Imagine a pilot who, during approach to landing, suddenly sees on the display coordinates of the aircraft in the middle of a field somewhere in Belarus — although in reality the plane is landing on a runway in Tallinn. This is not a technical glitch, but a consequence of ground-based radio-electronic warfare systems. For the crew, it is stress and additional manual work; for the airline, it is a risk of delays; for the passenger, it is a possible flight cancellation. This is precisely the mundane reality of civil aviation over the Baltic and Black Seas today.
What exactly happens in the cockpit
Valery Yakovenko, co-founder and managing partner of DroneUA, explained in an analysis for LIGA.net that civil aircraft crews regularly report GPS loss, incorrect coordinate determination, false warnings from onboard systems, and problems with navigation displays. According to him, the airspace over the Black Sea and adjacent territories of Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, and partially Turkey, as well as the Baltic region — Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland — remain the most vulnerable.
Yakovenko draws attention to the simple physics of the problem: radio waves do not stop at state borders, and the range of impact depends on the power of the electronic warfare system, antenna, radiation direction, terrain, transmitter height, and the altitude of the flight itself. In other words, interference occurs far from the front line — simply because the jamming signal "reaches" across hundreds of kilometers of sea or land.
Numbers that show the scale
This is not about isolated cases. More than 46,000 cases of potential GPS signal failures were recorded by aircraft over the Baltic region between August 2023 and March 2024. Among the affected flights were 2,309 Ryanair flights, 1,368 Wizz Air flights, 82 British Airways flights, and four easyJet flights. In the first two months of 2024, Eurocontrol recorded 985 GPS outages — almost as many as for the entire 2023, when there were 1,371.
The problem is not fading but growing: in the first four months of 2025, over 122,600 flights in northern Europe encountered GPS jamming and other satellite system disruptions. In summer 2025, Poland identified the source — two military facilities on the coast of the Kaliningrad region.
Why this is no longer just a safety issue, but also a money issue
Regulators insist there is no direct threat of a catastrophe: modern aircraft have backup inertial navigation systems, and crews are trained to switch to them in case of GPS loss. But the operational cost of interference is very real. Airlines are forced to reroute flights, maintain greater distances between aircraft in risk zones, spend additional time communicating with dispatchers, and train personnel. Maritime transport in the Baltic region, due to the same interference, is reverting to outdated radio beacons and paper maps — in other words, navigation methods that seemed to belong to the last century.
Every extra kilometer of detour, every hour of additional system monitoring — these are costs that ultimately end up in the price of a ticket or cargo transportation. And regions dependent on tourist flow through Baltic airports and Black Sea resorts risk feeling this not only in airline budgets, but also in local economies — from hotels to transport companies.
What to do about a problem that transcends borders
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is already considering depriving Russia of rights to radio frequencies for civil aviation in response to widespread jamming cases over the Baltic — following complaints from Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and later Sweden and Poland. This is more of a symbolic than a technical step: it does not physically turn off any jammer, but formalizes the status of the problem as an international violation.
- According to research, since 2019, GPS failures have been recorded throughout Europe — from Iceland to Italy, each lasting less than 10 seconds.
- On May 26, Lithuania warned of the spread of Russian fake GPS signals in Europe.
So far, no economic sanctions or resolutions have forced Russia to stop operating electronic warfare systems near its borders. The question that remains open for Europe's aviation and logistics industries is: are they ready to systematically change navigation standards — invest in backup ground beacons and crew training — before the first incident caused by loss of orientation ends not in pilot frustration, but in a real accident?
