Several NATO members accuse Moscow of deliberately jamming positioning signals
GPS is no longer reliable around the Baltic Sea and northern Norway. Interference in the Global Positioning System (GPS), which has affected all NATO members bordering Russia for two years, has worsened in recent months. Alternative systems to GPS have had to be activated on tens of thousands of flights and the main Finnish airline has suspended one of its routes due to the problem, which is also disrupting maritime navigation. Several of the affected countries accuse Moscow of intentionally jamming signals with its electronic warfare systems.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, GPS interference has been recurring in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These types of disruptions are common in and around conflict zones. Even so, in the last half year, the airspace of the three Baltic countries — in addition to that of Finland, Sweden and Poland — has been much more affected than at the beginning of the war. What’s more, thousands of ships have been navigating the Baltic without GPS since December, when the Russian army’s electronic warfare began in the Kaliningrad enclave. And in remote northeastern Norway, near Russia’s Northern Fleet base — which has eight of the 11 Russian submarines capable of launching long-range nuclear missiles — outages are almost daily.
Don’t all commercial planes have this?
There are other ways to navigate and fly other than gps and it’s basically just as easy to do. It’s just not quite as accurate and relies on stations on the ground which have been decommissioned over the years as gps has become more prevalent. VOR to VOR flying airways and then using ILS type approaches as an example.
Thinking about it: This can also be manipulated by an enemy on the ground…
Well they are all radio signals even the ILS and localizers. In the US our 5G network interferes with radio altimeters. A person at home can spoof airplane traffic that would show up in cockpits. Bad actors could cause havoc anywhere.
Would air traffic controllers be able to guide them via radar?
They could but you wouldn’t want to do that for all planes. Planes follow standard departure and approach paths so the controllers know where everyone is and should be going. Moving a few planes around no biggie but if you’re doing radar vectors for everyone that will slow things down dramatically.
That makes sense. I was thinking more about emergencies because it says outages are almost daily, which means not consistent.
They do, but compounding errors are always a problem with inertial navigation.
Instead of GPS, they can use fixed radio beacons like VOR and TACAN (which I think are both just US systems, but there are similar systems around the world and at major airports). This is basically the system that was in use before GPS.
EDIT: grammar
VOR is international, my local airport has one. TACAN is military only (though some can be used as a VOR by civilian aircraft), also international, and by the way originally British as per Wikipedia.
I understood everything in your comment! All those years playing FSX instead of going to school finally paid off!
I am not a pilot or aviation watcher, so I don’t know. Makes sense.