Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. It is February twentieth, twenty twenty six, and I am your host, Corn. I am joined, as always, by my brother and our resident technical expert, Herman Poppleberry.
Herman Poppleberry, reporting for duty! It is good to be here, Corn. Especially since we are talking about something that has been quite literally surrounding us lately. It is a topic that sits right at the intersection of high stakes geopolitics and the invisible infrastructure that keeps our modern world moving.
It really has. Today's prompt comes from Daniel, who is curious about the escalating use of global positioning system jamming and spoofing in regions like Ukraine and Israel. He specifically wants to know how this affects routine commercial aviation and what steps militaries are taking to keep these electronic warfare operations from turning the sky into total chaos for civilian pilots.
This is such a timely topic, Daniel. Living here in Jerusalem, we have been seeing the effects of this on our own phones and devices for over two years now. It has become a part of daily life. It is one thing when your food delivery app thinks you are in Beirut or Cairo while you are sitting in your living room, but it is a completely different level of complexity when a three hundred ton aircraft carrying three hundred people is trying to find a runway in low visibility.
Exactly. And I think it is important to start by defining what we are actually talking about here, because jamming and spoofing are two very different animals, even though they both mess with your navigation. Herman, before we get into the aviation side of things, can you break down the technical distinction? Why is the global positioning system so vulnerable in the first place?
Absolutely. To understand why it is easy to mess with, you have to understand how weak the signal is. Think of a global positioning system satellite as a twenty watt lightbulb orbiting twelve thousand miles above the earth. By the time that signal reaches your phone or a plane's antenna, it is incredibly faint. It is actually quieter than the background cosmic noise of the universe. We only hear it because we know exactly what pattern to listen for.
So it is like trying to hear a whisper in a crowded stadium.
Exactly. And that leads us to jamming. Think of jamming as a loud, obnoxious noise. If you are trying to listen to that whisper and someone starts blasting a foghorn right next to you, you cannot hear the whisper anymore. That is jamming. A terrestrial transmitter sends out a high power signal on the same frequency as the global positioning system satellites—primarily the L one and L two bands. Because the satellite signals are so weak, a relatively small jammer on the ground can drown them out for miles. When a receiver is jammed, it just says, I have no signal. It is a denial of service.
Right, so the pilot sees a big red X on the navigation display or a warning message saying global positioning system primary lost. It is annoying, and it increases the workload, but at least the pilot knows the system is down. They can transition to other methods.
Exactly. Spoofing, however, is much more insidious. Spoofing is not a foghorn; it is a ventriloquist. The spoofer does not just drown out the signal; it sends out a fake signal that looks exactly like a real satellite signal, but it contains slightly different data. If the receiver accepts that fake signal, it will calculate a position that is completely wrong, but the receiver thinks it is perfectly fine. It does not show a warning. It just tells the flight computer, hey, we are fifty miles north of where we were a second ago.
And that is where the real danger lies for commercial aviation. If the navigation system thinks the plane is in one place while it is actually in another, all sorts of automated safety systems start getting confused. We have seen a massive spike in this over the last two years, right?
A massive spike. In twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five, we saw the emergence of what researchers called the Baltic Jam. Thousands of flights over Poland, the Baltic states, and southern Sweden were experiencing persistent interference, likely originating from the Kaliningrad region. Some days, over one thousand six hundred aircraft were reporting issues. And then, of course, there is the Middle East. For months now, if you fly into Ben Gurion Airport or even just walk around certain parts of Jerusalem, your phone might suddenly tell you that you are at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon.
Which is hundreds of miles away. Now, for the listeners who might be confused, why would a military do this? It is a security measure, right?
Precisely. Most modern drones, loitering munitions, and long range precision missiles rely heavily on the global positioning system to find their targets. If you can make a drone think it is already at its target when it is actually still over the sea, or make it think it is flying at a safe altitude when it is actually about to hit a building, you can neutralize the threat without firing a missile of your own. It is a digital shield.
But the problem is that global positioning system signals are not targeted. They are broadcast.
Right. They are omnidirectional. So when the military turns on a spoofer to protect a city from an incoming drone swarm, every commercial airliner in the vicinity is also receiving that fake signal. The spoofer does not know the difference between a hostile suicide drone and a Lufthansa Airbus A three twenty one.
