Image: Screen capture from YouTube – Azerbaijan Air 8243
What’s new: A LinkedIn post by our friend and colleague Ramsey Faragher, Director (CEO) of the Royal Institute of Navigation. He relates that many people have not fully realized GPS jamming has cost lives. And that it could well happen again.
In case you missed it – It’s Christmas Day, 2024, and Russian forces at Grozny are jamming GPS. The jamming disables ADS-B so they can not identify Azerbaijan Air 8243 as a friendly. The Russians fire a missile and severely damage the airliner. It crash lands and, when all is said and done, 38 are dead.
Why it’s important:
- The loss of life on Azerbaijan Air 8243 should have been a wakeup call for all GNSS providers, users, and especially aviation authorities.
- Little has been done to mitigate the impacts of GPS disruption. Aircrews have been warned and received a bit of additional training, but to the best of our knowledge, system and hardware changes are still far in the future.
- As Santayana and Churchill famously cautioned – ‘Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.’
What else to know:
- Before 9/11 over 140 commercial aircraft were hijacked. Yet little was done to increase airport or airliner security.
- After 9/11 immediate steps were taken, to harden cockpit doors and screen passengers.
- We wonder how many more lives must be lost before we consider the risks of not acting on GPS interference in aviation to be greater than the risks of acting quickly?
Here is the first part of and a link to Ramsey’s post. His post includes a transcript from the airliner’s cockpit voice recorder.
