Not really, whatever you are jamming you can just make sure it doesn't make it 10 km up in the air where most of the planes are (especially given the GPS patch antenna pointing up from the plane), and I don't believe they need GPS signal on takeoff/landing, they use older tech for that.
This isn’t for pilots to know where they are, it’s for air traffic control to know where planes are.
If GPS were to become the sole way to do the latter, every airplane would effectively get an invisibility cloak that those who want to do evil can activate (and even worse. Switching off the on-board transmitter is less scary than spoofing signals)
Because of that, I would expect they keep using some way to detect planes that don’t tell them where they are, or radios broadcasting “plane P is at X,Y,Z” without a plane being there.
GPS is used a lot to figure where planes are but I think they are still not allowed to rely in it as it's not considered reliable enough by the regulators. At least not for things like altitude settings and instrument landings.
For light aircraft getting lost in the old days one hack used to be to fly low till you came to a motorway and read the signs. I imagine most such pilots these days would pull out their phone and open the maps app. Commercial flights of course have more high tech stuff like radio beacons.
Even if the pilots didn't, ATC would (and the plane's own GPS unit's internal checks might notice as well) - and then it's simple enough to disable GPS and use VOR navigation (or radar vectors, in a pinch).
GPS receivers receive very weak signals from the GPS satellites, there is no way to boost the signal. GPS receivers use these signals to determine their location. There is nothing (except the law) to stop an attacker from building an array of transmitters to broadcast signals which emulate the GPS signals. Careful manipulation of attacker's bogus signals could be used to fool the aircraft's navigation controller.
This is jamming and not GPS spoofing. Wouldn't the navigation system 'fail' and that pilot switch over to flying by heading? I would think the civilian craft would have to be robust in the presence of spoofing (military testing). ATC would declare a certain area as GPS off, a NOTAM or something.
Consumer grade GPS actually won't work at 30,000+ feet at speeds the plane would be flying. This is to prevent someone from using the GPS system to steer a ballistic missile.
Are there NOTAMs regarding GPS jamming operations? It's not a fix, but maybe it would allow pilots - specially ones without sophisticated avionics like those founds in airliners(who don't rely on GPS in flight) - to prepare and/or avoid the issue.
Okay so let me get this straight: you're telling me that passenger airplanes currently fly by dead reckoning or stellar navigation or ground-based triangulation or something else? When a pilot doesn't know where he is, he doesn't have any kind of certified GPS-based system handy to tell him?
And moreover, even beyond GPS: how the hell can a plane's navigation system be capable of (and certified for!) landing the monster under autopilot, and yet not be able to tell the pilot its own location within the accuracy of a few feet reliably? I literally do not understand how what you're saying makes any sense.
GPS is unlikely to work from inside the cargo hold of an airplane.
But someone with a very long yagi antenna could probably transmit a signal to an overhead airplane. Due to the way airplanes travel only in corridors it wouldn't be too hard to set someone up on the ground.
> Anyone who can buy a GPS jammer could disrupt one of the busiest airports in the world.
Fortunately, that one is not quite the case – the aviation industry is incredibly safety-conscious and does not allow relying on GPS exclusively.
For both en-route navigation and landing, every plane will have at least one fallback system available (usually ground-based radionavigation aides such as VORs or DMEs or inertial navigation systems, which is also what was used for navigation during ocean crossings before there was GPS), and in fact, these other systems are seeing more use than you might assume: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17987/usaf-is-jamming-...
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