Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks (vice.com) 183
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Commercial air crews are reporting something "unthinkable" in the skies above the Middle East: novel "spoofing" attacks have caused navigation systems to fail in dozens of incidents since September. In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes' systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission. Since then, air crews discussing the problem online have said it's only gotten worse, and experts are racing to establish who is behind it.
OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, sounded the alarm about the incidents in September and began to collect data to share with its members and the public. According to OPSGROUP, multiple commercial aircraft in the Middle Eastern region have lost the ability to navigate after receiving spoofed navigation signals for months. And it's not just GPS -- fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure. According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks, the group said in a November update, and identified three new and distinct kinds of navigation spoofing incidents, with two arising since the initial reports in September.
While GPS spoofing is not new, the specific vector of these new attacks was previously "unthinkable," according to OPSGROUP, which described them as exposing a "fundamental flaw in avionics design." The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a piece of equipment often described as the "brain" of an aircraft that uses gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other tech to help planes navigate. One expert Motherboard spoke to said this was "highly significant." "This immediately sounds unthinkable," OPSGROUP said in its public post about the incidents. "The IRS (Inertial Reference System) should be a standalone system, unable to be spoofed. The idea that we could lose all on-board nav capability, and have to ask [air traffic control] for our position and request a heading, makes little sense at first glance" especially for state of the art aircraft with the latest avionics. However, multiple reports confirm that this has happened." [...] There is currently no solution to this problem, with its potentially disastrous effects and unclear cause. According to OPSGROUP's November update, "The industry has been slow to come to terms with the issue, leaving flight crews alone to find ways of detecting and mitigating GPS spoofing." If air crews do realize that something is amiss, Humphreys said, their only recourse is to depend on air traffic control.
OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, sounded the alarm about the incidents in September and began to collect data to share with its members and the public. According to OPSGROUP, multiple commercial aircraft in the Middle Eastern region have lost the ability to navigate after receiving spoofed navigation signals for months. And it's not just GPS -- fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure. According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks, the group said in a November update, and identified three new and distinct kinds of navigation spoofing incidents, with two arising since the initial reports in September.
While GPS spoofing is not new, the specific vector of these new attacks was previously "unthinkable," according to OPSGROUP, which described them as exposing a "fundamental flaw in avionics design." The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a piece of equipment often described as the "brain" of an aircraft that uses gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other tech to help planes navigate. One expert Motherboard spoke to said this was "highly significant." "This immediately sounds unthinkable," OPSGROUP said in its public post about the incidents. "The IRS (Inertial Reference System) should be a standalone system, unable to be spoofed. The idea that we could lose all on-board nav capability, and have to ask [air traffic control] for our position and request a heading, makes little sense at first glance" especially for state of the art aircraft with the latest avionics. However, multiple reports confirm that this has happened." [...] There is currently no solution to this problem, with its potentially disastrous effects and unclear cause. According to OPSGROUP's November update, "The industry has been slow to come to terms with the issue, leaving flight crews alone to find ways of detecting and mitigating GPS spoofing." If air crews do realize that something is amiss, Humphreys said, their only recourse is to depend on air traffic control.
Specifics? (Score:2)
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Re:Specifics? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would not be surprised if some manufacturers decided that they could cut costs by making the IRS less precise on its own, assuming that recalibration via GPS will render this invisible to the customers.
Highly unlikely. These inertial systems are typically able to navigate within less than half a mile per hour without GPS, and they're designed to stop using GPS updates if the GPS solution diverges too far from the free inertial solution. Acceptance testing verifies the free inertial performance of each IRS; if the manufacturer is dry-labbing that, they are in for a lot of heartache.
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It's possible there's some kind of crosstalk between the inertial navigation system and the GPS, but there's a good chance some pilots just resynched their INS when they shoud have been more skeptical of the GPS location they were getting.
