Due to GPS interference, Finnish airlines canceled flights to Estonia. There is evidence that the attack is controlled from Russia – VTM.cz

The Finnish airline Finnair has suspended the operation of regular flights to Estonia’s Tartu International Airport for a whole month. The reason is repetitive jamming the GPS signal in the Baltic regionwhich has been occurring since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“It was never really about whether it was Russia – who else could it be?” says Dana Goward of the nonprofit Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, which focuses on protecting and expanding GPS signals. Goward claims that since December “more and more sightings and analysts confirm it’s Russia”.

GPS interference over Estonia

One of the targets of the interference is Estonia, which borders Russia. Problems with the GPS signal over the capital Tallinn began last year and since the beginning of 2024, their number has increased significantly. Üllar Salumäe from the Estonian Transport Authority says: “Currently, we receive 20 to 30 reports a day from various aircraft about GPS interference.”

The good news is that GPS interference has not yet had a significant impact on flight safety at Tallinn Airport, as there are alternative navigation aids and radar coverage on the ground to help guide aircraft. However, the smaller airport in Estonia’s second largest city, Tartu, is not as well equipped technically.

It was for this reason that two Finnair flights on April 25 and 26 had to interrupt their landing at Tartu Airport and turn back. The airline subsequently made a decision to suspend flights between Tartu and the Finnish capital Helsinki until June 1.

According to Erko Kulu of Estonia’s Office for Consumer Protection and Technical Regulation, there is no concrete information yet on the source of the interference that forced the diversion of flights. However, Estonia had previously discovered that similar GPS jamming in its airspace came from a source located in Russia’s Leningrad region.

The jammers are on the territory of Russia

An analyst going by the pseudonym Markus Jonsson found further evidence of the likely source of the attack. He tracked down the GPS jammer so that mapped “radio horizons” – basically circles representing the maximum range of the jammer – for each aircraft hit.

The geographic area where the GPS jammer is most likely to be found is in Russia southwest of St. Petersburg. GPS interference was detected mainly at high altitudes and had little effect on ground-based GPS equipment, which is relied on by, for example, Estonian telecommunications networks, power grid and financial services systems.

Another transmitter that analysts have geolocated to Kaliningrad – the Russian enclave located between Lithuania and Poland – often jamming GPS signals in the airspace over Poland, Sweden and Germany. In March, he launched a 63-hour attack that affected more than 1,600 aircraft over Europe.

Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna called the latest cases of GPS jamming over Estonian territory a “hybrid attack” by Russia and said the government would address the issue with the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).