Observations of Trends in GPS Anomalies Affecting Aviation

The Global Positioning System (GPS) serves a central role in most aircraft systems: supporting communications, navigation, and surveillance. Recently, over the last few years, the scale and severity of jamming and spoofing of aircraft GPS systems has increased and diversified significantly. Aireon can observe such impacts via its comprehensive Space-Based Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) receiver system, which collects billions of aircraft-transmitted ADS-B messages per day in real-time. Patterns and trends of GPS anomalies can be analyzed in this extensive geo-temporal dataset, which can be used in applications such as airspace monitoring and flight planning. In this paper, the scope of GPS anomaly incursion from state and/or non-state actors is viewed at the global as well as the local level.