It was the last second of the journey, simply before score at , Beirut’s international airports,  , when the Airbus 320’s surface contact warning — the system that warns pilots if their aircraft is about to strike a mountain or other obstacle — squawked,” Terrain! Take away! Move up”!
Fadi Ramadan, the 37-year-old captain, fell again on the emergency protocol drilled into him every six weeks for the last 15 years of his flying job.
” It’s muscle memory at this point. Whenever we get this caution, we immediately go complete strength and full back stay to get the plane to a healthy altitude”, said Ramadan, a former staff of Lebanon’s premier carrier , Middle East Airlines.
He was going to do just that. But looking out the pilot, he knew something was wrong with the jet’s Global Positioning System, or GPS. He could see the tarmac straight in front of him, but they were far away from the mountains that viewed the airport. And the jet’s tool getting structure, which relies on television transportation, showed they were in the right location.
” Disregard”, he told his co-pilot, and landed the plane with the alarm blaring all the way to the wall.
Ramadan and other pilots who were over Lebanon on that day were the victims of a” GPS spoofing” attack that sends fake GPS signals to devices, overwhelming the weak signal from navigation satellites, and giving devices a false impression.
Another phishing attacks have followed, affecting places in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and Cyprus — part of a torrent of transmission disruptions that are becoming a regular event over the Middle East. In a recent 72-hour period, for example, researchers from SkAI Data Services, using information from the OpenSky Network,  , detected almost 2, 000 spoofed planes.
The attacks are different from the more common GPS jamming, which simply interferes with the satellite’s and receiver’s signals.
Spoofing can” simulate the entire constellation of GPS satellites to trick the receiver into believing they’re in a different position”, said Benoit Figuet, SkAI’s co-founder.
” It’s affecting a huge area, which means you need power”, Figuet said. ” So this is probably military activity. Not as a garage hobbyist as I like to be.
Researchers with the University of Texas at Austin’s radio-navigation lab analyzed measurements of low-Earth orbit satellite measurements over the eastern Mediterranean to determine the source of the spoofing to an air base in northern Israel.
In the weeks after , Hamas ‘ Oct. 7 attack, Israel worked to counter missile strikes from Hamas and , its Lebanese ally Hezbollah.  , The latter possesses an Iran-supplied arsenal of GPS-guided munitions, including drones.
The Israeli army stated in October that it was “proactively disrupting navigation systems for various operational needs,” adding that people’s phones would be affected by location-based applications.
In April, Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari also acknowledged the military’s disruption was meant to “neutralize threats”.
” We are aware that these disruptions cause inconveniences, but it is a vital and necessary tool in our defensive capabilities”, Hagari said in a news conference.
Those inconveniences have hit people far beyond Israel’s borders, affecting not only aviation but also maritime shipping.
Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, described this as an attempt to use the most potent form of GPS electronic and navigational warfare. They ca n’t stop spoofing that only applies to Israel’s borders because they need it to overpower receivers who are trained to withstand it, they say.
That implies that a much wider area is being affected by the signal interference, Humphreys said. They must possess many times the traditional power in order to defeat a GPS receiver, so the signals are being echoed all the way to Cyprus.
Israel’s spoofing has also wreaked havoc on GPS-reliant consumer programs, such as Google Maps, food delivery and dating apps. Users in the area who are perplexed claim that their smartphones are suddenly telling them that they are either at Beirut’s international airport or Cairo, the Egyptian capital.
” It’s affecting 80 % of our drivers and obstructing our work — we’re getting constant complaints”, said Marwan Fayyad, head of Lebanon’s taxi drivers union. Due to the extra time needed to navigate, drivers have had to reduce how many trips they can make.
After the spoofing began in October, Fayyad met with several government officials, but to no avail.
” The government is n’t able to do anything. All we can do is wait for this to end”, Fayyad said.
The foreign ministry of Lebanon complained to the U.N. Security Council in March about what it called Israel’s “reckless” interference with signals since the start of the Gaza war, claiming that it was an attack on Lebanon’s sovereignty that had “dangerous consequences on the safety of civil aviation, as well as on the lives of thousands of civilian passengers every day.”
The impact on air traffic is what aviation experts are most concerned about because pilots are instructed to turn off a plane’s GPS receiver and rely on other means of navigation. That may work, but the spoofing has been so significant that it has had an impact on a plane’s inertial reference systems, which use sensors to extrapolate from the most recent GPS position, causing any calculations onboard to be messed up and making pilots request assistance from air traffic control. That could quickly turn into a burden for already stressed air traffic controllers.
Another option might be to rely on other global navigation satellite systems as a workaround. GPS is owned by the U. S. government and is run by the U. S. Space Force, but there’s also Russia’s GLONASS, China’s BeiDou, and the European Union’s system, Galileo.
But only GPS is used for airplane navigation, and those systems are also susceptible to spoofing.
The impact of GPS malfunctions on a plane’s avionics suite is potentially more dangerous, according to Humphreys.
There is no denying that safety has decreased in flights in the eastern Mediterranean as a result of airlines instructing their pilots to turn off GPS, along with automatic collision avoidance, and terrain warning systems, he said.
” They’ve been put in for a reason, so the danger is that we’re normalizing aberration”.
Ramadan, the pilot of the airline, claimed that the spoofing had been particularly disruptive for companies unfamiliar with the area. He’s heard pilots saying they’re running terrain avoidance procedures on numerous occasions over the radio.
” But what’s worse is that pilots are getting used to the collision alert”, Ramadan said. When they should be able to act quickly, they now question it and take time to troubleshoot a very high-risk alert. In real-life conditions, this could prove catastrophic”.
___
© 2024 Los Angeles Times
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
