Airlines in Europe are still having problems with jammers interfering with airplane GPS systems near war zones and political hot spots. The issue has been especially prevalent lately in and around Estonia.
Finnair temporarily cancelled flights to the city of Tartu, Estonia because airplanes were losing access to GPS before landing. Tartu is roughly 50 km from the Estonia-Russia border.
“Jammers are working pretty much 24/7," Mihkel Haug, head of the air traffic control department with Estonian Air Navigation Services, told the CBC.
"We get incident reports every day from pilots. In April, it was more than 600."
Finnair announced that it will resume flights to Tartu starting 2JUN, 2024, using ground-based radio signals that are less likely to be interfered with than GPS signals.
The CBC said jamming reports also have spiked around the Black Sea.
Aviation and security experts say the jamming is troubling, but that it doesn’t automatically create dangerous situations, as pilots are able to rely on other navigation aids.
Last month The Guardian repored that more than 2,300 Ryanair flights have reported incidents of GPS interference since last August, as well as 82 at British Airways and almost 1,400 at Wizz Air.
Using public flight logs, researchers from GPSJAM.org and The Sun found that 46,000 aircraft reported sat-nav problems while in the Baltic region between August 2023 and March 2024.
An aircraft’s GPS could be spoofed to mislead the flight crew into believing they are somewhere else, at a different altitude or even flying at a different speed.
