Piloting planes is getting a lot more interesting

[wtg]

“Terrain ahead. Pull up!”

It’s a command that should only be heard in a disaster movie or flight simulator. But pilots and aviation experts say such warnings have been increasingly sparking alarm in cockpits as bogus signals from global positioning satellites hit commercial flights.

The disruption of GPS signals has become endemic in conflict zones, including the region now impacted by the Iran war, affecting planes on routes that skirt hot spots for military activity in the Middle East, Baltic Sea and Black Sea. In cases of GPS interference, an airplane’s ground proximity warning system may lock onto a false signal, triggering unsettling warnings even though the plane is flying at a safe altitude.

“I have fellow pilots that encounter this on a regular basis. That’s the true danger. It’s becoming normalized,” said Captain Ron Hay, president of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations, which represents over 160,000 pilots in more than 70 countries. Hay, who works for Delta Air Lines, said he feared that pilots might lose trust in critical safety systems as they become desensitized to these warnings.

In addition to harrowing phantom pull up commands, flights encountering these spoofed signals experience abnormal system responses such as map shifts, where the aircraft location on the cockpit screen moves miles from the actual flight path, or when a plane is on the runway ready for takeoff, systems may erroneously suggest it’s elsewhere, according to a 2026 resource guide from the US Federal Aviation Administration.

Around 900 flights each day are affected by GPS interference, according to Benoit Figuet, a research associate at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and founder of SkAI Data Services, which since 2024 has tracked such incidents on its site GPSWise.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/28/science/gps-jamming-plane-navigation-problems