Image from YouTube: Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 crashing on Christmas day 2024 with the loss of 38 lives. The aircraft had been fired on by Russian forces after GPS jamming prevented its identification as a civil aircraft.
What’s new:
A really outstanding podcast from Aviation Week that discussed more than technical issues. It also addressed some fundamental leaderhip/, governance, policy, and procedure problems keeping aviation and all other users from having better GPS and PNT.
Why it’s important:
A number of important points were brought up that echo things we have been saying:
- We have needed technology but politics and ingrained processes are keeping us from using them.
- GPS/PNT is a national utility that needs national leadership. The US has not been giving it the attention it deserves. – This was also a finding of the US National PNT Advisory Board before it was disestablished, the subject of an OpEd by Gen. William Shelton, USAF (ret), former Commander, US Space Command, and the subject of a recent “Washington View” column in Inside GNSS+.
- GPS falling behind Galileo and Bei Dou is a whole of government failure.
- As a military system, improvements to GPS that benefit civilians take a back seat. – Note, executive policy requires DOT to pay for upgrades that benefit civil users. Yet OMB has regularly prohibited DOT from getting funds for that purpose because “GPS is a DOD system.”
Graham Warwick made very cogent points about aviation’s seeming inability to adapt quickly enough to meet threats, and the need to rethink some of our assumptions.
- It takes multiple years to approve and incorporate equipment changes in commercial aircraft. That’s because we don’t want to risk something going wrong and people getting hurt.
- But what about the risks from threats that aren’t addressed during the years it takes to get new equipment on board and operating?
- We don’t balance these two risks off against each other. – Good case study is CPRA antennas. Low risk to air crews and passengers, high ability to greatly reduce the impact of jamming and spoofing on commercial aircraft. Why aren’t they on aircraft now?
- Aviation as an industry should be able to adapt to change faster. Long, deliberate processes for everything will be increasingly dangerous. The world is changing fast and demands faster reactions and responses. Example – responding to/preventing AI enabled cyberattacks on aircraft.
What else to know:
- The point about aviation not being able to adapt to change fast enough applies in other areas as well. Certainly, true for many PNT users across applications.
- Interesting that the U.S. government has designated GPS a “safety of life” system. We wonder what that is supposed to mean. Shouldn’t it mean that the government will do everything it can to protect and reinforce it? Establish a governance structure that ensures both military and civilian users are safeguarded?
- A number of technical improvements mentioned in the podcast are short to mid-term mitigations that will help, but not solve the problem. For example, having L5 available and using multiple GNSS will certainly make it harder for malicious actors. Yet a 2018 paper demonstrated how with $400 in COTS parts researchers built a device that spoofed all GNSS signals at the same time. GNSS signal strength and open signal specs will always be a challenge. Longer term, more substantial changes are needed.
