(Reuters) – Global regulators, aviation safety experts and aircraft manufacturers failed on Thursday to reach an agreement to develop a quick technical solution to solve the problem of GPS jamming near war zones, and called for more training of pilots to enable them to deal with the issue, according to two sources close to the talks.
Airlines have called for swift action after a series of incidents in which navigation systems were induced to show a false location or the wrong time, although aircraft controls remained intact.
The practice of “spoofing” can occur when a country’s military sends false Global Positioning System (GPS) signals to an enemy plane or drone to impair its operation, which causes a side effect on nearby aircraft. According to the OpsGroup, these problems occur on a larger scale in Eastern Europe, the Black Sea and the Middle East.
Thursday’s meeting in Cologne, Germany, brought together the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA). In a joint statement, they said that GPS interference “can pose significant challenges to aviation safety”.
“We need to coordinate the collection and sharing of GNSS (global navigation satellite system) security information, create universal procedural guidance on GNSS incidents from manufacturers and a commitment from states to maintain traditional navigation systems as a backup in cases where GNSS is counterfeited or jammed,” said General Willie Walsh, director of Iata.
One long-term solution that has been discussed is the development of a second layer of authentication, which would help to check whether the GPS location has been altered. Such technology was developed in the European Galileo program, the sources said, but is not widely used at the moment.