So let us talk about the cockpit. Imagine you are a pilot on a Boeing seven eighty seven flying from London to Tel Aviv. You are over the Mediterranean, cruising at thirty five thousand feet. You are tired, you are three hours into the flight, and suddenly, your navigation system gets spoofed. What actually happens on those screens?
It can be very disorienting and, frankly, terrifying if you are not prepared. One of the biggest issues is the terrain avoidance system. Most modern planes have what is called an E G P W S, or Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System. This system uses a massive internal database of the entire world's terrain—every mountain, every radio tower, every skyscraper—and compares it to the plane's current global positioning system coordinates.
So if the system thinks you are at three thousand feet and there is a four thousand foot mountain right in front of your spoofed coordinates, it starts screaming.
Exactly. It does not matter if you are actually over the flat, blue ocean. If the spoofer tells the plane it is currently over the Alps, the cockpit will fill with red lights and a synthetic voice shouting, terrain! terrain! pull up! pull up! Now, imagine you are a pilot in the clouds. You cannot see the ground. Your instruments are telling you that you are about to die. Your instinct is to pull back on the stick. But if you do that, you might climb into the path of another aircraft or stall the plane.
And the opposite is even scarier, right? If you are actually flying toward a mountain but the spoofer makes the plane think it is safely over the ocean, the warning system might stay silent.
That is the nightmare scenario. This has led to a very controversial practice where pilots are having to literally turn off their terrain warning systems in certain known interference zones. In late twenty twenty four, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, or E A S A, actually had to issue a bulletin about this. They warned that pilots were experiencing multiple false pull up warnings during approach.
That sounds like a massive safety downgrade. You are basically flying blind in terms of automated terrain protection. How do they handle it? I mean, we are still flying. Planes are landing every day. What is the workaround?
This is where we see the importance of what I call the navigation hierarchy. Before the global positioning system became the gold standard in the late nineties, pilots relied on terrestrial radio beacons. These are things like V O R, which stands for V H F Omnidirectional Range, and D M E, or Distance Measuring Equipment. These are physical towers on the ground that broadcast a radio signal. The plane's equipment measures the angle and the distance to that tower to triangulate its position.
I remember you telling me that some of these systems were being phased out a few years ago because everyone thought the global positioning system was all we would ever need. It was seen as old, expensive tech.
Yes, many countries, including the United States, were planning to decommission a huge chunk of their V O R networks to save on maintenance costs. They called it the Minimum Operational Network. But the recent surge in electronic warfare has completely reversed that trend. The Federal Aviation Administration and Eurocontrol are now rushing to maintain and even upgrade these ground based beacons. It is a backup system. It is less precise than the global positioning system—you might be off by a few hundred meters instead of a few centimeters—but it is much harder to jam or spoof over a large area because you have to be in the line of sight of the specific ground station.
And then there is the inertial navigation system, right? The I N S? Or I think on newer planes they call it the I R S, the Inertial Reference System?
Correct. High end commercial jets have these incredibly precise laser gyroscopes and accelerometers. When the plane is parked at the gate before takeoff, the pilots enter the exact coordinates of the gate. From that point on, the I R S measures every tiny movement, every turn, every acceleration, and every descent to calculate where the plane is. It is entirely self contained. It does not need any external signals from satellites or ground stations.
But it is not perfect. It drifts over time, does it not?
It does. It is like trying to walk a straight line with your eyes closed. You can do it for a while, but eventually, you will veer off. Over a twelve hour flight, an older I R S might drift by a few miles. But in the context of spoofing, it is a great sanity check. Modern Flight Management Systems, or F M S, are designed to compare all these sources. The computer looks at the global positioning system, the radio beacons, and the I R S. If the global positioning system suddenly says you moved twenty miles in two seconds, the computer looks at the I R S and says, wait, the accelerometers did not feel a twenty mile jump. Therefore, the G P S is lying. It then rejects the G P S data and reverts to what they call dead reckoning.
That leads into the second part of Daniel's prompt. What are militaries doing to mitigate the impact on civilian flights? Surely they do not want to be responsible for a mid air collision or a commercial plane wandering into a combat zone because its navigation was hijacked.
It is a very delicate balancing act, and to be honest, it is not always successful. Militaries use several strategies. The first and most common is the use of N O T A M s, which stands for Notices to Air Missions. When a military is going to conduct electronic warfare testing or persistent jamming, they issue a formal notice telling pilots exactly where, when, and at what altitudes the interference will happen.
So a pilot flying into the Middle East or near the Black Sea right now would see a N O T A M saying, expect global positioning system interference within a two hundred mile radius of these coordinates.
