GPS Jamming Is Screwing With Norwegian Planes

From the ground, northeastern Norway might look like fjord country, peppered with neat red houses and dissected by snowmobile tours through the winter. But for pilots flying above, the region has become a danger zone for GPS jamming.

The jamming in the region of Finnmark is so constant, Norwegian authorities decided last month they would no longer log when and where it happens—accepting these disturbance signals as the new normal.

Nicolai Gerrard, senior engineer at NKOM, the country’s communications authority, says his organization no longer counts the jamming incidents. “It has unfortunately developed into an unwanted normal situation that should not be there. Therefore, the [Norwegian authority in charge of the airports] are not interested in continuous updates on something that is happening all the time.”

Pilots meanwhile, still have to adapt, usually when they are above 6,000 feet in the air. “We experience this almost every day,” says Odd Thomassen, a captain and senior safety adviser at the Norwegian airline Widerøe. He claims jamming typically lasts between six and eight minutes at a time.

When a plane gets jammed, warnings flash on cockpit computers and the GPS system used to warn pilots of a potential collision with terrain, such as mountains, stops working. Pilots are still able to navigate without GPS if they can communicate with ground stations nearby, explains Thomassen. But they are left with an eerie sense they are flying without the support of the latest technology. “You’re basically [going] 30 years back in time,” he says.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, jamming has dramatically increased across Europe’s eastern edges, and authorities in Baltic countries openly blame Russia for overloading GPS receivers with benign signals, meaning they can no longer operate. In April, a Finnair plane trying 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 been considered so dependable that many smaller, more remote airports have started to rely on it completely instead of maintaining more expensive ground-based equipment, says Andy Spencer, a pilot and international flight ops specialist at OpsGroup, a member organization for pilots and others in the airline industry.

“In Norway, you’re probably looking at a lot of airports that only have GPS approaches,” he says, referring to the phase of the flight where planes descend to the runway. “If there is an issue with GPS signals, these airports can become off limits.”

In Finland, even tractors capable of operating automatically have been disrupted. In May, the Finnish transport agency said the problem had intensified since Ukraine began targeting Russian energy infrastructure with drones, suggesting the jamming could be a side effect of Russia’s new drone defense systems. That same month, the agency changed its guidelines so that airlines have to report only GPS interference that has “exceptional effects.”

NKOM also attributes jamming above northeastern Norway to Russia. “In Finnmark, the interference is Russian jamming of several GNSS bands [systems that help satellites and ground stations communicate], not only GPS, originating from some place on the Russian side of the border,” Gerrard tells WIRED. Pilots aren’t the only people affected, he stresses. Across Norway, there have been cases of fishing boats unable to carry out certain tasks and diggers on construction sites no longer able to dig precisely, he says. The Russian embassy in Oslo did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

NKOM’s decision to stop tracking jamming in Finnmark sets a dangerous precedent, says Melanie Garson, a professor focused on international conflict resolution at University College London. “By not reacting, how do you enforce a deterrent effect?” she asks, adding it is still unclear whether the government is going to find a solution to the jamming problem or leave it to the industries that are affected.

NKOM does try to “eliminate” GPS jamming when its source is inside Norwegian territory, says spokesperson Gerrard. The agency is also among several government departments that organizes the annual event Jammerfest, held on the Norwegian island of Andøya, to experiment with countermeasures. Since 2022, representatives from industry and government travel to the arctic circle to test how their systems respond to jamming and the more serious GPS spoofing, where GPS signals are faked to deceive a plane or other device about its own location.

Yet Widerøe pilots are concerned that this issue might feel remote to the American companies that make a lot of the equipment inside their planes. They believe it is the American Navstar satellite system being targeted because other devices like iPads—which can pick up signals from multiple satellite constellations—still work throughout periods of jamming.

“The providers of the navigation computers, they are mainly American,” says Rolf Fossgård, deputy VP of flight operations at Widerøe. He’s worried that if American businesses are not affected themselves, they might not be motivated to upgrade their systems 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 situation in the skies above Finnmark is going to evolve. Since 2022, most interference has hit planes above 6,000 feet—suggesting the device that is causing the jamming is located on the ground, and that the more sensitive part of a plane’s journey, at lower altitudes, is protected by the curvature of the Earth.

But in April, Thomassen claims, he encountered his first case of jamming as he attempted to land. Flying into Båtsfjord, on Norway’s northern tip, his plane suffered jamming as it approached the runway. “We were able to land just fine based on visual contact with the airport,” he explains, adding that his company Widerøe is yet to verify why this case of jamming took place at such low altitudes.

Luckily the surrounding area is 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.”