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What’s new: Another report about the serious impacts of GPS jamming and spoofing in aviation.

Why it’s important: Eventually people are going to die. If they haven’t begun dying already.

• We are confident Russian forces did not intend to shoot down an Azerbaijani commercial airliner on Christmas. We know GPS was being interfered with. And we know that ADS-B, the system that identifies airplanes to each other and to folks on the ground, needs GPS to work. We strongly suspect that, if GPS interference had not been present, the airliner would have been properly identified and not shot down.

What else to know: 

• The recent Christmas shoot down was not the first time Russians shot down a commercial airliner by mistake. In September 1983 they shot down Korean Air 007 killing 269 people.  A navigation error caused the flight to wander into Soviet air space. Many credit this event with motivating President Regan to make GPS available for peaceful use around the world.
• This most recent disaster will likely not be the cathartic event needed to cause political leaders to act for two reasons. First, the linkage with GPS disruption is not sufficiently direct and clear. Second, leaders in the east are cowed by Putin and will remain largely silent in the face of Russian lies that the crash was due to an oxygen cylinder exploding. Leaders in the west likely see it as “not happening here” and not their problem.
• Global aviation needs a more resilient set of navigation signals if it is to achieve the safety and efficiency goals it aspires to. A recent paper from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences identified systems needed. The paper was funded by the RNT foundation.
• Governments, and people generally, have a hard time preventing bad things from happening, even when the trends show you are on the road to disaster. This is true even in a field like aviation that should have a very safety-oriented culture. For example, over 140 commercial airliners were hijacked before 9/11. In two of those the hijackers threatened to fly the aircraft into nuclear power plants. Yet nothing was done to harden cockpits or improve aircraft security until after the twin towers came down.

Thanks to member Mitch Narins for bringing this article to our attention.