From the bottom, northeastern Norway would possibly appear to be fjord nation, peppered with neat pink homes and dissected by snowmobile excursions by way of the winter. However for pilots flying above, the area has turn out to be a hazard zone for GPS jamming.
The jamming within the area of Finnmark is so fixed, Norwegian authorities determined final month they’d now not log when and the place it occurs—accepting these disturbance alerts as the brand new regular.
Nicolai Gerrard, senior engineer at NKOM, the nation’s communications authority, says his group now not counts the jamming incidents. “It has sadly developed into an undesirable regular state of affairs that shouldn’t be there. Due to this fact, the [Norwegian authority in charge of the airports] should not curious about steady updates on one thing that’s occurring on a regular basis.”
Pilots in the meantime, nonetheless should adapt, often when they’re above 6,000 toes within the air. “We expertise this nearly day-after-day,” says Odd Thomassen, a captain and senior security adviser on the Norwegian airline Widerøe. He claims jamming sometimes lasts between six and eight minutes at a time.
When a aircraft will get jammed, warnings flash on cockpit computer systems and the GPS system used to warn pilots of a possible collision with terrain, reminiscent of mountains, stops working. Pilots are nonetheless in a position to navigate with out GPS if they will talk with floor stations close by, explains Thomassen. However they’re left with an eerie sense they’re flying with out the help of the most recent expertise. “You are principally [going] 30 years again in time,” he says.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, jamming has dramatically elevated throughout Europe’s eastern edges, and authorities in Baltic nations brazenly blame Russia for overloading GPS receivers with benign alerts, which means they will now not function. In April, a Finnair aircraft attempting to land in Tartu, Estonia, was pressured to turn back quarter-hour earlier than touchdown as a result of it couldn’t get an correct GPS sign.
Over the previous decade, GPS techniques have been thought-about so reliable that many smaller, extra distant airports have began to depend on it utterly as a substitute of sustaining costlier ground-based tools, says Andy Spencer, a pilot and worldwide flight ops specialist at OpsGroup, a member group for pilots and others within the airline business.