We have civilian GPS because of Flight 007 (Score:3)
The old inertial guidance systems where very hard to program and worse often lacked anyway to verify that they had been correctly programmed until after the plane took off. I seriously hope the interface isn't still this terrible but I have a feeling it might still be and someone's solution was to periodically set the inertial system with the GPS location making the back up dependent on the primary. I would love to know how this got through testing and certification.
Re:We have civilian GPS because of Flight 007 (Score:4, Informative)
I'm guessing that by "hard to program" you mean the interface for entering pre-flight position and waypoints was clumsy and error-prone. But a large error in the entered position would make it impossible for the system to gyrocompass accurately enough to align properly and light the "ok to takeoff" light.
KAL007 was in 1983, 13 years before GPS became fully operational. The inertial systems in use then weren't capable of being tightly damped by GPS. Modern system don't use hand-entered waypoints; they have mission computers equipped with databases containing all the routes they fly, and they get pre-flight position for GPS. And again, if that position isn't correct, the system won't align.
Directional antennas? (Score:5, Insightful)
Aircraft have the advantage of being in the sky and thus having no obstructions to the satellites. Why isn't their antenna simply mounted on top of the aircraft with a hemispherical pickup pattern (AKA shield the antenna from anything below it) such that it can't receive any spoofed signals from the ground? I assume that GPS isn't being spoofed by other satellites.
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There are a lot of satellites in space. What's to say the signal isn't coming from space - perhaps even from official GPS sats?
A ground based attack makes the most sense, until you consider the very large area they'd have to cover, horizon problems, and how relatively easy it would be to triangulate on a ground-based GPS signal.
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There are a lot of satellites in space. What's to say the signal isn't coming from space - perhaps even from official GPS sats?
There is more than one kind of "official" GPS so that could be possible. When people hear "GPS" they most often think of the Navstar system run by the USA, but there's GPS from other sources including Russia and China who might not be above messing with navigation in the region. I doubt GPS run by the USA, Japan, or EU would intentionally corrupt their satellite navigation aids. They rely on these systems for their own navigation, and if there's anyone that finds out that the GPS system has been corrupte
Re:Directional antennas? (Score:5, Informative)
However, there is more than one GNSS (global navigation satellite system). Several other countries have GNSS system, include Russia: GLONASS (Russian: Global Navigation Satellite System), China: BeiDou (Northern Dipper Star Navigation System), or European Union: Galileo. Additionally, there are augmentation systems that use GPS (or other GNSS) to increase accuracy in a given area. For example, US: WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System), Japan: QZSS (Quasi-Zenith Satellite System), IRNSS (Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System). There are other regional, country and even commercial augmentation systems. Furthermore: Most GPS receivers are really GNSS receivers and can receive signal from one or more systems simultaneously. Random fact: More advanced receivers can be configured for select GNSS, augmentations system, or even miliary (or authorized user) bands for increase accuracy. Another random fact: Some receivers don’t work over a given speed to prevent their use in miliary applications.
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There is more than one kind of "official" GPS so that could be possible.
Technically, there is only one GPS, United States GPS (Global Positioning System).
I was going to mention something along the same lines. But I think the post you're responding to isn't considering successful forgeries (hence, the historical meaning of the word 'spoof') of the radio transmissions that are GPS. Meaning, for example, a Russian satellite transmitting a faked + maliciously erroneous GPS signal, rather than simply a maliciously erroneous GLONASS signal. I think some prevention could be in order (ie, gps authentication). But if someone's broadcasting spoofed gps with enough pow
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GPS spoofing is usually done with ground-based (or sea-based) transmitters. In this case, it's pretty clear Israel is doing it. They've even admitted it.
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I think IFR certified avionics listens only to Navstar (US DoD GPS), not Galileo (EU), Baidu (China), or Glonass (Russia).
Because the FAA doesn't trust them furriners.
