More than 1,500 British Airways flights, 57 Jet2 flights and 46 Easyjet flights were affected by suspected Russian GPS spoofing in the year to 28 May, a spread of interference that has hit UK airlines again this week and last week. The latest cases have kept the issue in view because the disruptions are happening now, not as a one-off episode.
The scale is stark. On the same day last week that an RAF jet carrying Defence Secretary John Healey had its GPS signal jammed near the Russian border, 18 flights run by BA, Easyjet, Ryanair and Jet2 experienced interference. This week, a BA flight from New Delhi to Heathrow was spoofed over the Black Sea, and for around 900km it appeared to be over land in Odessa on Ukraine’s coast. A Ryanair flight from Riga to East Midlands airport also lost its onboard GPS for an hour while flying in the Baltic region.
Most of the incidents were concentrated in eastern Europe near the Russian border, where interference has become a familiar feature of the air corridor since Russia’s war in Ukraine began. That matters because GPS location data is used alongside speed and altitude in systems that can trigger collision warnings, so a bad signal is not just a navigation nuisance but a problem that reaches into cockpit safety checks.
Commercial aircraft are built to cope with this. They have back-up systems that help identify an aircraft’s location and keep navigation accurate, and pilots are getting additional training for GPS-denied environments, where they must fall back on more traditional methods. But the spread and frequency of the jamming and spoofing are still putting operational pressure on crews, especially when several airlines are hit on the same day and the interference moves across different routes and regions.
The unresolved question is not whether the problem exists — it plainly does — but how long airlines can keep absorbing it before the next major incident forces a sharper response. The pattern now points to a persistent threat near the Russian border, with British Airways, Jet2 and Easyjet among the carriers carrying the load.
