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It seems like every pilot’s worst nightmare – hijacking a plane’s GPS while hanging around 40,000 feet above the ground, with hundreds of passengers on board.
But this kind of situation, it has emerged, is extremely common, with new data showing that 46,000 planes flying over the Baltic Sea have logged GPS problems since last August.
There are two types of interference: intentional signal “jamming”, where GPS signals are blocked, and “spoofing”, where planes send fake GPS positioning signals to try to throw them off course. Spoofing and jamming are not new, but cases of both became common “in Ukrainian airspace when the conflict started in 2022”, says David Mumford of Opsgroup, which monitors changes in global airspace.
“But then in 2023 we started getting reports of spoofing across the Middle East, including cases near Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Cyprus and Lebanon. Since then we’ve had reports from all sorts of other places, including Pakistan, Niger and China.” Opsgroup knows of one spoofing incident where a plane almost entered Iranian airspace, where missiles were ready to hit unauthorized aircraft.
At the end of March there was “a continuous period of 63 hours of GPS dormancy in the Baltic area”, says Mumford. One presumed victim was Grant Shapps: last month an RAF plane carrying the Defense Secretary home from Poland was intercepted for half an hour while flying close to Kaliningrad, Russian enclave between Poland. and Lithuania.
NATO also says that spoofing and jamming are on the rise. “We have seen an increase in GPS jamming since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, and allies have publicly warned that Russia was behind GPS jamming affecting aviation and shipping,” says a NATO official . “Russia has a track record of assembling GPS signals and has a range of capabilities for electronic warfare. In the Middle East, Russia has been using GPS jamming against Allied air forces fighting Isis for years.”
It certainly sounds worrisome. Furthermore, it appears that there is little that airlines and aviation authorities can do to combat this trend. GPS jamming equipment can be operated in the air by airplanes and drones, or by vehicles on the ground below. But it is not known exactly how it is done. “Even if you asked a technology expert how jamming or spoofing is done they wouldn’t be sure,” says Nick Eades, who was the world’s most experienced Boeing 747 pilot when he retired in 2022. The Americans who take care of the GPS system look for ways to prevent it from happening, but in a few weeks the people behind it will have found another way to corrupt the signals.”
As for the motivation behind the attackers, Richard Dearlove, the former head of the secret service, thinks that this is all a terrible show of power on the part of Russia. Dearlove says GPS jamming is typical in Russia. “We are in a gray state of war with Russia,” he says. “None of this is particularly surprising, but it shows that we are in a confrontation with Russia, and we are only beginning to understand the seriousness of that here in the West.”
Dearlove points out that Russia likely disrupted three undersea internet cables that went out of action last year.
“Those were simultaneous accidents, or someone did something to demonstrate their ability,” he says, and signal jamming works to the same effect. Russia will “do all kinds of things to undermine the quality of our daily lives and disrupt things”, says Dearlove, “and a very good way to do that is by messing with our air travel or our internet cables.”
Opsgroup says that such situations are “increasingly more prevalent” overall rather than more disruptive. But Dearlove thinks we’re right to see the threat behind jamming and spoofing, even if it’s relatively harmless. “It’s a low-quality method of increasing our uncertainty without directly confronting us,” he explains. “It’s very difficult for us to respond to things like this because it’s not like we’re going to turn around and jam their GPS in retaliation – that’s not what we do with civilian aircraft.”
So should passengers be concerned? Yes and no. Spoofing and jamming are illegal for individuals to do in this country, Eades says, and for good reason. “Anytime you interfere with an aircraft it’s dangerous,” he explains. “It’s not a good idea, like shining a laser light into a pilot’s eyes, it’s just stupid and irresponsible.”
But it also makes it clear that pilots are easily able to respond to attacks. “It certainly wouldn’t destroy [a pilot’s] day,” says Éades. “You might have to put down your coffee and use your brain a little bit, but in the grand scheme of things that can go wrong, it’s just an inconvenience.”
When this happens, the pilot gets a “warning light” which is “the plane telling you it doesn’t think its GPS is working properly”, says Eades. “Then you have to go into the system and work out what’s wrong.” An easy task, Eades says: airplanes have two alternative navigation systems, so if your GPS seems to be going astray, pilots simply choose to follow the others.
“It’s definitely a modern phenomenon and turbulent flights are much more common today,” he says. “These days, the Chinese and the Russians, they have more sophistication and can disrupt systems much more often.” But such failures are “something we know and train for,” he says. In addition, airplanes did not have GPS when Eades qualified some 35 years ago.
Another pilot, speaking anonymously, says he has “personally experienced it several times over the Baltic Sea, flying to and from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia”.
Pilots have been discussing the issue on forums and warning their colleagues, but each time “it’s been pretty clear, and it’s easy to deal with,” he says. “In each case it only lasted a few minutes as we quickly moved to an area near Kaliningrad. Once the crew has taken effective action, the flight continues. Passengers would feel nothing and nobody would be the wiser.”
NATO warns that GPS troubles are unlikely to end anytime soon. An official says that “electronic warfare, including against GPS, is likely to be part of any future conflict, and we welcome allied investments in technologies that are more resistant to jamming”. But in Eades’ eyes, flying is less safe today than it was three decades ago. “Honestly it’s not about me,” he says. “I’d be very happy to get on a plane today knowing what’s going on.