Your phone isn't so restricted - modern phones listen to all 4 networks. And if one of them gives a wildly different position/velocity than the others, you know somebody is spoofing.
So, ironically, it's possible that the pilots' phones know where the plane is, while the plane's avionics don't.
Re: Directional antennas? (Score:3)
It's too bad they can't turn on their phones during flight, cause that will cause their nav systems to go haywire...
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It's too bad they can't turn on their phones during flight, cause that will cause their nav systems to go haywire...
Nav system will work fine, but the copilot's chair will begin spinning, Otto may inflate, ice cubes will fly out of the toilets, and ATC will become unintelligible ("Pan-Am 376 fly heading 270 and pray to J, do the same-ol', same-ol'. I take TCBin', man! Maintain Flight level 170 vectors to see a broad to get dat booty act'ion...lay her down, or smack 'em, yak 'em!")
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FAA is not the sole certification authority for aviation and there are actually significant differences between the requirements of FAA and, say, EASA.
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I doubt GPS run by the USA, Japan, or EU would intentionally corrupt their satellite navigation aids.
GPS is designed for intentional degradation of accuracy, and that feature is controlled by the US military. However, since there are other global nav satellite systems from other countries that your adversary can use, a better idea is to interfere with the signals. The military practices doing this all the time (at least once a month in the US.) I assume they practice not only interfering, but the recognition that the attack is happening, and practice the mitigations. This war game is not a simulation - t
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There is more than one kind of "official" GPS so that could be possible. When people hear "GPS" they most often think of the Navstar system run by the USA, but there's GPS from other sources including Russia and China who might not be above messing with navigation in the region. I doubt GPS run by the USA, Japan, or EU would intentionally corrupt their satellite navigation aids. They rely on these systems for their own navigation, and if there's anyone that finds out that the GPS system has been corrupted then that puts trust in the system at risk.
Look up "Selective Availability". Corrupting the GPS quality for civilian users while keeping a highly accurate one for their own military was the first thing US military built into GPS.
And IIRC during the Gulf war non military GPS has been disabled completely.
Currently, they do neither, but willingly corrupting a GPS signal isn't unthinkable, but an existing feature, that has been used before.
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IIRC the current Navstar satellites don't even support selective availability.
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As discovered during warfare in the past being blatant about jamming GPS often results in producing a juicy target for an anti-radiation missile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It works until you realize a jammer is an antenna, aka. a thin rod of metal that costs maybe $5 to make. Add the wire, mounting bracket and screws, you're talking about $25 tops. That's what the $250,000 passive homing missile will be destroying. Everything else, i.e. batteries, signal generator and the operator could be a hundred feet away or even hidden in a tunnel.
Re:Directional antennas? (Score:5, Insightful)
I assume that - at least in part - it's because airplane systems haven't really been designed with the thought that a sophisticated adversary might attempt to interfere with them.
Yes, that's "unthinkably" dumb.
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That is a very poor assumption, and says you're unfamiliar with SAASM or m-code.
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In all seriousness - feel free to enlighten us on how the military technologies you mention apply to the commercial flights we're talking about here.
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Obviously, technology restricted to military use doesn't apply to commercial systems, and I didn't say they did. What I was trying to express is that these technologies exist, and to think that designers have given no thought to the very reasons that those technologies exist, is rather silly. Sorry if I didn't make that sufficiently clear for you.
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Actually a designer shouldn't have to consider an attack to be military in nature, communication technology in particular has a long history of someone naively implementing something and then having to improve its security later on because somebody was doing bad stuff. It seems clear that the designers of the GPS system considered several sorts of things (including deliberately offsetting the signal themselves, so that only the military receivers would get the fine tuned data; that's been retired) but as I
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It's not difficult to create a public key crypto system that allows receivers to validate the data they are getting, making spoofing impossible. Jamming is still possible, but not sending false positioning data because to generate a valid signal you need the private key.
