Instances of GPS interference on passenger aircraft, including ‘spoofing’ with false signals, are on the rise over conflict zones globally, including on India’s borders with Pakistan, which are among the top sites for such occurrences, according to OPSGROUP, a voluntary group of 8,000 aviation personnel, including pilots, who share information on risks to flights. The GPSjam portal also lists India’s borders with Pakistan and Myanmar as among the top five regions where more than 10% of aircraft reported low navigation accuracy.
‘Spoofing’ is a form of cyber attack that includes false GPS signals to mislead navigation equipment. It is seen in conflict zones and is used to attack drones that are increasingly used in modern warfare. Interference with GPS was recently seen on the Embraer jet involved in the Azerbaijan Airlines crash on December 25 in which 38 people onboard were killed. On Saturday (December 28, 2024), Russian President Vladimir Putin apologised to his Azerbaijan counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, for the “tragic incident that occurred in Russian airspace” and said that Russian air defence was repelling attacks from Ukraine’s combat drones in Russian towns.
According to a report published by the OPSGROUP in September 2024, the first series of GPS spoofing was identified in September 2023 in the area of northern Iraq, centred on Baghdad. In 2024, new spoofing locations were identified in the Black Sea region, western Russia and the Baltics, the North and South Korea border areas, western Ukraine, and the India-Pakistan border.
The report said there was “daily spoofing” since May 2024 in the Delhi Flight Information Region. It also ranked this area at the ninth position among the top 20 Flight Information Regions, with 316 aircraft impacted by spoofing between July 15 to August 15. The rank was based on the analysis of 17,000 flights.
Globally, instances of spoofing have increased from 300 flights impacted daily in January to 1,500 flights impacted daily by August, the report said.
In an advisory in November 2023, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) asked airlines to develop standard operating procedures and provide bi-monthly reports on such occurrences. This data is not available publicly. The Hindu requested the Ministry of Civil Aviation to share this data, but there was no response till the time of going to press.
One IndiGo pilot reported losing both GPS systems for a few minutes while he was flying out of Amritsar earlier this month. Several other pilots have said that “nearly every flight” to Amritsar either experiences interference or spoofing. Flights to Dubai, Doha and other Gulf destinations from northern parts of India also experience false GPS signals, as do flights to Bangkok, Vietnam, Hong Kong while crossing Myanmar.
Pilots have also said flight tracking website flightradar24 can sometimes show, albeit inaccurately, that there had been a flight diversion mid-air because of loss of data used to indicate the aircraft’s location to other aircraft and air traffic control, resulting in an immediate message from the airline’s operation control centre.
While aircraft systems are built with several redundancies, including the Inertial Reference System that’s also used for navigation, which continue to operate safely for up to five hours even if a primary system fails, one pilot described the phenomenon of GPS spoofing and interference as one of flying with “one’s hands tied to one’s back”.
Spoofing the GPS could also result in errors in the speed display, or trigger a terrain warning by tricking the navigation system into believing it’s at a dangerously low altitude or in proximity to terrain. Though pilots don’t receive an alert inside the cockpit during spoofing, crew are able to detect such events from the ‘incoherent’ information displayed on various instruments.
The UN’s International Civil Aviation Organisation held its 14th Air Navigation Conference in Montreal between August 26 to September 6 on aviation safety concerning interference to the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). It expressed “strong concerns on the serious recent escalation of GNSS harmful interference” and condemned interferences “not clearly justified by security or defence needs”. It recommended that states under the International Civil Aviation Organization “acknowledge that military shall notify aviation authorities, spectrum regulators and ANSPs (aviation navigation service providers) about their GNSS intentional interference activities whenever possible”.
Published – December 28, 2024 11:05 pm IST
