Pilots face tough time following surge in false GPS signals near conflict zones
False GPS signals that deceive onboard plane systems and complicate the work of airline pilots are surging near conflict zones, industry employees and officials said.
A ground collision alert sounds in the cockpit, for instance, even though the plane is flying at high altitude — a phenomenon affecting several regions and apparently of military origin.
This includes the vicinity of Ukraine following the Russian invasion two years ago, the eastern Mediterranean and the air corridor running above Iraq, according to pilots and officials.
Disruptions which were previously limited to jamming, preventing access to signals from geolocation satellites, are now also taking a more dangerous form making it difficult to counter spoofing. This sees a plane receive false coordinates, times and altitudes.
By comparing this data to the geographical maps in its memory banks, its systems can conclude there is imminent danger ahead, Thierry Oriol, a Boeing 777 pilot and member of the SNPL, the main French pilots’ union, said.
He also mentioned an incident “departing from Beirut where the plane thought it was at the level of the Alps, at 10,000 feet (above sea level)”.
The problem, explained a manager at a European airline speaking on condition of anonymity, is that this adulterated information enters the navigation system and can cause false alerts hours afterwards as the flight nears its destination.
The commonly used GPS actually only covers the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) managed by the American Army. On board airliners, GNSS are the main tools which pilots can rely on in order to determine their position, but they are not the only ones.
Without needing to return to the sextants of bygone days, these devices are equipped with inertial orientation devices capturing movement in order to deduce an object’s trajectory. But their precision deteriorates throughout the flight.