The EU's Galileo satellite navigation system implements that via OSNMA. Data is signed, so any spoofing is easy to detect. Aircraft can fall back on other navigational systems.
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Re:Directional antennas? (Score:5, Informative)
If it were only that simple. Do you know how weak GPS signals are? A ground-based transmitter with enough power can overwhelm that signal regardless of antenna type or mounting.
I supported flight test of an experimental aircraft at Edwards Airforce Base a few years back. Periodically we'd have to stand down for a day because China Lake (70 miles to the north of EAFB) was doing GPS jamming and spoofing tests.
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I'm still not clear how an upwards facing antenna would be overwhelmed by noise from a transmitter below it though.
Because outside of a mathematic simulation, no antennas are perfect and it is possible to overwhelm the insanely small GPS signal even from behind a directional antenna.
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GPS need to view from just about horizon to horizon, and to not lose satellites during banking turns, take-off (tilted back) etc. So while I am guessing they already are mostly pointed skyward, you can't easily shield your way out of this.
As received GPS signals are below the noise floor of the receiver. A good antenna as you describe might be able to get a front-to-back ratio of maybe 20-30 dB. A bad actor just need to transmit a jammer signal to overcome the noise-level signal as received, which just i
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Starlink phased-array antennas are already certified by Transport Canada, the FAA, and EASA. It's not intended for navigation use, but it could be (without any hardware changes) if they wanted to:
https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
Of course you'd then also need certification to use it as a navigation device.
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If you want to design a system from the ground-up with such a threat in mind the approach would be to put a phased array receiver on the plane and actively track the satellites individually before sending the IF signal to the GPS to convert to ephemeris data, which would greatly increase the directivity and make a jammer/spoofer attack much more difficult.
That's probably something like what the cool kids are doing in Ukraine with their drones, because Russian jammers are good.
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I would assume that, too, but that's the precursor to the next "unthinkable" attack.
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Then it sounds like it should be possible to spoof GBAS but not GPS, and that GPS should be the fallback when GBAS data diverges too much from GPS.
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Wrong question.
Would it help to build antennas that are 180-degrees-shielded? Probably.
But WHY they aren't build that way? It was simply never necessary! Have you seen your phones GPS antenna? Probably not as it is a 1/10 squareinch loop on a PCB-board. A simple antenna like that can be stuck everywhere on the plane. Directional antennas are much larger, need to be moving if mounted on a moving vehicle. And RF paths are tricky. Think of diffraction and fresnel zones.... the antennas ARE probably already on
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WAAS data is only provided to aircraft from the GPS satellites themselves, so I'm not sure how it's relevant here. It also only covers North America, so doubly not relevant for GPS spoofing in the middle east.
HOW can inertial guidance break at same time? (Score:5, Interesting)
That seems a lot worse than losing GPS. GPS is a luxury, available from the military as a favor which could, at any moment, go away. It's "unthinkable" that anyone would ever rely on it.
Inertial guidance, though, ought to be unspoofable (even though less accurate than GPS on average). There will certainly be found an explanation for this; it isn't magic.
(Or is it?!)
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It would be crazy to not count votes from the US, Russian, and Chinese positioning systems.
My $250 drone can land within 2' of its launch point, so that's good.
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GPS is certified for aircraft navigation systems, and the US government guarantees its availability and accuracy in the US. The ability for the military to disable it or reduce its accuracy was disabled permanently.
The EU intends the same for the Galileo system.
You absolutely are supposed to rely on them, when in the airspace of the operating countries. Of course, you might not trust those governments, but Airbus and Boeing are obliged to.
Signed transmissions next? (Score:2)
Requires more processing power by receivers but since they already need lots it shouldn't be much trouble.
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They don't need lots, though. You can run a GPS receiver for months in a dog collar. Having to verify a cryptographically strong signature every small number of seconds really would cost a lot more processing power.
