Hybrid warfare: When the GPS suddenly fails in the cockpit

In recent months, thousands of civilian pilots in the Baltic region have had to contend with their navigation systems suddenly failing in mid-flight. Authorities in the Baltic region are certain that the reason is interference from Kaliningrad.

The visibility was good when Henrik Edshammar and his flight students took off from Gdansk, Poland. Once over the Baltic Sea, back to Sweden – that was the plan. It looked like a pleasant flight on this day in March. But at an altitude of just 150 meters, the GPS signal, which is important for navigation, fails:

“I can’t find any error, so I restart the system. Everything works – only the GPS signal is still missing,” Edshammar remembers. “Then my colleague, who took off shortly before me with other students, calls. He has the same problem. That’s when we realize: It has nothing to do with our planes.”

The case of the Swedish flight instructors is one of thousands. While in 2018, according to the European Aviation Safety Agency, fewer than 100 cases of GPS interference were reported in the entire Baltic Sea region, last year there were more than 10,000. This year there has been another significant increase.

If backup systems are missing

In the spring, the airline Finnair was forced to stop landings in Tartu, Estonia, for a few weeks – because of constant disruptions, as it was said. In the event of a GPS failure, you can usually navigate using backup systems. But there were none in Tartu.

Despite the thousands of cases, nothing is known about safety-related incidents in civil aviation. The Swedish pilot Edshammar had air traffic controllers navigate him from a tower for a while. After half an hour, the GPS signal was suddenly available again: “It’s as if you’ve been flying through clouds the whole time and then the sun comes out and you can see something again. It feels like you’re suddenly flying into nice weather,” he remembers.

Balts see Russia as the culprit

The GPS interruptions in the Baltic Sea region are triggered, for example, in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, say authorities from Lithuania or Estonia when asked by the ARDHans Liwång also confirms this. He is a scientist at the Swedish Defence School in Stockholm and says: “The Baltic Sea is affected by the tensions between Russia and the West. If you look at the GPS interference, everything indicates that most of it is being initiated by Russia from Kaliningrad.”

It is not just aircraft that are affected by these technical problems: ships, cell phones and even agriculture require GPS data. On the Finnish border with Russia, farmers complain about problems with their tractors, which cannot navigate accurately across the field.

The new normal for pilots?

Such disruptions seem to be the new normal, says Swedish flight instructor Henrik Edshammar. For him, this means that every flight has to be planned more intensively – for example by filling up with more fuel before take-off in case the landing is delayed.

In such moments, he has to reassure his flight students. They are not used to using other systems for navigation, says the pilot – even if these backup solutions work very well.