L4sBotNov 23, 2023

Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do

https://lemmy.world/post/8651764

Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do - Lemmy.World

Commercial Flights Are Experiencing ‘Unthinkable’ GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New “spoofing” attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is “highly significant” for airline safety.

Show threadDettweilerNov 23, 2023
That just means you can’t use autoland in low visibility conditions. Modern IRUs (inertial reference unit) are highly accurate laser gyros that can use GPS for correction, but will throw out the data if it doesn’t make sense. Navigation won’t be affected much, and autoland (if used) will still rely on VHF guidance.
Show threadDelograndNov 23, 2023
Modern IRUs also take input from multiple sources (GPS, Navaids) to update their drift error. With spoofed GPS, bad drift corrections are made and when the navigation solution eventually fails the IRU is just as unusable.
Show threadDettweilerNov 24, 2023

ADIRUs will throw out bad GPS data if it disagrees with multiple IRUs, hence why there’s usually 3 on the aircraft.

If they’re using the older IRUs, the drift is corrected via redundancy and not GPS. Usually pilots will report drift based on their final IRU coordinates compared against GPS. Even then, they should still be checking their course with VOR.

Show threadRivalarrivalNov 24, 2023
Anyone with the ability to jam GPS can easily spoof VOR signals.
Show threadDettweiler
But in this case, they’re not. Plus, the crew are going to be the ones determining if their VOR/DME makes sense or not.
Nov 24, 2023 at 11:06amWeb
Show threadRivalarrivalNov 24, 2023
We don’t know that they aren’t spoofing VOR/DME as well. We might be seeing reports from affected aircraft, rather than specific targets.