More than 1,100 flights daily in August were affected by what’s being called GPS spoofing. This is up from just a few dozen incidents per day in February. A “spoofing attack” can cause the GPS coordinates used by pilots to “drift away” from their real location during the flight.
These spoofing attacks “come from powerful electronic-warfare transmitters in Russia, Ukraine and Israel,” University of Texas at Austin aerospace engineer Todd Humphreys told WSJ. The attacks aren’t directed at civilian planes, but those planes do get in the way.
In one instance where this happened, a United Airlines flight headed from Delhi to the East Coast of the US “picked up a spoofed GPS signal” over the Black Sea, south of Ukraine, which “caused problems for the rest of the flight.”
Another occurrence saw a private Embraer jet almost fly into the hostile airspace of Iran without clearance, which could have been extremely dangerous had it not been corrected in time. Another flight, a Boeing 787, had to abort two landings, “one of them 50 feet above the ground, after the loss of a GPS signal kicked off a series of instrument problems.” […]
— Read More: humanevents.com
