Electronic/cyber warfare is the ‘new’ norm, but this one is a ‘old’ trick…
U.K. authorities have confirmed that a Royal Air Force Dassault 900LX business jet transporting Grant Shapps, the U.K. defense secretary, recently experienced GPS jamming while flying near Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave. Russia has a known history of performing electronic warfare attacks in Europe and elsewhere around the globe, impacting both commercial and military aircraft, including uncrewed systems, as well as shipping. But it’s not clear if the Royal Air Force jet was specifically the intended target, or if it just passed through an area where a broad GPS disruption operation was focused, which is not uncommon in the area.
The Times of London was the first to report on the electronic warfare attack, which occurred on March 13 following a one-day visit by Shapps to Orzysz, northeast Poland. There, the secretary met with Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz at a military training site, alongside Polish and British troops currently participating in Exercise Steadfast Defender 24, NATO’s largest military exercise since the Cold War.
Full article, HERE from the War Zone. h/t Stretch
The problem here is that too many pilots today rely on GPS for navigation, and don’t really use other tools to cross check that the GPS is actually correct. Very few of the young pilots today have ever done dead reckoning navigation since they were in basic ground school, and celestial navigation equipment doesn’t even exist for most aircraft anymore. LORAN and Omega are defunct, and inertial navigation systems are now ’embedded’ in most of the GPS systems, and never used by themselves.
Also, many pilots don’t understand Schuler Cycle issues inherent in inertial systems… sigh…
I just hope the pilots and crews ‘wake up’ to what is going on, and start cross checking that their GPS is actually doing what it is supposed to be doing…