Building Resilience to GNSS Jamming & Spoofing

Building Resilience to GNSS Jamming & Spoofing

    If you fly, fix, dispatch, or supervise airplanes in 2025, you’re living in a world where GPS can be wrong, and not by a little. Reports of GNSS (GPS) jamming and spoofing have surged across Eastern Europe and the Middle East, enough that EASA and IATA published a joint plan this summer to help operators detect, withstand, and report interference events through standardized reporting, improved training, and layered navigation resilience. We’ve seen the operational consequences firsthand: flights forced to revert to ground based procedures after suspected jamming, and an ICAO assembly resolution that condemned satellite navigation interference because of its safety impact. Closer to home, FAA flight advisories continue to warn U.S. crews about GPS outages from testing and encourage pilots to report anomalies, proof that interference isn’t just happening overseas.

    From a safety manager’s perspective, this isn’t just an avionics issue; it’s a risk management and culture issue. We’ll update our procedures to include preflight GNSS risk checks, “lost GNSS” contingencies, and backup navigation plans. Training will include table top and simulator scenarios for spoofed positions, incorrect flight paths, and ADS-B anomalies, ensuring crews can safely revert to conventional navigation methods. Finally, we’ll strengthen reporting by including quick guidance in the EFB on how to file hazard reports and ASRS entries when GNSS interference occurs.

    The EASA and IATA plan promotes a culture of openness, treating interference as a hazard to manage, not a failure to blame. Sharing deidentified event summaries, short micro lessons, and credible external alerts within our company aligns our practices with the global safety effort led by EASA, IATA, ICAO, and the FAA. By reporting what we see and learning from others, we make the system stronger together.

References

International Air Transport Association. (2025, June 18). EASA and IATA publish comprehensive plan to mitigate GNSS interference. International Air Transport Association.

Federal Aviation Administration. (2025, May). Flight advisory: GPS interference testing (CSG4 25-03). Federal Aviation Administration.

International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations & International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Associations. (2025, October 16). Joint statement on GNSS outages.

The Times. (2025, September). Russian jamming forces Ursula von der Leyen plane to land without GPS.

Reuters. (2025, October 3). UN aviation assembly closes with rebuke of Russia over satellite navigation jamming.