I wonder what the human factors consequences of having a GPS/chartplotter working almost all the time and then suddenly fail are. Well, I don't wonder that much, but it would be interesting to see the data. It seems a similarly jarring situation to having an AI chatbot that most of the time gets things right but then occasionally gets something wildly (albeit plausibly) wrong. Or self-driving car technology that occasionally (rarely) tries to drive into the median. It seems like it renders the user more complacent and less able or likely to respond to the failure safely and correctly.

So is it safer? If the answer is "yes, until it fails" that's pretty bad. Things fail, systems degrade, and we need to be able to adapt safely. If the transition between "everything working" and "degraded performance" causes a safety issue... that's kind of a systemic failure isn't it?

[edit] maybe it's a UX issue? What if interacting with the GPS had the same UX as the VOR? The failover would be a lot less disruptive. That's kind of where I always end up with chart plotters.. like, you need to be using the paper chart anyway if you want to be able to fail over safely and quickly... so does the chartplotter really add anything? Or does it take things away?