UK holiday f lights ‘hacked’ by Russia

Russia is behind ‘extremely dangerous’ electronic attacks on thousands of British holiday flights, aviation sources claimed yesterday.

The planes appear to be suffering from GPs jamming and manipulation, giving pilots a false location for their aircraft.

The European aviation safety agency warned in January of a ‘sharp rise’ in the attacks but did not say who was responsible.

But industry experts now blame Vladimir Putin’s forces, with one insider telling The sun the ‘information from the Russians is spurious’. The suggestion echoes that of an aide who reportedly blamed Russia for the ‘wildly irresponsible’ attack that jammed an RaF plane as it flew through Poland with Defence secretary Grant shapps on board.

The GPs signal was interfered with for 30 minutes as the Dassault Falcon 900LX flew near Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad.

Between august and March, 46,000 flights reportedly logged satellite navigation issues in the Baltic. among them were 2,309 Ryanair flights, 1,368 Wizz air flights, 82 British airways flights and four EasyJet flights. EasyJet said it had procedures in place to ‘mitigate against GPs issues’.

Ryanair said: ‘if any location systems, such as GPs, are not functioning then the crew switch to alternate systems.’

Experts note that a significant number of aircraft report ‘low navigation accuracy’, which appeared to ‘correlate well with areas of known and suspected jamming’.

Dr Jack Watling, of the Rusi defence think tank, told The sun that Russia had ‘long used GPs jamming as a harassment tool’ and was ‘projecting it across Nato borders’.