Flights of European airlines are frequently hampered by signals from the ground over the Baltic Sea, the Baltic countries and Poland. This so-called jamming disrupts the GPS signal that aircraft receive from satellites, preventing them from telling other aircraft and air traffic control where exactly they are. The danger is limited: aircraft have a different navigation system if GPS no longer works. The interference signals most likely come from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania. They are considered a form of electronic warfare in the West.
The British tabloid TheSun In collaboration with John Wiseman of the website GPSJAM.org, researched the number of disruptions in the period August 2023 to April 2024 for this region. For these eight months they arrive at 46,000 disrupted flights. The Irish budget airline Ryanair was the most affected, with more than 2,300 incidents. The Hungarian budget airline Wizz Air also had a lot to do with it, with almost 1,400 incidents. There has been a sharp increase: from fifty disruptions per week at the beginning of last year to 350 disruptions in March this year.
The measurement of the number of disruptions is indirect: the GPSJAM website records the accuracy of aircraft navigation on the basis of the signals they permanently send via ADS-B, the flight tracking system. Low accuracy results in GPS interference. This can be done in two ways: jamming disrupts or blocks the signal, spoofing deliberately sends incorrect positioning information to the aircraft. Jamming is common around military bases. Notorious regions are the Black Sea, the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea and now the Baltic Sea and surrounding countries. The latter may have to do with the recent NATO membership of Sweden and Finland.
One disruption that made the news concerns the government plane that British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps flew back from Poland to the UK on March 13. The aircraft flew close to Kaliningrad and had no GPS for half an hour. A government spokesperson called the incident “not unusual” in that area.
Safety risk
Aviation organizations EASA and IATA organized a workshop on jamming and spoofing at the end of January. EASA director Luc Tytgat then spoke of a “sharp increase in these attacks” and a “security risk”.
According to a spokesperson, KLM is seeing an increase “on our routes over parts of the Middle East, among other things” and emphasizes that pilots are well prepared for possible disruptions and that thanks to alternative navigation, flying can also be done safely without GPS.
According to the pilots’ union VNV, jamming occurs over Siberia, Korea, the Middle East and Europe. According to the pilots, spoofing is more dangerous than jamming because it is less noticeable: “Due to spoofing, the systems on board can give incorrect signals during the entire remaining flight, including during the approach. That can cause enormous confusion and is a risk to flight safety.” The VNV advocates retaining radio beacons on the ground as an alternative location determination.
The Russian jamming of European flights is not intended to crash a plane, writes Russia expert Mark Galeotti in an article published on Monday in the British magazine The Spectator. According to him, we should see the phenomenon – “more of an inconvenience than anything else” – as part of a broad strategy to influence European voters, just like disinformation, intimidation and hacking. According to Galeotti, the fact that Western Europe is trying to combat all these undermining tactics separately is outdated and wrong.
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