GPS Jamming Is Screwing With Norwegian Planes | EUROtoday

NKOM’s determination to cease monitoring jamming in Finnmark units a harmful precedent, says Melanie Garson, a professor centered on worldwide battle decision at University College London. “By not reacting, how do you enforce a deterrent effect?” she asks, including it’s nonetheless unclear whether or not the federal government goes to discover a resolution to the jamming drawback or go away it to the industries which are affected.

NKOM does attempt to “eliminate” GPS jamming when its supply is inside Norwegian territory, says spokesperson Gerrard. The company can be amongst a number of authorities departments that organizes the annual occasion Jammerfest, held on the Norwegian island of Andøya, to experiment with countermeasures. Since 2022, representatives from business and authorities journey to the arctic circle to check how their programs reply to jamming and the extra severe GPS spoofing, the place GPS indicators are faked to deceive a airplane or different system about its personal location.

Yet Widerøe pilots are involved that this problem may really feel distant to the American firms that make quite a lot of the gear inside their planes. They imagine it’s the American Navstar satellite tv for pc system being focused as a result of different gadgets like iPads—which may decide up indicators from a number of satellite tv for pc constellations—nonetheless work all through durations of jamming.

“The providers of the navigation computers, they are mainly American,” says Rolf Fossgård, deputy VP of flight operations at Widerøe. He’s fearful that if American companies aren’t affected themselves, they may not be motivated to improve their programs to be jamming-resistant. “For a lot of European operators or Middle East operators, they are in need of this kind of equipment.”

It’s unclear how the scenario within the skies above Finnmark goes to evolve. Since 2022, most interference has hit planes above 6,000 toes—suggesting the system that’s inflicting the jamming is situated on the bottom, and that the extra delicate a part of a airplane’s journey, at decrease altitudes, is protected by the curvature of the Earth.

But in April, Thomassen claims, he encountered his first case of jamming as he tried to land. Flying into Båtsfjord, on Norway’s northern tip, his airplane suffered jamming because it approached the runway. “We were able to land just fine based on visual contact with the airport,” he explains, including that his firm Widerøe is but to confirm why this case of jamming happened at such low altitudes.

Luckily the encircling space may be very flat, he says. “Norway is a mountainous country, so if the jamming were in other parts of the country, operational impact would be significant.”