A two-tiered system might make sense, though. Unencrypted signals for dog collars, commodity watches and phones and such. Encrypted signals for things that are more critical. Jamming might still be a problem. It doesn't matter if the signal is signed if you can't hear it.
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> It doesn't matter if the signal is signed if you can't hear it.
It's better to know your GPS is down than to trust a spoofed signal.
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Also, the calculations for position is complex and iterative to converge on a trustworthy position. It's not just a simple trig calculation.
This just shows poor design and poor FAA oversight (Score:2)
This just shows poor design and poor FAA oversight. I don't mean that the mechanical systems in the plane are poorly designed, nor am I claiming that the IRS (Inertial Reference System) software does not provide the correct output given correct input. I am claiming that the software and hardware was not designed to account for Murphy's Law and Electronic Warfare (EW).
There should always be a paper backup. There should be an altimeter and a compass that is not connected to anything. That air gap between
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and barometer with him on the plane
You ever open the barometer app on your phone inside a pressurized aircraft? ;-)
Also, why would civilian aircraft have to incorporate resistance to electronic warfare into their design? Should they also have anti-missile countermeasures? Perhaps missiles of their own so they should shoot back at any fire control radars or GPS jammers that play games with them?
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I believe there are barometric sensors (outside the pressurized cabin, obviously) that help determine altitude. Radar altimeters additionally are used to measure proximity to terrain.
(Disclaimer: IANAP, don't play one on TV, not *your* pilot, etc., etc.)
"unthinkable... fundamental flaw in... design" (Score:2)
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It honestly ought to be a box in the middle of the console with the only input being power. Let it have an optical out to the rest of the instruments so they can use it for sanity checks. An old school mechanical compass, attitude indicator, and altimeter plus an IRS with its own display. Maybe a wind speed indicator.
The idea that your avionics themselves can be remotely corrupted is indeed frightening. I'd actually assume the attack was coming from someone onboard with a specialized electronic device, o
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This just shows poor design and poor FAA oversight.
The FAA resolved this where it has jurisdiction with WAAS, the affected areas are not inside FAA jurisdiction.
There should always be a paper backup. There should be an altimeter and a compass that is not connected to anything.
A map, compass, and altimeter isn't going to provide sufficient precision to prove GPS isn't being spoofed. Paper maps would prove gross errors in navigation but not be fine enough for getting a jet onto a runway. For that kind of precision they'd need trusted radio beacons on land, such as VOR or... wait for it... WAAS and we already went over why WAAS doesn't apply here.
People have been navigati
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Paper maps would prove gross errors in navigation but not be fine enough for getting a jet onto a runway.
Why wouldn't they? People were flying jets across the Atlantic and landing quite nicely long before GPS came along. The US even has the remains of a navigation system that pre-dated radio direction/range finding: large painted concrete arrows on the ground pointing in the direction of the next city on the route. Primitive, but it worked.
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the pilot is well trained for flight only using those sensors, maps, and the view out the cockpit window, and
Tell us you don't know anything about flying an aircraft at 43000ft without telling us you don't know anything about flying an aircraft at 43000ft.
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Everyone follows the FAA no matter where they are. Especially aircraft manufacturers and instrumentation manufacturers since they all have to be certified by the FAA regardless of where they end up and under what jurisdiction they ultimately get certified under.
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There are mutual recognition treaties between multiple aviation safety authorities.
https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/a... [faa.gov]
s/unthinkable/easily predictable/ (Score:2)
The fine article misspells the phrase "easily predictable" as "unthinkable".
Attacks like this are downright obvious. It's a broadcast signal. Of course, it's possible for someone to screw it up. Of course, it's foreseeable that someone will.
