Posted on 09/28/2023 5:24:16 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
False location signals near Iran shut down onboard direction systems
False electronic signals imitating satellite data from Global Position System satellites recently caused complete navigation failures for 12 aircraft flights near Iran, according to a private aircraft security group.
“A troubling new development in enroute airspace is emerging: Aircraft are being targeted with fake GPS signals, quickly leading to complete loss of navigational capability,” the organization OpsGroup stated in a warning notice.
The crew of a Boeing 777 flying near southeastern Iraq toward Baghdad lost the use of its GPS in one incident, leaving the pilot in the dark. “What time is it, and where are we?” he asked an air controller, the security firm stated in a report.
The “spoofing” incident is the first time false GPS signals were detected penetrating aircraft systems. The Iraq events differed from past GPS jamming attempts. Jamming of GPS signals on civilian aircraft has been detected in the past elsewhere, including near South Korea and in the Middle East.
According to the report, the false GPS signals were received by state-of-the art navigation systems called inertial reference systems, or IRS, that until now had been thought to be impervious to false GPS signaling. The system collects signals from satellites at regular intervals to update the time and position of an aircraft in flight.
The false GPS signals apparently showed the aircraft to be off course from actual positions by between 69 miles to 92 miles, the report said.
GPS spoofing is considered particularly dangerous in the region because the aircraft could have risked being shot down if it strayed into Iranian airspace.
The area where the incidents occurred is considered a conflict zone and airliners risk terrorist attacks. Still, several airlines, including a European carrier, several Middle East carriers and private jets use...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
The old mechanical instruments that I learned to fly with didn’t have those problems.
Do they even put astrolabes on aircraft any more?
Tune it up a little and you can make the pilot unaware of crossing the Iranian border. Then Iran can force the plane down and ransom the passengers for the current going rate of $1.2 billion per hostage. (Thanks, Joe)
I doubt it.
Jets used to navigate just fine using inertial navigation, which is immune from external interference. GPS supplements inertial navigation by correcting sensor drift. Aircraft used to use other electronic navigation aids, like VOR DME, and LORAN to supplement inertial navigation, but with the advent of GPS a lot of electronic aids are going away. There are a number of satellite navigation systems, and one might think that commercial aircraft would employ as many independent checks as possible.
BTW, it is not easy, almost impossible, to spoof military GPS codes, which are encrypted and transmitted at different frequencies with more power than the civilian codes. Civilian GPS only gets about 10% of the power and precision of military GPS.
When I worked at AVCO Everett on the RC135, they would do a star-cal by taking time-tagged digital camera photos of the local star field. It would not be prohibitively expensive to instrument commercial aircraft to perform stellar navigation. At high enough altitudes stars are available in the daytime, and only a few bright navigational stars would be necessary to get a reasonable fix.
Spoofing my arse. If it is the Iranians, it is an act of war.
Yep, I learned how to do that learning to fly in the early 70’s. Old school with a Sectional Chart, plotter and pencil. Always works.
As late as the late 70s we would “occasionally” use sextants to verify location on extended over-water transit flights on P-3 Orions. Basically inertial nav and paper charts was all we had. There was a sextant port over the Navigators station. Geeze that was a long time ago. Makes me feel pretty old. Yeah. 😎
I always thought that P-3’s were one of the neatest airplanes out there. One of my former co-workers (now deceased) flew P-2 Neptunes and P-3’s.
Pretty hard to spoof the stars.
As much as I hated to see Moffett NAS shut down, I sure enjoyed the peace & quiet.
I was just reading about the P-3 incidents on Wiki and saw this one. Wow...
6 January 1987: Following a seven-hour P-3 ASW patrol, VP-6's Crew Eight initiated restart of the loitered No. 1 engine, 830 nm from NAS Barbers Point. The engine encountered RPM problems and failed to feather leading to gearbox issues. After six hours of flight back to Barbers Point and only 12 nm from the runway, the No. 1 prop disconnected and collided with prop No. 2. This caused the aircraft to roll violently to the left until prop No. 2 was able to be locked with the prop brake. Despite this, the crew managed to touch down on centerline, 2,000 feet down the runway, completing its landing roll-out with 2,500 feet remaining and all crew surviving. Due to this event, P3 engine oil protocol was adjusted.
Can pilots even do dead reckoning anymore?
Yep, I stopped reading at: “Aircraft are being targeted with fake GPS signals, quickly leading to complete loss of navigational capability,”...commercial aircraft just started using GPS approaches not that long ago...plenty of other navaids out there like VOR, inertial navigation boxes, ILS aids, compass & stopwatch etc, etc..
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html/chap1_section_1.html
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html/chap1_section_2.html
https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_02_09/article_05_1.html
The C-130, among other military aircraft, used to come with a sextant port. But that’s no longer the case and celestial navigation on aircraft is now a lost art.
My uncle Ned was a navigator on B29s in WWII doing bombing raids on Japan. He was the most important man on the aircraft. He had to navigate back to a small Island in the Pacific. All he had was sun and star shots. If he got it wrong they would be in the water. He always got it right.
Uncle Ned was a small man and soft spoken and kind. He always had time for us kids those many years ago. Uncle Ned was a warrior with a backbone of steel. I admired Uncle Ned.
““A troubling new development in enroute airspace is emerging: Aircraft are being targeted with fake GPS signals”
...and people why our HIMARs in Ukraine are now turning back and taking out Ukrainian positions. It doesn’t take a Rocket Scientist to know that GPS and be jammed and Spoofed, but it does take people more educated that the Affirmative Action hires at DOD to understand it.
Spoofing is a term of art in electronic warfare, meaning the insertion of false signals into the enemy’s receiver. It is usually a false radar echo or transponder reply. Imitation of GPS signals is very much a form of spoofing, but it it is not a harmless prank.
Normally the best navigator was on the lead bomber. The P-51’s would “escort” the B-29’s (which were hardly threatened by the Japanese Air Force) for navigation.
One can also navigate by dead reckoning, using a compass, map, landmarks, coastlines, and estimated ground speed.
During World War II, German V-1 buzz bombs used magnetic compasses. Unbeknownst to the Germans, the British completed an electrical circuit on the Circle Line underground (subway) by connecting rails, and ran current through them to throw off compasses.
German bombers were guided by radio beams from Norway and France. The intersection of the beams marked the target. The bomber would ride one beam which was a series of intermittent tones. The crossing beam would fill in the gaps in the tone. When the pilot heard a steady tone he was at the bomb release point. The British could have jammed the beams, but found it more useful to conduct electronic reconnaissance to find the beams, which came on a few hours before a raid, so they precisely knew the direction the Germans would be coming from. Rather than jam the beams, they would wait until the approaching formation was nearing the intersection and sent the filler tone loud and clear, causing the bombers to drop their loads prematurely. There was an incident where German bombers targeting Liverpool attacked neutral Dublin by accident. Years after the war, some in the Irish press accused the British of “bending the beams”, but that never happened, it was purely a navigational error, and given the state of navigation in those years, not a particularly egregious one.
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