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What’s New: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued a warning and direction to pilots to be careful and not use GPS/GNSS in some instances.
Why It’s Important: This seems to us to be a quantum step in governments admitting the jamming and spoofing problems.
- As we know the long journey to recovery starts with “First, admit you have a problem.”
What Else To Know:
- The advisory talks about GNSS, but to the best of our knowledge, only GPS is used by the ADS-B safety and traffic management system and vast majority of aircraft navigation.
- The air transportation system operates MUCH less efficiently without GPS. Imagine the economic impact of even a tiny decrease in efficiency on tens of thousands of flights.
- The air transport system operates less safely without GPS.
- Here are cautions to pilots from the SAFO:
• Inability to use GPS/GNSS for navigation;
• Inability to use hybrid GPS/GNSS inertial systems for navigation;
• Loss of area navigation (RNAV) capability, to include required navigation performance (RNP);
• Unreliable triggering of Terrain Avoidance and Warning systems (TAWS);
• Inaccurate aircraft position on navigation display (e.g. moving map and electronic flight bag);
• Loss of or erroneous Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) outputs;
• Unanticipated effects to use of conventional navigation aids (e.g. inability to autotune);
• Unanticipated position-dependent flight management system effects (e.g. insufficient fuel indication)
• Failure or degradation of Air Traffic Management (ATM) infrastructure and its associated systems reliant on GPS/GNSS, resulting in potential airspace infringements and/or route deviations.
- Here is a link to the FAA’s Safety Alert for Operations (SAFO) 24002 “Recognizing and Mitigating Global Positioning System (GPS) / Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Disruptions.”
FAA Tells Pilots To Go Analogue As GNSS ‘Spoofing’ Incidents Increase
The Federal Aviation Administration is advising pilots to prepare to use conventional navigational aids to manage the risks of ‘spoofing’ attacks on global positioning systems and global navigation satellite systems
Incidents of aircraft navigation systems disrupted by false data have become more frequent, causing pilots to veer dangerously off course. Though all pose a danger to aircraft, interference, jamming, and spoofing, differ in the extent of risk.
Interference and jamming prevent aircraft navigation systems from obtaining a reliable positioning signal. Spoofing sends false navigational data, sometimes corrupting critical flight systems and making them unusable.
