Europe's Skies Under Siege: Regulators Move to Counter GPS Jamming Threat

EASA and EUROCONTROL publish a joint action plan as satellite navigation attacks on commercial aviation reach a new intensity

European aviation regulators moved on Thursday to confront one of the most persistent and underappreciated threats to commercial flight safety: the systematic jamming and spoofing of satellite navigation signals across the continent's most congested flight corridors.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency and EUROCONTROL published a joint action plan on 26 March setting out coordinated measures to protect aircraft navigation systems from interference with Global Navigation Satellite System signals. The timing is not incidental. GPS disruption events, concentrated along conflict zone boundaries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, have become a routine operational hazard for crews and air traffic controllers, stretching from the Baltic approaches to the eastern Mediterranean.

The scale of the problem is not in dispute. According to IATA data, GPS signal loss events increased by 220 per cent between 2021 and 2024, a trajectory that geopolitical conditions give little reason to expect will reverse. In 2024, Finnair suspended flights to Tartu in Estonia after persistent interference rendered the route operationally unacceptable.

The action plan sets out short, medium and longer-term measures built around four pillars: improved detection and data sharing between regulators, standardised operational procedures for flight crews and air traffic controllers, maintenance of backup non-satellite navigation infrastructure, and better civil to military coordination on interference event reporting.

EASA Executive Director Florian Guillermet was direct in his assessment, noting that raising pilot awareness alone was no longer sufficient and that the plan assigns clear responsibilities across the wider sector. EUROCONTROL Director-General Raúl Medina described the action plan as a concrete step toward protecting aviation infrastructure that underpins the entire European network.

For airlines, the practical implication is straightforward. GNSS is no longer simply a navigation convenience. It is critical infrastructure, and its vulnerability has graduated from an inconvenience into a systemic risk that European regulators are no longer willing to manage quietly.