From the ground, northeastern Norway might look like a fjord region, dotted with elegant red houses and crisscrossed by snowmobile tours in the winter. But for pilots flying above, the region has become a dangerous zone for GPS interference.
The interference in the Finnmark region is so constant that Norwegian authorities decided last month that they would no longer record when and where they occur, accepting these signs of disruption as the new normal.
Nicolai Gerrard, a senior engineer at NKOM, the country’s communications authority, says his organization no longer counts jamming incidents. “Unfortunately, this has become an unwanted normal situation that should not exist. Therefore, (the Norwegian authority in charge of airports) is not interested in continuous updates about something that happens all the time.”
Meanwhile, pilots still have to adapt, usually when they are above 6,000 feet in the air. “This happens to us almost every day,” says Odd Thomassen, captain and senior safety advisor at Norwegian airline Widerøe. He states that improvisation usually lasts between six and eight minutes straight.
When a plane gets stuck, warnings flash on cockpit computers and GPS system used to warn pilots of a possible collision with terrain, such as mountains, stops working. Pilots can still navigate without GPS if they can communicate with nearby ground stations, Thomassen explains. But they are left with the disturbing feeling that they are flying without the support of the latest technology. “You’re basically going back in time 30 years,” he says.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, interference has increased dramatically around the world. The eastern edges of Europeand authorities in the Baltic countries openly blame Russia for overloading GPS receivers with benign signals, meaning they can no longer function. In April, a Finnair plane attempting to land in Tartu, Estonia, was forced to push back 15 minutes before landing because he couldn’t get an accurate GPS signal.
Over the past decade, GPS systems have been considered so reliable that many smaller, more remote airports have begun to rely entirely on them rather than maintaining more expensive ground equipment, says Andy Spencer, pilot and international flight operations specialist at OpsGroup. . a member organization for pilots and others in the airline industry.