Seen from the ground, northeastern Norway may look like fjord country. It is dotted with neat red houses and offers snowmobile tours during the winter. But for pilots flying over the area, the area is a danger zone for GPS jamming.
Jamming in the Finnmark region is so constant that Norwegian authorities last month decided to accept these jamming signals as the new normal and not record when and where the jamming occurs.
Nicolai Gerrard, a senior engineer at the country’s communications authority NKOM, said the country’s communications agency no longer counts incidents of interference. “Unfortunately, it has developed into an undesirable normal situation that should not exist in the first place. Therefore,[Norwegian authorities in charge of the airport]are not interested in constant updates about what is happening. .”
Pilots, on the other hand, typically still need to adapt above 6,000 feet. “We experience this almost every day,” says Odd Thomassen, captain and senior safety advisor for Norwegian airline Wideroe. He said the sabotage typically lasted six to eight minutes at a time.
When a plane is stuck in traffic, a warning flashes on the cockpit computer and the GPS system used to alert pilots to potential collisions with mountains or other terrain becomes inoperable. Thomasen explains that pilots can navigate without GPS if they can communicate with nearby ground stations. But they are left with the eerie feeling that they are flying without the support of modern technology. “You’re basically going back 30 years,” he says.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, jamming has increased dramatically across the eastern edge of Europe, and authorities in the Baltic states suspect Russia is overloading GPS receivers with innocuous signals. , has publicly denounced it as no longer operational. In April, a Finnair plane attempting to land in Tartu, Estonia, was forced to turn back 15 minutes before landing after failing to receive an accurate GPS signal.
Over the past decade, GPS systems have been considered so reliable that many small and remote airports have begun to rely entirely on them instead of maintaining more expensive ground-based equipment. said Andy Spencer, pilot and international aviation operations specialist at OpsGroup. Membership organizations such as aviation industry pilots.