I've said the very same thing of automotive systems that promise to talk to nearby cars. I'll say it again because I'm sure that'll be unthinkable, too. Other cars will lie to you. Some of the other cars won't even be cars. Some things will just scream noise at yo
Possible mitigation (Score:3)
There are multiple ways to avoid spoofing but difficult to avoid jamming. A simplest technique would be to use multiple GPS systems mounted on two ends of the plane and two ends of the wings. It is almost impossible to spoof it so that all four of them read the correct data (you know the relative distance, so you know the difference in positions they are supposed to read). I don't think any company is making such a kit which can alert you of spoofing if the data from multiple receiver do not match the pre-calibrated distances). It will work very well on large planes (or any other large moving objects).
Also you can use directional antennas, but they don't work well for GPS as GPS satellites are spread over huge angles but now the spoofing transmitters will have to use higher power and higher chance of getting detected and getting caught.
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The antennas don't have to be very directional. A hemisphere above the plane would work fine, it'd detect almost all of the usable satellites while excluding ground-based transmitters. Spoofing that would require putting a satellite in orbit, something beyond the capabilities of most of the people doing the spoofing.
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Agree that it is not hard to make directional antenna. But now you will need tracking antenna since planes tilt while taking off, landing (when you need the GPS most), turning and so on. Plus directional antennas don't reject 100% signal from the other directions unless they are bulky ones. Ground signal is close by and can be very strong, so even the directional antennas will pick up ground signal unless they are bulky antennas. Now think about mounting a large directional, and tracking antenna on a plane.
Everywhere Putin travels, GPS does not work (Score:2)
Industry learned nothing from MH17 (Score:2)
STOP FLYING OVER ACTIVE WARZONES. Problem largely solved. Let me know where I can send the consulting bill.
Seriously though, these spoofing attacks are generalised and countries not at war don't do this because countries have their own airlines and passengers that need to be taken care of as well.
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These aren't active warzones. Iran, for example, is not an active warzone.
Some airlines do avoid areas that are not part of a hot war, e.g. many now avoid Russia. However, it would be a big escalation if airlines were required to avoid anywhere that might potential become a warzone. A country's economy could be badly damaged by the mere threat or hint of escalation.
Planes have GPS? Since when? (Score:2, Funny)
MA Flight 370.
'Nuff said.
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Planes have had GPS much longer than that; MH370 pushed for GPS postion broadcasting to a degree, but for navigation it has been used for decades.
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This seems to be a common misconception about GPS. People seem to think that if something has a GPS, it can be tracked by satellites. That's not how it works.
GPS is receive only. Nothing is transmitted from receivers, they just listen to the signals from satellites.
For tracking you need some other way of getting the data sent out. Aircraft use long wave radio to send periodic status and maintenance messages. Consumer gear usually uses the cellular network.
Flight 370 doubtless did have GPS, but that is of no
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
We've been navigating long before GPS was around. Pull out your maps and grab the sextant. Spoiled brats. Think everything needs handed to you.
If I'm reading the summary correct, the GPS attack is impacting the ability to do dead reckoning [wikipedia.org] as well. This is the "Unthinkable" part. If true, the pilots can't even navigate "the old fashioned way" because they can't obtain an accurate heading. Sounds like there is a bug in the avionics code, and the systems aren't as redundant as they thought.
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I need to start putting /s at the end of my comments because clearly people aren't getting my sarcasm.
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I need to start putting /s at the end of my comments because clearly people aren't getting my sarcasm.
How ironic your sarcasm would probably save lives today.
It's not the sextant that stopped working.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Informative)
There is no reason why people should get your sarcasm. They don't know you. So, they don't know if you are actually dumb enough to say something that ridiculous. The internet is full of dumb people who say ridiculous things, so there is no reason to expect that the strangers who read your post will assume you are anything other than one of them.
When you are typing it out it sounds very obviously sarcastic in your head, of course. But most of how that sounds is lost in translation. Text just doesn't communicate as much as tone-of-voice and body language would. It makes sarcasm extremely difficult to detect online.
So, yes, if you make sarcastic posts online you will need something explicit to make that clear.
