Imagine drones are forced to land. Rockets are deflected. Electrical grids, telecommunications, and transportation systems are degraded. Airliners are driven off course. Interference with Global Positioning System (GPS) signals is a fact of everyday life, and things are only getting worse.
One example is instructive. The rate at which aircraft locations are electronically manipulated, “spoofed,” increased 500 percent in the first three quarters of 2024. An average of 1,500 flights a day were impacted by the beginning of September. In a recent survey of almost 2,000 flight crew members, 70 percent described their concerns about the impact on aviation safety as either “very high” or “extreme.”
The world depends upon signals from GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) to underpin virtually every technology. Yet the essential positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) service they provide is incredibly vulnerable.
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