Image: John Hartzel
What’s new: A fairly comprehensive article by our colleague, Fred George in Aviation Week.
Why it’s important:
- Aviation is feeling the brunt of GPS jamming and spoofing, and has had the first documented fatalities as a consequence. So we know lives are at stake.
- Of all GPS applications, commercial aviation’s could take the longest to modify because of certification requirements and the extent of the installed base.
What else to know:
- Fred gets a lot of things right and the article is worth reading, especially for those not familiar with aviation.
- One thing we do take a bit of issue with is his $40B a year estimate for the benefits of GPS. We are pretty sure that a utility that underpins virtually every aspect of American life provides much more benefit than that. If it went away for one of many possible reasons, it would be an existential threat for the U.S.
GPS Needs To Toughen Up, Or Get Trampled Down
Fred George May 13, 2025
GPS is under siege from hostile forces. In 2024, there were as many as 700 daily GPS jamming and spoofing incidents, according to an analysis of ADS-B reports by Switzerland’s Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). The Swiss institution recorded 41,000 GPS spoofing events from Aug. 15 to Sept. 15 last year.
One of the deadliest GPS L1 civil signal interference events occurred on Dec. 25. On that date, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, an Embraer 190, was lured off course while enroute from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, Russia. When it strayed, Russia fired a surface-to-air missile at the airliner. The exploding warhead riddled the aircraft’s hydraulic system with shrapnel, crippling the jet.