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Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
The threat is likely that the inertial system corrects itself periodically based on GPS coordinates. If you make it think it is slightly, but consistently off in heading then it would be possible to have those corrections fed back in and poison the inertia system.
Radio beacons are the next option for navigational waypoints.
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Adama would never have allowed the independent systems to be networked.
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The FMS has to hit the GNSS receiver for inputs periodically, the position error starts accumulating pretty quickly if it doesn't.
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We've been navigating long before GPS was around. Pull out your maps and grab the sextant. Spoiled brats. Think everything needs handed to you.
Your sarcasm aside, if I'm reading the summary correct, the GPS attack is impacting the ability to do dead reckoning [wikipedia.org] as well. This is the "Unthinkable" part. If true, the pilots can't even navigate "the old fashioned way" because they can't obtain an accurate heading. Sounds like there is a bug in the avionics code, and the systems aren't as redundant as they thought.
Your sarcasm aside, the bug is really a design flaw. From TFA, the inertial nav system used GPS to correct its position under the assumption GPS was correct and inertial nav would only be needed if GPS fails; i.e. ceased to get a signal. They never thought GPS would be wrong. They probably were trying to fix the inertial nav problem of it walking away from the actual position as small errors compound until it is too far off and requires a reset.
I doubt any pilot today has ever used an air almanac nor do
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And partially because they were too slow in an airspace that is a lot more crowded than it used to be, and with planes that are faster.
Also, the old joke was that it's called dead reckoning because if you make a mistake you end up dead.
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Not even a mistake, just a wrong estimation like wrong wind speed in your accurate calculation.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pull out your maps and grab the sextant. Spoiled brats. Think everything needs handed to you.
You think commercial pilots are still trained in stellar navigation? The US military dropped it from the Service Academy curricula for many years and only recently brought it back (which tells you how secure they are that our near peer adversaries can't shoot down our satellites....)
Do you have any idea how much work it actually is to get a astronavigation fix? Or to navigate by dead reckoning without the benefit of computer assistance? Planes had dedicated navigators before the advent of modern navigational aids. Likewise, they had dedicated flight engineers before the advent of modern computer avionics. It was only technological advancements that allowed the elimination of these roles. Airline pilots don't have the spare capacity to resume doing these holes on a routine basis. They can navigate well enough in an emergency, e.g., systems failure, enough to find a safe airport anyway, but they don't carry sextants and aren't expected to fly an entire route the old fashioned way.
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Dead reckoning is pretty easy, and pilots are really supposed to be sanity checking their instruments. It's hard to be really accurate though, so reasonably subtle spoofing would still get them. A celestial fix isn't that much work if have a bit of practice, but it's awfully tricky to do in the daytime.
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Dead reckoning is pretty easy, and pilots are really supposed to be sanity checking their instruments. It's hard to be really accurate though, so reasonably subtle spoofing would still get them. A celestial fix isn't that much work if have a bit of practice, but it's awfully tricky to do in the daytime.
DR is easy to do but hard to do accurately over long distances, as you point out, which is why you have to get a fix periodically to correct the plot. A fix from a fast moving aircraft is likely to not e very accurate, even if you move the lines based on groundspeed. Celestial nav is also a skill that requires a lot of practice to be really good at and get an accurate fix. It's hard enough on a slow moving ship, a modern a/c traveling at hundreds of miles an hour would be challenging, to say teh least, e
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OPs claim was that it's a lot of work to navigate by dead reckoning "without computer assistance." It's not. Sea navigation courses certainly teach navigation with a compass, watch and knot meter. I would be surprised if pilots don't also learn to fly with compass, watch and airspeed indicator.
To address your comments, you are supposed to know where you are at all times when you're in command of a ship or plane, specifically so that if you GPS "goes haywire" you can continue to navigate. A typical GPS unit
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Not to mention the limited view from an airplane. How would a dedicated navigator get a fix on the sun with a sextant if the sun is behind or exactly above the plane?
