Insight
Satellite navigation is contested every day
Jamming and spoofing of satellite positioning are part of everyday flight operations in several regions. Aircraft are where this interference is best documented, because crews and airlines report it.
Two forms dominate. Jamming drowns the signal, so the receiver loses its position. Spoofing replaces the signal with a false one, so the receiver keeps a position that is wrong.
Reports come in every day, and European aviation treats the problem as lasting rather than passing. The figures below come from aviation's own publications, each with its source.
Satellite navigation will remain essential. What changes is that a vehicle can no longer take its position for granted. Spoofing is the harder case: the receiver does not always know it is being deceived.
That is the problem we work on. Our instrument is designed to correct a vehicle's position without satellites, using the Earth's magnetic field. Passive: it reads the Earth's own field and needs no external signal. It completes the inertial unit, it does not replace it.
Every fix comes with its error bound: not how accurate the position was on a good day, but how wrong it can be right now.
A magnetic source placed nearby can disturb a magnetometer. The instrument is designed to detect that and say so.
The figures, with their sources
Reported jamming events rose 67% in 2025 compared with 2023, and reported GPS spoofing incidents 193%.
Source: IATA, 9 March 2026, “IATA Releases 2025 Safety Report” (opens in a new tab).
More than 71,000 reported interference cases and 2.1 million GPS signal-loss events in IATA's GNSS interference report for 2024 and 2025.
Source: IATA, June 2026, “Media Briefing Safety & Operations, AGM 2026” (opens in a new tab).
By August 2024, about 1,500 flights a day were being spoofed, up from about 300 in January.
Source: OPSGROUP, 6 September 2024, “Report of the 2024 GPS Spoofing Workgroup” (opens in a new tab).
After a letter from 13 EU Member States, Europe's aviation action plan aims to contain the threat for at least the next three years.
Source: EASA and EUROCONTROL, March 2026, “European Aviation Action Plan for Ensuring Safe Operations during GNSS Interferences” (opens in a new tab).
Live map of likely interference
Live map: GPSJAM by John Wiseman, built from aircraft ADS-B navigation-accuracy reports. Red cells mean many aircraft reported low accuracy, usually but not always caused by interference. Third-party data, not Spectral Flow's.
Drawing by Spectral Flow, illustration only. The live map is GPSJAM by John Wiseman.
The map shows where aircraft lost confidence in satellite positioning. It cannot show how wrong each position was. That is the question our instrument is designed to answer.