Increased Russian disruption of European aviation

European airline flights are often disrupted by signals emanating from the ground over the Baltic Sea, the Baltic states and Poland. That's what it's called Jamming It disables the GPS signal that planes receive from satellites, preventing them from telling other planes and air traffic control exactly where they are. The risk is limited: aircraft have a different navigation system if the GPS is no longer working. It is likely that the interference signals come from Russia's Kaliningrad region, between Poland and Lithuania. It is considered a form of electronic warfare in the West.

British tabloid newspaper the sun In collaboration with John Weissman of GPSJAM.org, we looked at the number of disturbances from August 2023 to April 2024 for this region. During these eight months, the number of suspended flights reached 46,000. Irish budget airline Ryanair was the worst affected, with more than 2,300 incidents. Hungarian budget airline Wizz Air also played a major role, with nearly 1,400 incidents occurring. There has been a sharp increase: from fifty outages a week at the beginning of last year to 350 outages in March of this year.

The number of turbulence is measured indirectly: GPSJAM records the accuracy of aircraft navigation based on the signals they transmit permanently via ADS-B, the flight tracking system. Low accuracy causes GPS interference. This can be done in two ways: jamming disrupts or blocks the signal, and spoofing intentionally sends incorrect information about the aircraft's location to the aircraft. Jamming is common around military bases. The notorious areas are the Black Sea, the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea and now the Baltic Sea and the surrounding countries. The latter may have something to do with Sweden and Finland's recent membership in NATO.

One disruption that made the news involved the government plane on which British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps returned from Poland to the UK on 13 March. The plane flew near Kaliningrad and did not have a GPS for half an hour. A government spokesman described the incident as “unusual” in that region.

Safety risks

Aviation regulators EASA and IATA organized a workshop on jamming and spoofing at the end of January. Then the director of the European Aviation Safety Agency, Luc Tetgat, spoke of a “sharp increase in these attacks” and “security risks.”

According to a spokesperson, KLM is seeing an increase “in our routes over parts of the Middle East, among others” and stresses that pilots are well prepared for any possible disturbances and that thanks to alternative navigation, flying can also be done safely without GPS. .

According to the VNV pilots' union, the jamming is occurring over Siberia, Korea, the Middle East and Europe. According to pilots, spoofing is more dangerous than jamming because it is less noticeable: “Due to spoofing, the on-board systems can give incorrect signals during the entire remaining flight, including during the approach. This can cause enormous confusion and pose a risk to aviation safety.” ” VNV advocates keeping radio signals on the ground as an alternative to determining location.

Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in an article published Monday in the British magazine that Russian interference with European flights is not aimed at shooting down a plane. Viewer. According to him, we should view this phenomenon – “which represents more of an inconvenience than anything else” – as part of a broader 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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