When the map lies: What GPS jamming and spoofing mean for aviation and maritime operations

GPS jamming and spoofing affects around 900 commercial flights every day and thousands of vessels at sea. Here is what the threat means for aviation and maritime operations.

For most passengers boarding a commercial flight, GPS is invisible infrastructure, background technology that works until it does not. For pilots, it is something else entirely: a system they are increasingly being trained not to trust.

The disruption of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals, through jamming, which blocks positioning data, and spoofing, which replaces it with false information, has moved from a geopolitical irritant to a daily operational challenge for crews flying routes anywhere near the Middle East, the Baltic Sea, or the Black Sea. The same threat is reshaping how maritime operators manage safety and compliance across some of the world’s busiest shipping corridors.

A problem that has become routine

According to research from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, reported by CNN, around 900 commercial flights are now affected by GPS interference every single day. The disruptions are concentrated in active conflict zones, but their effects spread outward. Spoofed signals have caused cockpit screens to show aircraft in entirely the wrong location, triggered ground proximity warning systems to issue pull-up alerts on perfectly safe approaches and forced onboard clocks to decouple from reliable time sources.

“The aircraft thinks that it is absolutely someplace else,” said Captain Ron Hay, president of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations, which represents over 160,000 pilots in more than 70 countries. His deeper concern is normalisation: that crews and organisations are becoming desensitised to what should be treated as an alarm.

That normalisation is visible in how airlines now talk about the issue. Aleksi Kuosmanen, Chief Flight Instructor and Captain at Finnair, describes GPS interference as a daily nuisance that crews factor into every planning cycle. There is disruption, he says, almost every time a flight departs from Helsinki. In April 2026, a Finnair ATR-72 carrying passengers to Kirkenes in northern Norway had to make two landing attempts after GPS spoofing disrupted the first approach. The second was successful. Not every crew in every situation is so well prepared.

Aerospace Global news stated that Finnair suspended its service to Tartu in Estonia for a month in 2024 while the airport upgraded its ground-based landing systems, the backup infrastructure pilots rely on when satellite signals cannot be trusted.

Why GNSS is straightforward to disrupt

The vulnerability is structural. GPS signals travel more than 20,000 kilometres from satellites in medium Earth orbit and arrive at ground level at a strength comparable to a couple of light bulbs. Jamming them requires nothing more sophisticated than a high-intensity radio transmitter broadcasting on the same frequency bands. Spoofing, transmitting false location data convincingly enough to fool a receiver, demands slightly more technical capability, but the underlying technology is widely accessible.

The intended targets are drones and missiles. Commercial aircraft and shipping vessels are collateral damage. When a spoofed signal enters an aircraft’s GPS receiver, it does not remain isolated. It flows downstream into clocks, weather radar, ground proximity warning systems, and passenger Wi-Fi. Pilots have described having to manually decouple aircraft clocks from GPS to prevent corrupted timing data spreading through other onboard systems, working around their own equipment rather than through it.

The maritime situation

At sea, the same problem plays out at greater scale. More than 1,100 vessels experienced GPS and Automatic Identification System (AIS) interference across the Middle East Gulf within a single 24-hour period earlier this year. Ships were falsely shown to be anchored at airports, positioned over a nuclear power plant, and docked at ports inside Iran. In congested waters where precise course-setting is essential for collision avoidance, the consequences are not merely operational inconveniences. They are safety events.

The US Navy, keenly aware of how deeply military operations depend on reliable positioning, has been reviving an older craft in parallel with its high-tech systems. Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear carrier, quartermasters are trained in celestial pilotage using traditional brass sextants — measuring the angle between stars and the horizon, cross-referencing with chronometers, and plotting position by hand on paper charts. It is not nostalgia. It is an operational fallback against a threat the Navy takes seriously enough to maintain alongside all its modern avionics.

Where the market is heading

The US Federal Aviation Administration has warned that as GNSS interference becomes more common, pilots and organisations risk developing a higher tolerance for risk, and that once trust in flight deck systems is compromised, it is difficult to restore. Thirteen EU member states signed a joint letter calling for concerted action in 2025, which led to the publication of a European Aviation Action Plan. Proposals include live interference awareness tools integrated into flight management software, improved signal authentication, and longer-term changes to aircraft avionics design.

The commercial market for solutions that address GNSS vulnerabilities, resilient positioning systems, spoofing detection, authentication tools for GNSS receivers, and alternative timing infrastructure, is growing in direct proportion to the scale of the problem. Buyers across aviation, maritime, defence, and critical infrastructure are actively evaluating technologies that work when satellite signals cannot be relied upon.

Technology companies supplying resilient positioning, timing, and signal authentication solutions to the aviation and maritime sectors are operating in a market where the demand is demonstrably urgent. Terra Global Solutions works with technology SMEs to identify and enter the international markets where that demand is accelerating. Whether a company’s products address monitoring, signal authentication, receiver resilience, or crew training platforms, Terra can help translate that capability into credible routes to market across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, without the overhead of building a costly international sales infrastructure from scratch. If your technology addresses the reliability gap that geopolitics has opened, Terra can help you build the commercial relationships to close it. 대화 예약하기에서 팔로우하세요. LinkedIn for the latest news from Terra Global Solution