Mounting use of electronic warfare is threatening commercial flights

The aviation industry has faced mounting disruption as conflicts have multiplied around the world in recent years. Factors such as rising jet fuel prices and longer flight routes caused by closed airspace have been well documented, but increasingly frequent GPS interference are creating new challenges for airlines and pilots.

Pilots and aviation experts told CNN that bogus signals from global positioning satellites are increasingly triggering false warnings in commercial aircraft cockpits, raising concerns among crews operating near conflict zones.

GPS disruption has become widespread in areas affected by military activity, including regions around Iran war as well as the Baltic and Black seas. Aircraft flying near these areas can encounter GPS interference that causes onboard systems to lock onto false signals. In some cases, a plane’s ground proximity warning system may issue alarming warnings even when the aircraft is flying at a safe altitude.

“I have fellow pilots that encounter this on a regular basis. That’s the true danger. It’s becoming normalized,” said Captain Ron Hay, president of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations, which represents more than 160,000 pilots in over 70 countries.

Hay, who flies for American Delta Air Lines, said he was concerned that repeated false warnings could cause pilots to become desensitized to alarms and eventually lose confidence in critical safety systems.

The effects of spoofed signals extend beyond phantom “pull up” warnings. According to a 2026 resource guide from the US Federal Aviation Administration cited in the article, aircraft can experience abnormal system behaviour, including map shifts in which the aircraft appears on cockpit displays to be miles away from its actual flight path. Systems can also incorrectly indicate that an aircraft is somewhere else while it is sitting on a runway preparing for takeoff.

Around 900 flights are affected by GPS interference each day, according to Benoit Figuet, a research associate at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and founder of SkAI Data Services. His company has tracked such incidents through its GPSWise website since 2024.

A commercial pilot who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly said digital navigation displays in cockpits can “become a work of fiction”.

He said pilots sometimes have to switch off the “terrain inhibit switch” to silence ground proximity warning system alarms, manually disconnect clocks from GPS and rely on ground-based navigation systems “like it’s the 1970s.”

When GPS becomes unreliable, pilots can fall back on radar, inertial navigation systems and ground-based transmitters. However, GPS is integrated into numerous aircraft systems, meaning spoofed signals can affect several functions at once, including aircraft clocks, weather radar and passenger Wi-Fi.

The resulting confusion can ultimately lead to flight disruptions and delays, affecting pilots, airlines and air traffic controllers.

Physics behind growing phenomena

Global Navigation Satellite Systems, or GNSS, have become an essential, though largely invisible, part of modern life. They allow systems to determine precise locations and time virtually anywhere at the push of a button.

However, the signals used by GNSS are relatively weak — comparable in strength to a couple of light bulbs — because they lose power while travelling more than 20,000 kilometres from satellites to Earth. Although this vulnerability has long been understood, it became an increasingly significant problem for aircraft and ships following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine back in 2022, when drones became widely used in combat.

GNSS interference occurs when militaries or affiliated groups deliberately transmit powerful radio signals on the same frequency bands used by navigation systems. While the primary targets are generally drones and missiles, commercial aircraft can also be affected.

Jamming disrupts satellite-based positioning, while spoofing causes navigation systems to calculate and display a false location.

“The aircraft thinks that it is absolutely someplace else,” Hay explains. “The map doesn’t match. The time doesn’t match. There’s various cues that it’s going on but from what I’m told, the basic problem is when you’re being spoofed, you can determine you’re being spoofed, but you don’t know where you’re going to be spoofed.”

The issue was discussed during a panel moderated by Hay at the annual conference of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations (IFALPA), held jointly with the Turkish Air Line Pilots' Association (TALPA) in Istanbul in April this year.

Hay, who primarily flies routes across the Pacific, said he had not personally experienced GPS jamming or spoofing because the problem currently remains concentrated in areas closer to the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran.

He stressed, however, that passengers do not need to be concerned about the issue from a safety perspective. Instead, he described GPS interference as an increasingly difficult operational challenge for pilots, airlines and air traffic control.

Azerbaijan Airlines tragedy

While Zurich-based academic Figuet echoed this claim, telling CNN that the main concerns are related to the additional burden placed on pilots and the potential for delays or other logistical problems, he did point to the aviation disaster involving an Azerbaijan Airlines plane operating flight J2-8243 from Baku to Grozny, which tragically crashed on December 25, 2024.

In October 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin conceded that missiles fired by Russian air defences at a Ukrainian drone, which exploded near the aircraft over Grozny, were responsible for the tragedy.

A joint statement from the Azerbaijani and Russian foreign ministries released in April 2026 stated that investigations into the tragedy found it occurred "from the unintended operation of an air defence system in the airspace of the Russian Federation". 

Figuet recalled that GPS jamming was one among the many difficulties faced by the pilots during the entire flight, though underscoring that it was not the main cause of the crash.

According to a preliminary report released by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Transport in February 2025, which included voice recordings, the pilots experienced electronic interference. They lost GPS and received “pull up” warnings near Grozny, where fog made it difficult to land using beacons. 

After two unsuccessful attempts to land at Grozny airport, the pilots decided to return to Baku. During the return flight, the aircraft lost its primary control systems, prompting the crew to attempt an emergency landing near the Kazakh city of Aktau, the report said. At least 38 of the 67 people on board were killed when the aircraft crashed while landing.

By Nazrin Sadigova