On May 21, as U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey was flying back home from Estonia, the plane’s satellite signal was jammed—likely by Russia—for the duration of the flight. All around the Baltic Sea region, interference with navigation in shipping and aviation has become a persistent problem. Now, this subversive activity is growing fast in the Middle East, too.

Healey and his team had barely boarded their Royal Air Force plane after visiting British troops in Estonia when the signal was knocked out. As the Times reported: “The pilots were forced to use ‘revisionary’ inertial navigation systems to calculate their location. The interference also caused parts of the dashboard to malfunction in the cockpit of the Dassault Falcon 900LX aircraft, which is also used by the King.”

Fortunately, the skilled pilots landed the aircraft safely in the United Kingdom. The incident is a reminder of the predators haunting airliners in European skies these days. Malign actors are constantly transmitting signals that block airplanes’ navigational systems. Even worse, they are transmitting signals that distort those navigational systems, leaving pilots and ground staff uncertain of whether the locations they’re seeing on their instruments are real.

Last September, European authorities reported that approximately 123,000 flights had been affected by such navigational interference during the first four months of 2025. And planes were not the only vehicles affected: ships, which also use satellite navigation, were suffering from the same jamming and spoofing. Hyper-accurate navigational tools are a key reason that ships and planes can move so closely to one another. Without satellite navigation, today’s crowded skies and oceans would not be possible.

Last fall, the situation was so troubling that the ICAO Assembly, the International Civil Aviation Organization’s legislative body, condemned the interference and took the remarkable step of identifying the two key perpetrators: Russia and North Korea.

Since then, the problem has only spread further. In May, Darius Kuliesius, the deputy ​director of Lithuania’s communications regulator, told Reuters that since the beginning of 2025, Russia has increased its GPS spoofing antennae from three to 36. (GNSS, or the Global Navigation Satellite System, is the general term of satellite navigation; GPS is the U.S. system, though the term is commonly used to mean all forms of satellite navigation.)

The scourge is proliferating in other parts of the world, too. “We’re seeing manipulation in the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Eastern Med, the Baltic Sea, the Persian Gulf,” said Ben Westcott, director of digital services at the maritime safety firm Ambrey. “Ships are either getting no signal or a distorted one.” Joshua Hutchinson, Ambrey’s chief commercial officer, added: “GNSS interference is the largest threat by volume to the industry at this moment in time.”

When it comes to aviation, “navigational interference used to happen occasionally but now it’s basically constant,” said Raphael Monstein, co-founder of the aviation security consultancy SkAI Data Services. Unlike in the Baltic Sea region, where virtually all interference emanates from Russia, Israel and Iran (and sometimes others) jam and spoof in the Middle East. “The navigational interference is basically a measure [by both sides in the Iran war] to keep UAVs out,” Monstein said. “Civilians are just a casualty.” Sometimes jamming and spoofing flare up in India and Pakistan, too. Taiwan is regularly subjected to interference.

The problem is that nations—and even commercial outfits—can construct and deploy a jammer with relative ease. Electronic warfare is now a key component of modern warfare. For those wishing to see the scale of the situation for themselves, GPSwise offers a map that is illuminating yet troubling.

This all makes flying more difficult for airlines in affected regions, including the ones that have resumed some services to and from the Gulf. Having to manually establish and verify the location of one’s aircraft adds to pilots’ already considerable burden. “Many airlines have essentially become accustomed to this,” Monstein said. “In their briefings, pilots now receive warnings if there’s a risk of interference.” They know how to navigate without the aid of satellites, but it’s an additional task that they have to solve to perfection. Fortunately, aircraft, especially commercial airliners, are built to be able to fly despite GPS interference. Some corporate jets are less sturdy.

A similar headache is spreading on ship bridges. “Over the generations, the world has become reliant on GPS as the primary form of navigation,” Westcott said. “Now, crews are having to adjust to a new reality. Recently, we had a crew that called us to get advice because they were not used to sailing without GPS.” Years ago, some navies began—once again—instructing their sailors in celestial navigation, the totally interference-proof skill that allowed centuries of seafarers to circumnavigate the globe. But not all commercial seafarers have such training.

And this isn’t just a problem for crews in the air and at sea. Ground staff can’t be completely sure where their aircraft and ships are. In addition, Westcott pointed out, “time signals [that document the location of ships and aircraft at any given time] are linked to GPS.” This means that if GPS signals are distorted, then time stamps may no longer be accurate, creating complications for a host of industries, like insurers, that are highly dependent on this information.

What’s more, everyone is acutely aware that the jamming and spoofing could cause a serious accident. Through their constant activity, jammers and spoofers deliberately expose countless civilians to that risk. Indeed, GPS interference is thought to have caused the grounding of the container ship Antonia off the Saudi port of Jeddah in May 2025 and the bulker Meghna Princess in the Gulf of Finland a few months before that.

Now, governments are trying to help. In March, the European Union released an action plan that will provide instructions for how crews and air traffic controllers should operate during GPS disturbances. Norway has set up three monitoring stations for disturbances and plans to add another two. And DNK, a global maritime insurer based in Oslo, has launched a pioneering initiative that offers its members lower-orbit satellite signals that are much harder to disrupt than regular ones.

It’s a good thing that we can draw on the skills perfected by Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan, all alongside novel solutions like low-orbit navigation. But the global public can help, too, by calling out the countries responsible for this utterly irresponsible spoofing and jamming.