How electronic warfare is sowing confusion in cockpits

By Katie Hunt, CNN

(CNN) — “Terrain ahead. Pull up!”

It’s a command that should only be heard in a disaster movie or flight simulator. But pilots and aviation experts say such warnings have been increasingly sparking alarm in cockpits as bogus signals from global positioning satellites hit commercial flights.

The disruption of GPS signals has become endemic in conflict zones, including the region now impacted by the Iran war, affecting planes on routes that skirt hot spots for military activity in the Middle East, Baltic Sea and Black Sea. In cases of GPS interference, an airplane’s ground proximity warning system may lock onto a false signal, triggering unsettling warnings even though the plane is flying at a safe altitude.

“I have fellow pilots that encounter this on a regular basis. That’s the true danger. It’s becoming normalized,” 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. Hay, who works for Delta Air Lines, said he feared that pilots might lose trust in critical safety systems as they become desensitized to these warnings.

In addition to harrowing phantom pull up commands, flights encountering these spoofed signals experience abnormal system responses such as map shifts, where the aircraft location on the cockpit screen moves miles from the actual flight path, or when a plane is on the runway ready for takeoff, systems may erroneously suggest it’s elsewhere, according to a 2026 resource guide from the US Federal Aviation Administration.

Around 900 flights each day are affected by GPS interference, according to Benoit Figuet, a research associate at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and founder of SkAI Data Services, which since 2024 has tracked such incidents on its site GPSWise.

Cockpits are seeing their digital navigation displays “become a work of fiction” said a commercial pilot, who didn’t want to be identified because he was not permitted to speak publicly. He said that pilots sometimes have to turn off the “terrain inhibit switch” to silence alarms from ground proximity warning systems, manually decouple clocks from GPS and rely on ground-based systems “like it’s the 1970s.”

Pilots can use radar, inertial navigation tools and navigate using ground-based transmitters when GPS fails or becomes unreliable. But because GPS is embedded in multiple systems on board an aircraft, spoofed signals can flow through and affect several different tools such as aircraft clocks, weather radar and passenger Wi-Fi. Ultimately the interference can lead to flight disruptions and delays as confusion descends on the nerve center of a plane.

Easy to overpower

Global Navigation Satellite Systems, or GNSS, such as the most widely used US satellite-based system, GPS, are an intrinsic, if largely invisible, part of the modern world. With the flip of a switch, GNSS allows for the calculation of precise location and the exact time, no matter where you are.

But the signals powering these systems — comparable to the strength of a couple of light bulbs — are easy to overcome because they weaken as they travel over 20,000 kilometers to reach Earth from satellites in space. While this vulnerability has been long understood, it started to become a problem for aircraft and ships after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during which drones were widely deployed in combat for the first time.

GNSS interference involves militaries and affiliated groups intentionally broadcasting high-intensity radio signals in the same frequency bands used by navigation tools. While the intended targets are typically drones and missiles, aircraft can be collateral damage. Jamming results in the disruption of satellite-based positioning while spoofing leads to navigation systems reporting a false location.

“The aircraft thinks that it is absolutely someplace else,” Hay said. “The map doesn’t match. The time doesn’t match. There’s various cues that it’s going on but from what I’m told, the basic problem is when you’re being spoofed, you can determine you’re being spoofed, but you don’t know where you’re going to be spoofed.”

The topic was discussed in a panel moderated by Hay at IFALPA’s annual conference in Istanbul on Thursday, he said. Hay, who mainly flies Pacific routes, said he had not personally encountered GPS spoofing or jamming.

Hay added that the issue is not something that passengers needed to worry about from a safety standpoint but rather an operational headache for pilots, airlines and air traffic control.

For example, for aircraft headed across the Atlantic that encounter GNSS interference near the Black Sea, Hay said air traffic control would make sure the vehicles are spaced a greater distance apart for safety in case navigational reliability were to be comprised. This could mean that an aircraft can’t use the North Atlantic track system, a structured set of routes across the Atlantic that aims to accommodate as many aircraft as possible, which could result in planes taking longer, less fuel-efficient routes.

While most disruption happens in the Middle East, Black Sea and Baltic regions, allowing flight crews on routes in those areas to anticipate potential issues, Figuet said SkAI Data Services had detected clusters in Asia, including on the India-Pakistan border, around North Korea and South Korea, and Myanmar.

“There is risk, but I think it’s manageable risk, and what I don’t want to create is a false sense of panic,” he said. “So, it’s an issue. It has to be fixed.”

Figuet said the concerns have mostly to do with the additional burden placed on pilots and the possibility of delays or other logistical issues. However, he said that GPS interference has contributed to an aviation catastrophe: On December 25, 2024, an Azerbaijan Airlines flight traveling from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, Russia, crashed in Kazakhstan.

