GPS signals keep the world moving - but are dangerously simple to disrupt: David Richards
In the summer of 2013, pilots lining up passenger jets for landing at Newark Liberty Airport suddenly lost their GPS signals mid-approach. The satellite-guided system faltered, forcing aborted landings and panic among engineers.
The culprit was not a foreign agent but a £20 GPS jammer plugged into the cigarette lighter of a van. A truck driver had bought it to stop his employer tracking his movements while he slipped away for clandestine trysts.
Federal agents traced the signal, fined him $32,000, and he lost his job. What seemed comic exposed a serious weakness in the technology on which modern life depends.
Fast forward to this week, and the plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, was forced to divert and land using paper maps after its GPS navigation failed over Bulgaria. Officials suspect the culprit was Russian jamming. The symbolism could not be clearer.
The leader of Europe, flying into a region on NATO’s flank, was reduced to the tools of the 1940s because the digital compass of the modern world had been switched off.
Russia’s campaign of interference has turned GPS disruption from a curiosity into a constant menace. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, tens of thousands of incidents have been logged by airlines flying over the Baltic states.
Pilots report spoofing, where fake signals replace the real ones, sending aircraft astray. Military flights have also been targeted. Last year, an RAF plane carrying Britain’s Defence Secretary experienced spoofing near Kaliningrad. Finnair has had to turn back passenger flights mid-journey. The Lithuanian foreign minister compared it to having your headlights switched off while driving at night.
Some regulators downplay the risk, pointing out that aircraft use multiple systems, not just GPS. But this level of interference is a cause for concern.
GPS has become the bloodstream of the digital age. Beyond aircraft, it guides ships, synchronises stock exchanges, keeps mobile phone networks ticking, underpins precision agriculture and most worryingly, precision-guided missiles and defence systems. A tool designed by the US military to give soldiers a battlefield advantage has become a universal utility, yet relies on ultra-weak signals beamed from satellites some 20,000 kilometres above Earth. A pocket-sized jammer bought for the price of a takeaway can drown them out.
That fragility is no longer acceptable. If GPS can be spoofed or jammed, then it cannot be the backbone of critical systems such as missile defence. The West needs something more resilient. Enter the quantum clock.
Put simply, GPS works because satellites carry highly accurate atomic clocks. Each one broadcasts a timestamp. Receivers on the ground compare signals from multiple satellites, calculating their location from the differences in arrival time. Jam the signals, and calculation collapses. The quantum solution is to build clocks so accurate that each aircraft, ship or missile effectively carries its own internal GPS.
Britain is already a leader in this field. Birmingham, Glasgow and Oxford laboratories are working on portable atom clocks that may one day be housed in a cockpit or warship bridge.
But making them small and affordable enough to be employed on a mass basis is quite another thing. But the principle has been proved: if you can’t trust the sky, trust the atom.
We must invest now in quantum-equipped resilience and break free from a fragile satellite chain that can be severed at will.
David Richards is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs