Ekaterina Girnyk17:38, 03/29/24

The number of such cases has increased sharply in recent months.

Airplanes flying over the Baltic region are reporting a growing number of missing or spoofed GPS signals – and Russia is seen as the most likely culprit.

According to Politico , the interference appears to be concentrated around the Russian Kaliningrad exclave, a key military area for Moscow. Episodes of GPS signal jamming have occurred regularly since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. It is noted that the number of such cases has been growing steadily since January 2022, but in recent months the problem has become more serious.

“During the first two months of 2024, EVAIR recorded a significant increase in the number of reports of GPS outages. In absolute numbers, we received 985 GPS outages compared to 1,371 for the whole of 2023,” Eurocontrol said, adding that in the first two months There have been almost seven times more incidents this year than in the first two months of 2023.

At the same time, regulators so far say that problems with GPS do not pose a danger to flights.

Signal jamming is said to be very easy because it only takes a very weak signal to turn off a GPS receiver, and tools that can jam signals can be purchased online.

Another method, called spoofing, displays a false position of the aircraft. It’s a little more complicated than jamming, but with the right tools, “a reasonably competent amateur can do it,” aviation experts say.

Problems with GPS jamming have been reported, in particular, by Finnair, many of whose flights go south from Helsinki across the Baltic Sea and pass near Kaliningrad, as well as Latvian airBaltic.

(C)UNIAN 2024