Aircrews filed a record 1,022 GPS interference reports with Lithuania’s air navigation service Oro Navigacija in June, and the country’s Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) says that signal jamming has remained persistently common since the beginning of this year.
The number was up from 585 reports in May and 447 in April.
“There may be more, actually,” says Oro Navigacija spokeswoman Ingrida Daugirde. “We only register pilot reports, as against actual incidents of interference.”
June’s figure was 22 times higher than 46 reports which pilots filed a year ago.
The company says it typically received 25 to 55 pilot reports per month until last October, but then the numbers started to rise rapidly – 78 in October, 267 in November, and 483 in December.
Year-on-year, reports jumped tenfold to 440 in January, 14-fold to 359 in February, and nearly six-fold to 315 in March. Pilot reports began to become more common once again in April.
Transport Minister Eugenijus Sabutis tells BNS that these figures are quite alarming.
GPS signals, says the minister, can be replaced with alternative navigation systems, adding that the European Union should think about an EU-wide approach toward this matter.
Darius Kuliesius is deputy council chairman at the CRA, which is responsible for recording cases of GSP interference, and he reports that “the scale of interference grew steadily last year, and the intensity of interference has remained consistently high since the beginning of the year.”
Kuliesius adds that GPS jamming was first recorded on land in western Lithuania and along its border with Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave. Interference has also begun to affect maritime traffic at the Klaipeda port and in the Baltic Sea.
All GPS jamming incidents recorded in Lithuania this year originated in Kaliningrad. The impact extends beyond Latvia, affecting airspace over Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Finland and the Baltic Sea.
In an interview with LRT Radio, Minister Kuliesius said that the CRA has identified ten specific jamming sites in Kaliningrad.
He says that the interference is continuous, but its intensity, configuration and geographical scope can vary over the course of time.
Ingrida Daugirde also reported that the company logged 16 instances of go-arounds so far this year, which means aircraft that had to circle and make a second approach before landing. Eight of these were linked to GPS interference.
There were 15 co-arounds during the whole of last year, and one-fifth of these were caused by GPS interference.
The Oro Navigacija spokeswoman explains that go-arounds are not uncommon and that they can be triggered by a range of factors such as technical issues, a medical emergency onboard, obstructions on the runway, or adverse weather conditions.
The problem has also affected ornithologists, who say that GPS jamming interference with their research into bird behaviour.
Lithuania has joined with 13 other EU member states to call on the European Commission to take all available steps in political, diplomatic and legal terms to put increased pressure on the regimes of Russia and Belarus, including sanctions against individuals and entities that are involved in the deliberate jamming of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals.
In their joint letter, the member states argued that GNSS interference is nothing random. Rather, it represents a deliberate, systematic and ongoing effort by the Russian and Belarusian regimes to destabilise regional infrastructure, particularly in the area of transportation services.
Source: BNS
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