快猫短视频

Disruptions to GPS signals, which began near war zones in Europe and the Middle East, are now affecting the busiest oceanic airspace in the world. More than 1700 transatlantic flights cross the North Atlantic between Europe and North America each day. In recent months, a small but growing number of these flights have lost reliable GPS service over Europe or the Middle East and failed to recover it before the ocean crossing.

鈥淲e receive daily reports of aircraft that experience jamming prior to entering oceanic airspace,鈥� says at NATS, the UK鈥檚 main provider of air traffic control services. 鈥淪ome of these flights experience ongoing GPS degradation.鈥�

Commercial airliners aren鈥檛 the only victims 鈥� other forms of transportation, as well as weapons systems and even certain apps are at risk from GPS interference. To prevent disruption, governments are exploring location-pinpointing backup options.

Daily instances of GPS interference have spiked since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. NATO and European officials have blamed Russia for an ongoing campaign of scrambling GPS signals in European airspaces from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south-east. Earlier GPS disruptions, which began in the eastern Mediterranean in 2018, have been attributed to Russian military forces . More recently, in late 2023, its own deliberate disruption of GPS signals in its controlled territory and surrounding regions as part of its military siege of Gaza. (See 鈥�A timeline of incidents鈥� below)

Such interference comes in two forms. GPS jamming transmits powerful signals to overwhelm the weaker radio signals coming from global navigation satellites in space. Another intervention involves spoofing GPS signals, which misleads GPS receivers into falsely reporting that they are hundreds or thousands of miles away from their actual location.

Interference impact

Militaries might jam or spoof GPS signals because the technology provides timing and navigation services to weapons systems, including aircraft, warships, missiles and drones. But this interference also affects civilian services on land, sea and in the air.

Free newsletter

Sign up to The Weekly

Sign up to newsletter

For example, people in places such as Cyprus and Lebanon have reported erroneous location results in their food delivery, ride-hailing and dating apps. Ships in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea have experienced GPS receivers their location as being at airports in Lebanon, Egypt or Russia.

One of the most widespread impacts has been in civil aviation, with thousands of aircraft experiencing GPS jamming or spoofing. Such interference has sometimes forced flights to turn back from their destinations, and it even prompted Finland鈥檚 national airline, Finnair, to temporarily suspend flights to an airport in Estonia.

Meanwhile, Canadian and UK air traffic controllers who oversee North Atlantic airspace receive reports of about a dozen flights a day affected by GPS interference. 鈥淲hile they represent a very small proportion of overall transatlantic flights, [our organisation has] observed an increase in transatlantic flights impacted by GPS interference over the past year,鈥� says at Nav Canada, a non-profit organisation that operates Canada鈥檚 civil air navigation system.

Any aircraft with degraded GPS service may be 鈥渒ept at slightly lower altitudes for their oceanic clearance to avoid busy traffic areas, and further climbs may also be limited due to other traffic鈥�, says Johnston.

Meanwhile, planes sharing an airspace with an affected aircraft must stay further away than they normally would 鈥� even if that means taking a less efficient flight path. 鈥淔or example, a flight may be denied a requested flight level because a nearby airplane has faulty GPS, resulting in a fuel consumption increase,鈥� says at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland, who maintains a of aircraft affected by GPS interference.

The larger separation distances assigned by air traffic controllers to the affected aircraft can be as much as 145 to 160 kilometres, compared with just 22 kilometres under normal circumstances, says at the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a Virginia-based non-profit organisation for protecting and augmenting GPS. That means fewer aircraft on each route, which can then affect flight schedules and cause delays, he says.

GPS alternatives

Commercial passenger jets have some backup navigation aids, including ground-based radio beacons and radar tracking from air traffic control services. But those aren鈥檛 available for flights over most of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, aircraft deprived of GPS must fall back on inertial guidance systems, which calculate their location based on information from motion sensors and clocks.

鈥淲hat we have right now is inertial sensing, and that鈥檚 nice because nobody can tamper with it externally,鈥� says , also at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. But standard inertial navigation cannot match the accuracy of GPS. To improve it, research teams are developing more precise quantum motion sensors and atomic clocks.

In May, the UK government flight-tested a new 鈥� developed by the quantum tech company Infleqtion along with the aerospace companies BAE Systems and QinetiQ 鈥� that combines both quantum sensors and an optical atomic clock. The goal is to deploy such systems aboard aircraft by 2030.

Separately, the US Air Force, Boeing and Airbus have spent more than 200 hours flight-testing a different navigation system. It uses quantum sensors and artificial intelligence to pinpoint an aircraft鈥檚 current location according to a map of Earth鈥檚 magnetic field. This quantum magnetometer was made commercially available in June by the developer SandboxAQ, a cybersecurity and quantum start-up that spun off from Google鈥檚 parent company Alphabet in 2022.

This quantum magnetometer is resistant to jamming or spoofing because it navigates according to distinctive signals from the planet鈥檚 magnetic field and has baseline magnetic maps for reference, says at SandboxAQ 鈥� all the computing runs on the device without relying on any internet or satellite connections. He suggests that the quantum magnetometer could complement existing inertial navigation systems.

Some governments have also been developing what Goward describes as a 鈥渞esilience triad鈥� to ensure that their militaries, communications networks and financial centres have reliable synchronisation and location-based navigation services 鈥� even if GPS jamming or spoofing takes place. That triad includes global navigation satellite systems such as GPS, a modern version of a second world war-era ground-based radio tower network known as Loran technology and a fibre optic network for sending signals over cables instead of wirelessly.

Cosmic rays can help synchronise the global financial system

Particles generated by cosmic rays can penetrate indoor and underground environments with ease, and could provide a more secure alternative to GPS for synchronising financial transactions worldwide

China has already adopted this concept 鈥渙n steroids鈥�, says Goward, by launching its own BeiDou navigation satellite system, setting up an enhanced Loran (eLoran) system of radio towers and laying down more than 19,000 kilometres of fibre optic cables. South Korea has taken similar steps in response to the ever-present military threat from North Korea. The UK government laid out its own in October 2023, noting that a 24-hour disruption of signals from global navigation satellite systems could result in a 拢1.4 billion blow to the UK economy. Although the US has funded various GPS alternatives, the government hasn鈥檛 committed to a resilience plan.

There may not be a single solution. 鈥淭here is consensus in the navigation community that no one system currently exists that could provide the same level of performance in all the same places without actually being yet another GPS clone,鈥� says Osechas.

That is a testament to GPS鈥檚 crucial role in many timing and navigation applications 鈥� even as recent disruptions show we can no longer take it for granted.

听