How does the gps on my iPhone 4S know we're I am if I have no service, it's in airplane mode, and wifi is turned off ?

Let me just say that I didn't get the answer I wanted from contacting apple care and the customer service rep was very rude and gave me what seemed like a short answer just to get me off the line. So here I am hoping that someone can give me a straight answer.
I have an iPhone 4S and I have not had cellular service associated with it for over a year now. It's basically acting as an iPod touch right now.
Yesterday I took a car trip to Boston with my wife and I was playing around with google maps. I had loaded our destination prior to leaving our home so the route information was still loaded. I have my 4s on airplane mode all the time so constantly searching for a signal wouldn't drain my battery. I turn wifi off when I'm not in a hotspot for the same reason as well. So as I was looking at our route info I noticed that the little node that indicates your position was moving along with our corresponding location almost as accurate as any other gps. This concerns me because
1- I have no service on this phone
2- airplane mode is enabled
3- wifi is disabled
Now the even weirder thing is that my son has a nexus tablet. Just strictly wifi. We pulled into a rest stop and conveniently it had free wifi. So I loaded our route info onto his Google device. When we got back on the road I turned wifi off on his tablet and SHOCKER the node was moving along with our position.
I want to know why my iPhone 4S running on iOS 7.0.4 is receiving gps data when all of the supporting features are turned off. As an added concern I would like to know why my sons wifi-only tablet is receiving gps data as well.
What is apple doing with its devices or what is google doing to their devices and/or application software.
Thank you to whoever helps me out with this.

Because GPS has nothing to do with WiFi, cellular signals, or data of any sort. GPS is implemented by signals sent by satellites that are received by GPS receivers. The receivers process the information from the GPS satellites and calculate your location. GPS never sends data anywhere; GPS functionality is receive only.
If you have WiFi or cellular data turned on this can improve the accuracy of GPS, because the GPS receiver can then use the known location of cell towers and WiFi networks to refine the GPS location. GPS by itself has an accuracy of 10 meters, or about 34 feet. Using the additional information from WiFi and cellular data this can be brought down to 3 meters (10 feet). This mode is called Augmented GPS, or A-GPS.

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