The country’s security and aviation agencies are already investigating a purported rise in GPS spoofing incidents, senior officials have said. India’s aviation watchdog DGCA has asked airlines, pilots and air traffic controllers to report GPS spoofing incidents within 10 minutes of the occurrences, amid recent such incidents at the Delhi airport.
The country’s security and aviation agencies are already investigating a purported rise in such incidents, adding that the probe was triggered by reports of similar incidents reported near Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport last week.
Multiple officials confirmed that the GPS spoofing incident in Delhi is being directly monitored by national security adviser Ajit Doval. GPS spoofing involves sending fake satellite signals to trick a navigation system into showing the wrong position, speed or time. This is different from jamming. Jamming simply floods the spectrum on which GPS satellites share signal. Spoofing, however, gives the aircraft false but seemingly convincing navigation data, which can trigger errors and pose serious safety risks.
Against this backdrop, the DGCA has issued again a three-page circular, on November 10: “Any pilot, ATC controller, or technical unit detecting abnormal GPS behaviour (eg. position anomalies, navigation errors, loss of GNSS signal integrity, or spoofed location data) shall initiate real time reporting (within 10 minutes of occurrence).” Airlines have reported cases of GPS interference and spoofing in and around Amritsar, Punjab’s major city bordering Pakistan.
In November 2023, too, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) issued a circular instructing airlines to report such interference cases. Murlidhar Mohol, minister of state for civil aviation, informed parliament earlier this year that such flight disruptions have been most frequent in the border regions of Amritsar and Jammu between November 2023 and February 2024, and that a total of 465 incidents had been reported during this period. In recent days, incidents of GPS spoofing and interference have been reported in and around the national capital’s airport, which is India’s busiest airport with over 1,500 flight movements daily.
The DGCA circular to airlines, pilots and others says the initial report of any GPS-related anomaly should compulsorily have details such as date and time of occurrence, aircraft type and registration, airline name, flight route and coordinates of occurrence or area affected.. Also, the watchdog has said the report must mention the type of interference, whether it is “jamming/spoofing” or any other.
All aircraft operators, flight crew and Airports Authority of India (AAI), including Air Traffic Control (ATC) and Communication, Navigation, Surveillance (CNS) units, operating in and around the Delhi airport have been asked to follow the instructions in the circular. Both the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) have been looking at the issue of GPS spoofing and jamming, and looking at ways to deal with them.
