From the ground, northeast Norway may look like fjord country, dotted with pristine red houses and scattered with snowmobile tours in winter. But for high-flying pilots, the region has become a hotspot for GPS jamming.
Overcrowding in the Finnmark region is constant, and Norwegian authorities decided last month that they will no longer log when and where they occur—accepting these signs of disruption as the new normal.
Nicolai Gerrard, who is a senior engineer at NKOM, in the country’s communications department, says that his organization no longer counts incidents of waving hands. “Unfortunately, it has become an unwanted normal situation that should not exist. Therefore, the [Norwegian authority in charge of the airports] they’re not interested in constant updates on something that’s happening all the time.”
Pilots still have to adapt, usually at over 6,000 feet in the air. “We deal with this almost every day,” said Odd Thomassen, captain and chief security adviser at Norwegian airline Widerøe. He says jamming usually lasts between six and eight minutes at a time.
When the plane is congested, warnings are announced on the cockpit computers and the GPS system used to warn pilots of potential collisions with terrain, such as mountains, stops working. Pilots can still navigate without GPS if they can communicate with nearby stations, Thomassen explained. But they are left with a sense of dread as they fly without the support of the latest technology. “You are like that [going] 30 years ago,” he said.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, congestion has increased sharply on the eastern edge of Europe, and authorities in the Baltic states have openly accused Russia of overloading GPS receivers with positive signals, meaning they can no longer work. In April, a Finnair flight attempting to land in Tartu, Estonia, was forced to turn back 15 minutes before landing because it could not get an accurate GPS signal.
Over the past decade, GPS systems have become so reliable that many small, remote airports have begun to rely entirely on them instead of maintaining expensive ground-based equipment, said Andy Spencer, a pilot and international aviation specialist at OpsGroup, a member organization for pilots. were flying with others in the aviation industry.
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