Slowly They Modernize: A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks

[Major Nikon]

63. Not for the most part

Some VORs are maintained by municipalities and are really only used to define non-precision approaches. Some of those go down and don't get fixed because the municipality doesn't have the money or desire to repair them. The ones that the FAA maintains are kept in good working order because they define the airways and there's still a lot of planes out there who use them as their primary navigation source. GPS is not 100% reliable either with the network often becoming unreliable and unusable in certain areas. VORs are the only backup. NDBs are going away because mostly municipalities maintain them and they are used to define instrument approaches into certain airports, but with the FAA commissioning so many GPS approaches the cities are decommissioning them. I took the ADF receiver out of my airplane over a decade ago when I got a certified GPS. I never did like NDB approaches anyway.