The navigation systems of thousands of passenger aircraft are being disrupted every day as they fly close to conflict zones, according to researchers, who warn that the blocking or spoofing technology could one day put lives at risk.
There has been a big increase over the past two years in the use of electronic warfare technology, which is frequently used to disrupt drones or missiles that use global positioning system or other satellite navigation technology to home in on their targets.
However, the blocking or spoofing of GPS signals also affects commercial aircraft, explained Raphael Monstein, a research associate at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland.
“Spoofing is when an actor sends out malicious signals to all the receivers that are in the coverage area. And it tricks the receiver into believing that it is in a different position than it actually is. And particularly in aviation, that has quite some consequences, which can be quite negative,” he told VOA.
“It has a lot of side effects in the cockpit, and they can range from spurious warnings — obviously the loss of situational awareness because you’re not quite sure when your GPS indicates you’re somewhere else. You can have very different reactions of the aircraft, depending a bit on the aircraft type,” Monstein said.
Conflict zones
Monstein and his team in Zurich track GPS interference of civilian aircraft in real time and publish it on an online map.
They have detected a big increase in such incidents since the beginning of the year.
“And they are mainly around conflict zones. One of them would be the Middle East. One would be the Black Sea and around Russia,” he said. “We talk about on an average day about 1,000 aircraft at least being affected by that. And that is a very big scale. That is novel. We haven’t seen that kind of [interference] anywhere in the world so far.”
Commercial aircraft
The disruption isn’t only happening above war zones. In April, Finnair, Finland’s national carrier, suspended flights to Tartu in eastern Estonia near Russia after GPS disruptions prevented two aircraft from landing at the airport.
Finnair resumed the flights in June after the airport installed navigation systems that do not rely on GPS. Experts say most airports have such alternative equipment already installed.
Finnair previously reported similar problems when flying close to the Finland-Russia border and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. The interference began in 2022, the year Finland applied to join NATO, after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of that year.
At the time, Estonia’s defense minister said it was a deliberate Russian tactic.
“We all understand that these hybrid attacks are still very acute. We have to be ready also for these,” Hanno Pevkur told reporters on May 15.
Russia denies seeking to disrupt GPS signals of commercial aircraft.
Passenger dangers
How dangerous is GPS disruption for air travelers?
“It’s not that an aircraft is going to fall out of the sky because it loses its GPS signal,” Monstein explained.
“There are a lot of systems in aviation that were built in for a reason, and one of them is, for example, the ground proximity warning system. And if you have to deselect that one because it gives you spurious warnings, it chips away on the safety margins, and that is not good. And in the long run, there can be a high risk for something to happen,” he added.
GPS blocking and spoofing also affects navigation systems on the ground. Residents of Moscow have recently complained of malfunctioning smartphone applications, such as map, taxi-hailing or food delivery apps.
Experts have linked the disruption to Russian attempts to defend against Ukrainian drone attacks. Moscow has not commented on the issue.
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