The Sky's the Limit

In some ways, though, what's most remarkable about the way that Con-Way NOW operates is its gritty utilitarianism. There is no wall-sized status board showing where all of the trucks are. The computer displays are dense menus of text. And yet, anytime a staffer or a customer wants to know exactly where a truck is, a Con-Way NOW customer-service rep can actually "ping" the truck as if it were a jet or a submarine. The truck reports back time, date, map location, latitude and longitude, speed, direction, and, if desired, a whole raft of other information: the driver's name, the load being hauled, the ultimate destination, the distance out, the estimated time of arrival.

GPS -- location -- is really just the occasion for a link between truck and company that is constantly being exploited in ways that are unexpected. Truck drivers, all independents who have exclusive contracts to drive for Con-Way NOW, can actually have part of their pay zapped to special cash cards as soon as they pick up a load. That way, the costs of moving the load can be paid by the load itself. Confirmation of pay disbursement, naturally, bounces from Ann Arbor, off of the satellites in orbit, and back to a display mounted in the truck.

"This business is not about the cost of moving something," says Chris Hance, a regional sales manager who just spent three years as a regional account executive for Con-Way NOW. "It's about the opportunity cost of not getting it there when you need it." When the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup, Con-Way NOW moved the merchandise for the celebration. The company has moved the wheel from Wheel of Fortune, and it also routinely handles equipment for the military, medical supplies, newspaper inserts that are time sensitive, and, most often, auto parts, the kind of equipment that keeps an assembly line up and running. Ford books an average of 1,000 such shipments of auto parts each month.

To a big manufacturer, spending a few thousand dollars to move equipment is nothing compared with letting an assembly line sit idle at a cost of $100,000 an hour. "We are Big Brother," says Hance. "That's what we are selling to our customers. They always know where the shipment is. We've got what it takes to let them sleep at night."

We Have Hung Our Own Stars in the Sky

My Garmin handheld GPS unit has the comfortable heft of a cell phone. When I turn it on, the opening screen shows this message: "TRACKING SATELLITES." As soon as the Garmin finds the satellites, it does three things at once: It reports my latitude (north-south position) and longitude (east-west position), to three decimal places. It reports the accuracy of its own measurement. And it puts on screen a circular map that shows the relative positions of all of the "visible" GPS satellites in the sky above me. The satellites look like tiny Star Wars ships. It's a thrill to look down at that map of the satellites and then up at the sky, to hold a device that locks on to eight satellites at once, does the math, and tells me my exact location on the earth. (Office location: N 35? 47.234', W 78? 38.800', four satellites tracking, 36' accuracy.)

People have been looking to the sky for navigational guidance ever since they built boats and started venturing out of sight of land. Christopher Columbus, the navigators of U.S. Navy vessels from the Civil War, and merchant seamen after World War II would have easily understood many of one another's navigational tools: devices that measured the positions of the sun and stars in the sky, and charts and tables that helped to interpret what those positions meant.

The sun and stars have limitations as navigational aids: They are passive, they don't communicate very much information, and they are useless when blocked by clouds. The GPS satellites are a very sophisticated improvement on the stars: We have hung our own stars in the sky, better ones than we used to use. The operational GPS satellites are even referred to as "the constellation."

The constellation, managed and maintained by the Air Force, needs at least 24 satellites to provide full coverage of every point on the earth, all the time. A minimum of three satellites is needed to calculate one position on the earth. Right now, there are 28 working GPS satellites, out of a total of roughly 750 satellites currently in military, civilian, and commercial use.

It's easy to get confused about what GPS satellites do. They are, in many ways, just like stars, shining information down to Earth. The satellites don't know where you are or where Con-Way NOW's trucks are. They are, in fact, the opposite of spying devices. GPS satellites don't gather data; they broadcast it. Each GPS satellite knows two things: its exact location in orbit and exactly what time it is. It knows its position within a few feet, while moving at 17,000 miles per hour. It knows the time within 100 picoseconds or so. How accurate is that? There are 1 trillion picoseconds in every second.