Airplanes flying over the Baltic region are reporting an increasing number of missing or fake GPS signals — and Russia is seen as the likeliest culprit.
The blackout episodes — known as GPS jamming — have been occurring regularly since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. The jamming seems to be concentrated around Russia's Kaliningrad exclave — a key military area for Moscow.
“Russia is regularly attacking the aircraft, passengers, and sovereign territory of NATO countries,” said Dana Goward, president of the U.S.-based Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a GPS users lobby group.
“It is a real threat,” Goward warned. “There is one instance of accidentally jamming we know of that almost resulted in a passenger aircraft impacting a mountain,” he said, referring to a case reported by NASA in 2019.
The EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is looking into the issue, but so far regulators say that the GPS problems are not a danger to flights.
Interference cases reported by pilots “have been increasing steadily since January 2022,” said Eurocontrol, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation — which receives reports from pilots through its voluntary incident reporting system EVAIR.
The problem seems to be getting worse.
“During the first two months of 2024, EVAIR recorded high increases in GPS outages reports. In absolute figures we received 985 GPS outages compared with 1,371 for the whole of 2023," Eurocontrol said, adding that there were almost seven times more incidents in the first two months of this year compared to the first two months of 2023.
On Sunday night, an open source intelligence profile on X, formerly Twitter, named Markus Jonsson said that GPS jamming in the Baltic region had been going “for 47 consecutive hours making this the longest run ever” affecting “1,614 unique airplanes,” but the actual number could be higher.
