NKOM’s decision to stop tracking jamming in Finnmark sets a dangerous precedent, says Melanie Garson, a professor focused on international conflict resolution at University College London. “By not responding, how do you enforce deterrence?” she asks, adding that it is not yet clear whether the government will find a solution to the jamming problem or leave it to the affected industries.
NKOM does try to “eliminate” GPS jamming when its source is on Norwegian territory, says spokesman Gerard. The agency is also among several government departments that organize the annual Jammerfest event, held on the Norwegian island of Andøya, to experiment with countermeasures. Starting in 2022, industry and government representatives travel to the Arctic Circle to test how their systems respond to jamming and the more serious GPS spoofing, in which GPS signals are falsified to deceive an aircraft or other device about its own location.
Still, Widerøe’s pilots are concerned that the problem may seem far removed from the American companies that make much of the equipment in their planes. They believe the US Navstar satellite system was targeted because other devices such as iPads, which can pick up signals from multiple satellite constellations, were still operating during the blackout periods.
“The suppliers of the navigation computers are mostly American,” says Rolf Fosgaard, deputy vice president of flight operations at Widerøe. He worries that if US businesses themselves are not affected, they may not be motivated to upgrade their systems to be resistant to jamming. “For a lot of European or Middle Eastern operators, they need this kind of equipment.”
It is not clear how the situation will develop in the sky over Finnmark. From 2022 most of the jamming hit planes above 6,000 feet, suggesting that the device causing the jamming was on the ground and that the more sensitive part of the plane’s journey, at a lower altitude, was shielded by the curvature of the Earth.
But in April, Thomassen claims, he encountered his first case of jamming while trying to land. Flying into Båtsfjord, on the northern tip of Norway, his plane suffered a traffic jam as it approached the runway. “We were able to land quite well based on visual contact with the airport,” he explains, adding that his company Widerøe is yet to investigate why this case of jamming occurred at such a low altitude.
Fortunately, the surrounding area is very flat, he says. “Norway is a mountainous country, so if the jamming was in other parts of the country, the operational impact would be significant.”