According to a February 2025 preliminary report by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Transport that included voice logs, the pilots encountered electronic interference. They lost GPS and reported “pull up” warnings near Grozny, where fog made landing using beacons difficult.

After two unsuccessful landing attempts at the Grozny airport, the pilots decided to return to Baku. At some point during the return, the aircraft lost its primary control systems, and the crew tried to make an emergency landing, the report noted. At least 38 of the 67 people on board the plane were killed.

In October 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin said missiles fired by Russian air defenses to target a Ukrainian drone that exploded near the aircraft had been responsible for the jet crash.

“GPS interference was not the primary cause of the crash. But because of GPS interference, they could not land where they were supposed to,” Figuet said.

Ramsey Faragher, chief executive of the Royal Institute of Navigation in London, agreed. “If it hadn’t had the problems with its GNSS, it would have very, very, very likely landed an hour earlier,” he said of the Azerbaijan Airlines flight. Faragher also took part in the panel discussion at the IFALPA conference last week.

Daily nuisance

Pilots are well-trained to manage GNSS interference, a phenomenon that Aleksi Kuosmanen, chief flight instructor and captain at Finnair, described as a daily nuisance.

Most flights that depart southbound from Helsinki encounter GPS spoofing and jamming, Kuosmanen said. A Finnair flight on April 6 that was carrying passengers to Kirkenes — a town in northern Norway close to the Russian border, where tourists go to spot the Northern Lights — had to make a second landing attempt after encountering GPS interference on the first try.

“The effect on pilots, whether it be jamming or spoofing, is probably increased workload in the cockpit and concentrating on this spoofing takes, of course, a fair amount of your mental resource,” he said.

Finland’s Transport and Communications Agency Traficom said it had received 421 reports of GPS reception interference in January and February this year. Last year, it said it received a total of 1,704 reports.

Finnair, which flies around 100,000 flights a year, also suspended flights to Tartu in Estonia for a month in 2024 while the airport there made improvements to its ground-based landing systems that pilots rely on if they encounter GNSS interference.

“We’re in a position to manage the situation, and the pilots are used to it. But I wouldn’t like to see this as a new normal, that we are continuing many, many years from now with this kind of situation so our stand is to state that this is not acceptable,” he added.

The FAA said in its report that as GNSS interference becomes more common, organizations and pilots may develop a higher tolerance for risk. “GNSS interference can lead to mistrust in flight deck systems when the technology’s validity, reliability, or robustness is compromised,” the FAA report noted. “Once trust in these systems is lost, it can be difficult to regain. This mistrust may ultimately impact how flightcrews utilize information and respond to alerts.”

Finland was among 13 European Union members that shared an open letter in June last year calling for action on the issue, which resulted in a European Aviation Action Plan published in March. It includes proposals for short-term actions such as developing standard phraseology when communicating with air traffic control and longer-term goals of coordinating with military agencies to obtain timely information on sources of GNSS.

No silver bullet

Faragher said that live jamming and spoofing awareness maps such as those provided by SkAI Data Services can already be integrated into electronic flight bags, the digital information management system used by crews. This software can give pilots a clearer indication of where to expect interference and thus make it easier to avoid. IFALPA recommends a ground reset after every flight suspected to have been influenced by GNSS interference to erase corrupted GNSS signals from all systems.

Beyond these first steps, changes to cockpit avionics could help better manage the problem by improving software filters that detect big jumps in position and time, and making sure ground position warning systems don’t retain spoofed information, Faragher said. Longer term, changes in aircraft system design to enable the isolation of the GPS receiver from all other aircraft systems would also help, he added.

“It is disappointing that the hardware manufacturers have not fixed some of these problems by now,” Faragher said. “Given the right motivation, things can happen much more quickly, and we need to figure out how to get the sort of right motivations going.” He pointed out that when terrorists stormed cockpits on 9/11, locks were installed on cockpit doors “within weeks.”

Airlines have also been investigating the installation of Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna, which have an ability to filter out spoofing signals, he said, and Galileo, the European GNSS, now has a feature that allows users to authenticate the data they receive.

Companies and governments are also exploring whether stronger satellite signals sent from low Earth orbit could enhance GNSS navigation as well as planning improvements to GPS satellites currently in medium Earth orbit. The European Space Agency’s Celeste mission transmitted its first navigation signal on April 17. The project aims to launch a total of 11 satellites that will fly in low Earth orbit to test signals across various frequency bands in order to improve positioning and navigation.

“We are in a phase of waiting — waiting for new technology, and in the airline industry the change isn’t always that fast,” Kuosmanen said.

“New equipment, new system software requires a lot of testing before they can be set up,” he added. “In the meantime, it’s our job to make sure that our pilots are trained to competently handle these situations.”

CNN’s Katharina Krebs contributed to this report.

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