Another casualty of war

December 1st 2023

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Spoofing or jamming of vital commercial aircraft navigation systems have been increasing, largely exacerbated by global conflicts, International Air Transport Association (IATA) Senior Vice President Operations, Safety and Security, Nick Careen, said at the association’s Global Media gathering in early December. Read More »

“Spoofing or jamming of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) and GPS (Global Positioning System) signals impacts aircraft systems and results in the unavailability of navigation and/or surveillance information.” GPS is a specific satellite-based navigation system developed by the U.S., while GNSS encompasses multiple global navigation systems, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, and others. GNSS technology is used in conjunction with existing GPS systems to determine precise location positioning anywhere on the planet and works on a larger scale.

The incidents are impacting the operations of many airlines and outages are becoming longer, he said. A map of incidents produced by IATA shows a large number of events occurring over Eastern Europe, the region where the Russia-Ukraine war is being fought.

“Spoofing is when an erroneous signal is sent to the aircraft which potentially could have the aircraft doing something it should not be doing,” explained Careen. “Jamming is jamming the signal and forcing the pilots to use alternative procedures because their GPS results are not accurate. Neither is good, but procedures are in place to manage them.”

Careen commercial aircraft are not targeted. “It’s done to protect an asset on the ground. It could be the Americans have a facility that they don’t to be visible so if commercial air traffic happens to be flying overhead at a particular spot it is impacted by it. It is a byproduct of war games really. Spoofing is another version of interference that makes the GPS not work properly.”

IATA has January meetings are planned with Airbus and Boeing, some regulators and manufacturers of the aviation equipment to see if the issue can be operationalized with better procedures to avoid jamming. “We are not expecting to eliminate it, but we are definitely expecting to mitigate it,” Careen said.