The A310 was designed before GPS was even allowed to be used for civilian purposes and the A320 family (of which the A319 is a part) was also already well into its design phase before GPS was opened up to civilian aviation, though it had become available before it first flew. Aside from being based on an airframe originally designed in the 1960s and designed to be flown by pilots who had been trained on previous versions of the 747, even the 747-8 itself began design in the early 2000s. Of the 4 aircraft that you mentioned, the second-newest of those types is the 747-8. While airliners don't usually stay in service that long, we're still talking about production runs that last for decades and then service lives of decades beyond that. As an example, I'm in my late 30s and every airplane I've flown was built before I was born and was based on a type designed in the 1950s and/or 1960s. Airplanes, once built, tend to have very long service lives, especially when talking about an entire type of airplane rather than just one particular airplane. That said, due to the extreme cost of getting new hardware certified and the slow nature of regulatory changes, the aviation industry has a lot of momentum and major changes take a long time, both to be approved for initial use and then to actually become ubiquitous. It just is not the exclusive one and it most likely never will be because the aviation industry very understandably likes having backups to their backups to their backups, ideally ones that do not have common modes of failure, as would be the case with using other GNSSs. ![]() While the other answers are correct about why GPS (or similar GNSS, such as GLONASS, etc.) aren't used exclusively for aircraft navigation, I would say that, these days, the premise of this question is no longer correct and GPS is the primary means of navigation for aircraft.
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