From the ground, northeastern Norway can look like a land of fjords, dotted with neat red houses and punctuated by snowmobile rides in the winter. However, for pilots flying above, the region has become a danger zone for GPS jamming.
Disturbances in the Finnmark region have been so persistent that Norwegian authorities decided last month to no longer record when and where it happens, accepting these disruption signals as the up-to-date normal.
Nicolai Gerrard, a senior engineer at NKOM, the national communications authority, says his organization no longer counts jamming incidents. “Unfortunately, this has become an undesirable, normal situation that should not have happened. Which is why [Norwegian authority in charge of the airports] they are not interested in constant updates on something that is happening all the time.”
Meanwhile, pilots still need to adapt, usually when they are above 2,000 meters. “We experience this almost every day,” says Odd Thomassen, captain and senior safety advisor at Norwegian Airlines Widerøe. He says jamming typically lasts six to eight minutes at a time.
When the plane becomes disrupted, warnings appear on the cockpit computers and GPS system used to warn pilots of a potential collision with terrain such as mountains, no longer works. Pilots can still navigate without GPS if they can communicate with nearby ground stations, Thomassen explains. However, they have the uncanny feeling that they are flying without the support of the latest technology. “Basically you are [going] 30 years ago,” he says.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, jamming has increased dramatically across the country The eastern edge of Europeand Baltic authorities openly blame Russia for overloading GPS receivers with benign signals so that they can no longer work. In April, a Finnair flight trying to land in Tartu, Estonia, was forced to land turn back 15 minutes before landing because he couldn’t get an precise GPS signal.
Over the past decade, GPS systems have become so reliable that many smaller, more remote airports have come to rely on them entirely rather than maintaining more exorbitant ground equipment, says Andy Spencer, pilot and international flight operations specialist at OpsGroup. a membership organization of pilots and other people involved in the aviation industry.