Exactly. It allows the airlines to plan. They might load extra fuel so they can take a longer route around the interference zone, or they might ensure that the flight crew is specifically briefed on how to use non G P S navigation for that leg of the journey. But the problem is that in active combat zones, like Ukraine or the northern border of Israel, the jamming is not a test. It is a twenty four seven operational necessity. They cannot just turn it off because a flight from Dubai is passing by.
So how do they coordinate in those high pressure environments?
It comes down to close cooperation between the military and civil air traffic control. In Israel, for example, the military and the Civil Aviation Authority work in the same rooms. They might create specific corridors where the jamming is less intense, or they provide enhanced radar tracking. If the plane cannot navigate itself, the air traffic controller on the ground can see the plane on their primary radar—which does not rely on the plane's G P S—and they give the pilot verbal headings. Turn left to zero nine zero degrees, descend to five thousand feet. It is a return to a more manual, human centric way of managing the sky.
It sounds like it increases the workload for everyone involved. The pilots are busier, the controllers are talking more, and the margin for error gets smaller.
It really does. And it is not just about the workload; it is about the equipment. Militaries are also trying to develop more localized jamming. Instead of one massive transmitter that hits everything for five hundred miles, they are using networks of smaller, directional jammers. These can be aimed upward to hit drones at low altitudes while leaving the higher altitudes used by airliners relatively clear. Or they might use geofencing, where the jammer automatically shuts off if it detects a specific civilian transponder signal nearby, though that is risky because an enemy could just spoof that transponder signal too.
You mentioned earlier that pilots are sometimes turning off their terrain warning systems. Is there any technology being developed to help them distinguish between a real signal and a spoofed one so they do not have to fly with their safety systems disabled?
Yes, there is a lot of work being done on what they call resilient P N T, which stands for Positioning, Navigation, and Timing. One of the most promising developments, which has really taken off in the last year, is the use of multiple satellite constellations. Most modern receivers do not just use the American G P S. They also use the European Galileo, the Russian G L O N A S S, and the Chinese BeiDou.
Is it harder to spoof all of them at once?
Much harder. They use different frequencies and different encryption methods. Specifically, the European Galileo system has introduced something called O S N M A, which stands for Open Service Navigation Message Authentication. It is basically a digital signature. The satellite sends a code that the receiver can use to verify that the signal actually came from space and was not generated by a truck on the ground. If the signature does not match, the receiver ignores the data.
That seems like a no brainer. Why did we not have that from the beginning?
It is the classic problem of legacy systems. The global positioning system was designed in the seventies. Back then, the idea that a non state actor or even a foreign military would have the processing power to spoof signals over a wide area seemed like science fiction. The hardware on the satellites is old and hard to update. Galileo, being newer, was built with these threats in mind.
What about Low Earth Orbit satellites? I have heard people talking about using things like Starlink for navigation.
That is a huge area of research right now. Companies like Xona Space Systems are launching dedicated navigation satellites in Low Earth Orbit, or L E O. Because these satellites are only a few hundred miles up, instead of twelve thousand, their signals are about a thousand times stronger when they reach the earth. That makes them much harder to jam. You would need a massive amount of power to drown them out. Plus, because they move so fast across the sky, it is much harder to create a fake signal that mimics their orbital mechanics perfectly.
It is fascinating how this has become a cat and mouse game. The military develops a way to stop a drone, and that inadvertently creates a massive headache for a vacationer flying to Cyprus. Then the aviation industry has to develop a way to bypass that interference, which then might be used by the drone manufacturers to bypass the original jammer.
It is the classic electronic warfare cycle. And we are seeing it play out in real time in the most crowded airspaces in the world. For a long time, we took the global positioning system for granted. We thought of it as a utility, like water or electricity. But the last few years have shown us that it is actually a very fragile, very contested piece of infrastructure. It is a reminder that in the digital age, the most important thing you can have is a backup that does not require a computer.
It really changes your perspective when you realize that the blue dot on your map is not a fact, it is just an estimate based on a very faint signal from space that can be manipulated. I want to dig a bit deeper into the spoofing mechanisms, specifically what they call the record and replay attack. I read something about how these spoofers do not even need to generate a fake signal from scratch.
