Going Mainstream - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 123

in the Adriatic Sea to a hero's welcome—one that would be repeated later at
Aviano and again at the White House.
O'Grady's dramatic story of survival and rescue offered the media and view-
ing public a welcome break from the O. J. Simpson murder trial and a grinding
Medicare debate in Congress. More than half of people surveyed at the time
said they were still closely following news about the Oklahoma City bombing
two months earlier. 3 Against this gloomy backdrop, O'Grady became an instant
sensation. “High-Flying O'Grady Fills Hunger for Hero,” read a USA Today
headline above a story about how the crush of requests from reporters, agents,
authors, and filmmakers was keeping all sixty Air Force public affairs staffers
busy. 4 Media interest endured, with additional bursts of attention when O'Grady
later released a book and again on the one-year anniversary. News executives
voted O'Grady among the top ten news stories of 1995. 5 The coverage meant
lots of publicity for gps, but as reporters dug for different angles some asked
why it took six days to find the downed pilot. After a private meeting with
O'Grady, Rep. Robert Dornan, a California Republican who was chairman of
the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence,
declared O'Grady's prc-112 survival radio obsolete. 6 Dornan, an ex-ighter
pilot himself, revealed that O'Grady told him if he ever had to bail out again
he would like to have a couple of cellular telephones. 7 British pilots reportedly
were already carrying them. 8
The O'Grady search-and-rescue effort, reminiscent of incidents in Vietnam
thirty years before, prompted calls for immediately funding a stalled Air Force
program to replace the outdated prc-112 with a digital radio capable of satel-
lite communications. 9 By fall 1995, Motorola was working under a “quick-
reaction program” to add gps to the prc-112, creating a model known as the
Hook 112, but those units still relied solely on less powerful “line-of-sight”
communications. 10 In February 1996 the gps joint program office awarded
Rockwell International a $13 million contract to build eleven thousand Com-
bat Survivor Evader Locator (csel) radios for delivery by 1998. 11 Contract
options provided for twenty-seven thousand radios by 2001 at a cost of $67.2
million. 12 csel development took longer than expected, and in 1999 Depart-
ment of Defense officials deemed the first radios “not operationally suitable.” 13
Refinements continued. In 2004 the military began fielding the csel radios,
first proposed in 1991, at a cost of about $5,000 apiece. 14 By 2011, Boeing (which
acquired Rockwell International's aerospace and defense businesses not long
after the initial csel contract was awarded) delivered fifty thousand radios for