loss of GPS during instrument approach at night and/or in weather as an experience to cover.