That is exactly right, Corn. That is often called a meaconing attack. It is one of the most difficult types of spoofing to detect. The spoofer receives the real, legitimate satellite signals, stores them for a fraction of a second, and then rebroadcasts them at a higher power. To the plane's receiver, it looks like a perfectly valid, authenticated signal. But because of that tiny delay, the calculated distance to the satellite is wrong. If you do that with multiple satellites simultaneously, you can shift the plane's perceived position by miles without the receiver ever knowing the data was tampered with.
And because the data inside the signal is technically authentic, even the new digital signatures you mentioned might not catch it?
Exactly. It is like a sophisticated identity theft. You are using the real person's credentials, just at a time and place they did not intend. This is why the industry is moving toward what they call sensor fusion. You cannot just rely on the signal itself. You have to look at the physics. If the signal says you are moving at five hundred miles per hour, but your pitot tubes say your airspeed is only four hundred, something is wrong. If the signal says you are turning left, but your gyroscopes say you are flying straight, you reject the signal.
It is basically teaching the airplane to have a sense of skepticism.
Precisely. We are moving away from blind trust in a single source of truth.
You know, it is funny. We talk about all this high tech stuff, but at the end of the day, it comes back to the pilot's experience. I have read reports of pilots in the Middle East who have become so used to this that they can tell they are being spoofed just by looking at the way the map moves. They say it looks "jittery" or "unnatural."
That is the most important backup system there is—the human in the loop. There was a famous case in late twenty twenty three where an Embraer business jet nearly wandered into Iranian airspace without clearance because its navigation system had been spoofed. The pilots only realized something was wrong when they noticed the flight director was commanding a turn that did not make sense for their flight plan. They looked out the window, saw landmarks that did not match their map, and took manual control. You cannot replace that human element.
That is a great point. I think it is also worth mentioning the economic impact of this. When planes have to take longer routes or when flights are canceled because the interference is too high, that costs billions of dollars.
Oh, the fuel costs alone are staggering. If every flight between Europe and Asia has to add fifteen or twenty minutes to its route to avoid an interference zone over the Black Sea or the Baltics, that adds up to millions of tons of extra carbon dioxide and hundreds of millions of dollars in extra fuel. It is a hidden tax on the global economy caused by electronic warfare. In April of twenty twenty four, Finnair actually had to suspend flights to Tartu, Estonia, for a month because G P S jamming was making it impossible for their planes to perform the required instrument approaches.
And it is not just aviation. Think about all the automated systems that rely on the global positioning system for timing. Cell phone towers, power grids, financial markets—they all use the ultra precise atomic clocks on the satellites to stay synchronized.
That is a whole other rabbit hole, Corn. G P S is not just about where you are; it is about when you are. If you spoof the timing signal, you can crash a power grid by making the phases of the electricity go out of sync. You can desynchronize a stock exchange where trades are timed to the microsecond. The military's use of these jammers has to be incredibly careful because the timing interference can travel even further than the positioning interference.
It really shows how interconnected everything is. You turn on a jammer to stop a drone in a war zone, and suddenly a bank in London or a cell tower in Warsaw is having trouble because its clock is off by a microsecond.
It is a perfect example of cascading implications. We live in a world built on a foundation of precise timing and positioning, and that foundation is currently being rattled.
So, to summarize for Daniel, the effect on commercial aviation is a significant increase in workload, a return to older backup systems like radio beacons and inertial navigation, and a constant battle against false alarms from safety systems like the terrain warning. Militaries try to mitigate this through coordination, N O T A M s, and directional jamming, but in a hot war, civilian safety is often a secondary concern to the immediate tactical necessity of stopping an attack.
That is a very fair assessment. It is a messy, complicated reality, and it is likely the new normal for the foreseeable future. We are entering an era of "navigation warfare" where the sky is no longer a neutral space.
Well, Herman, I think we have covered a lot of ground here—literally and figuratively. It is a bit unsettling to think about, but also fascinating to see how the aviation industry is adapting. It is a testament to how robust the system actually is that we are still flying safely despite these challenges.
It always does adapt. We build a better lock, they build a better pick, and then we build a better door. The pilots of twenty twenty six are becoming some of the most electronically literate aviators in history.
Exactly. Well, before we wrap up, I want to remind everyone that if you are enjoying these deep dives into the weird prompts Daniel and others send our way, we would really appreciate a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps the show grow and reach more people who are curious about the hidden gears of the world.
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This has been My Weird Prompts. We will see you next time.
Goodbye everyone! Keep your eyes on the horizon and your sensors cross checked!
