Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSP) and aircraft operators rely on the integrity of the GPS signal to navigate the aircraft to its destination. Increasingly, however, the integrity of the GPS signal has become a target for interference — via nefarious actions like spoofing or jamming, or non-intentional actions like malfunctioning avionics. This trend has prompted many in the aviation industry to seek creative, technological redundancies to the GPS signal to ensure the aircraft is able to continue operating safely in the event of an interference.
One such example illustrated in the Aireon data of GPS interference occurred between Dec. 25 and 26 with aircraft flying in the Baltic and Russian airspace. Using a variety of validation methods, Aireon determined, based on the aircraft with low reported position integrity category (PIC) values (which correlates with aircraft having large radii of horizontal position uncertainty from its GPS), it is clear that a significant number of aircraft were experiencing interference with GPS, with peak of 18% of aircraft having low PICs observed around 14:40 UTC as shown in Figure 1 (e.g. PIC of zero means > 20 NM position uncertainty whereas PIC of 15 is being used in the figure to represent all “good” integrity bound values < 0.5 NM).
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