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Nobody knows for sure what happened to MA 370 but I've never heard it theorized that it was a navigational error, so, not really sure why it's topical to this discussion. The leading theory is deliberate pilot choice. That's hardly unprecedented [wikipedia.org] and very difficult to defend against.
Old-fashioned, is a bullshit excuse buried in pride and ignorance when functional still applies.
It's not about ignorance boss, it's about workload. In the before times there was a dedicated navigator for this kind of stuff. Modern day pilots can get through it in an emergency but they do not expect to have to routinely
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Yes. We have those modern, cheap and small navigation and other electronic devices.
The problem is that we relied on one of them that we now know is not as reliable as we thought it is.
And yes again, redundant Independent systems are the best solution for such a situation. But you keep in mind that for every system, there is a a way to sabotage it.
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(Here in the US, at least) Commercial airplanes are equipped with radio direction finding equipment that can locate non-directional beacons (NDB) or "Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Range" VORs. The former just beeps to tell you how far away from it you are. The latter is super cool. First, it looks like a Taco stand, and I do like tacos. Second, by a process indistinguishable to me from magic, it transmits a signal to the aircraft that indicates the bearing where the VOR "sees" the aircraft. If I
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Sounds like you know who "they" are. OPSGROUP doesn't. You could be a hero by revealing what you know about, "they."
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Re:Simple fix. (Score:4, Interesting)
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As Mo the bartender said on The Simpsons "they shouldn't have been there in the first place"
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IT Analogy. Attackers are performing a DOS attack. Shutting off business is giving in. Filtering IP ranges by geolocations can be done for your private blog if you notice weirdness in your logs. But keeping an airline afloat is sufficiently difficult task already, billions in debt from purchasing aeroplanes, thousands of people to pay in different countries. Stopping profitable routes (letting the market share to competitors) out of spite is not "their" problem; it is your problem, you're the one trying to
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i'd Argue that UAE / Israel / Egypt would all have the capability for GPS spoofing in the area - with Israel having the most compelling reason to do it.. By spoofing and causing drift, they would be able to shift the navigation of anything in the air relying on GPS.. while commercial flight is unlikely to be their target, i can see them doing it for short periods of time when they detect incoming rockets/guided munitions which may be GPS guided.
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My bad on the math. 500W at 120Kft being received at 30Kft requires only 5W at 0ft to override because of the inverse square law.
E
In the frequency allocation filing the L1 C/A power is listed as 25.6 Watts. The Antenna gain is listed at 13 dBi. Thus, based on the frequency allocation filing, the power would be about 500 Watts (27 dBW).
Now, the free space path loss from 21000 km is about 182 dB. Take the 500 Watts (27 dBW) and subtract the free space path loss (27 - 182) and you get -155 dBW. The end of life spec is -160 dBW, which leaves a 5 dB margin at the ground or about 5 dBW at 20990km as well for a receive strength aroun
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One can be very certain that GPS will eventually be abruptly decommissioned. A solar storm hitting them is inevitable. So systems that rely on GPS need to be able to tolerate being down until the prior version is replaced. But it's been at least decades since we've had a strong enough solar storm in just the wrong direction. So people ignore the problem.
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Iran did in fact recently shoot down a civilian airliner, and not because of "The Jews" but because it's command chain failed and air defense systems didn't talk to each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
But I suppose you'll figure out six degrees of separation to blame them anyway. Go.
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If Israel is under attack, then by all means, use it. But once no missiles are inbound, turn it off. Likewise, a NoTAM should be sent right away indicating it is in effect.
The problem is that others are using it to turn aircraft’s, esp. drones, into 9-11s. And this has been going on for years.
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Just like the US, which is also a big pariah loser. This GPS spoofing is highly unlikely done by Iran, but may be more because of interference of the US doing tests in those regions.
Don't think for a minute the US aren't bullies, because they are probably the biggest bully in the world, at this time.