"GNSS spoofing in the civil aviation sector: Impacts, lessons learned, and recommendations" with Captain Bulent Atas, Dr Todd Humphreys, and Dr Ramsey Faragher.

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) spoofing poses serious challenges to commercial flight decks. By transmitting false GNSS signals, spoofing can lead to false terrain warnings, position, time and navigation shifts, and GNSS-dependent equipment failures. These disruptions may necessitate route changes, avoidance and diversions due to degradation or loss of required equipment, compromising flight safety. This webinar will explore the issue of GNSS spoofing in the civil aviation sector, and will be delivered in three sections, followed by a Q&A session. 

Section 1: The problem and current mitigations with Captain Bulent Atas

Section 2: GNSS Spoofing:  Motives, Patterns, and Techniques with Dr Todd Humphreys

Section 3: Lessons learned from the OpsGroup report with Dr Ramsey Faragher

This event has taken place live, but registration is open to grant access to a recording of this webinar.

This event is free for RIN Members, with £5 tickets for non-members. Please note that as the recording of this webinar is available upon registration, we will not be issuing refunds for this event.

Programme

Section 1 with Captain Bulent Atas

Captain Atas will explore the problem and current mitigations. While current mitigation strategies provide a level of defence, there are instances where these measures may fall short. Pilots face difficulties reverting to basic navigation skills due to habitual and heavy reliance on GNSS and GNSS-dependent airspace design. The startle effect, conflict management, and normalisation of risk are critical areas in the human factors division. Flight safety can easily be compromised in high-traffic environments with reduced situational awareness and heavy workloads under GNSS RFI.

Upgrading navigation systems to resist spoofing attacks, redesigning airspace to accommodate legacy navigation systems (VOR/TAC/DME), and improving the performance of these legacy systems are crucial steps for flying under GNSS RFI. Developing advanced, technology-driven solutions is imperative to ensure the long-term safety and reliability of commercial aviation in an increasingly interconnected world.

Section 2 with Dr Todd Humphreys

The urtext of GPS spoofing is an internal memorandum written by Edwin Key for the MITRE Corporation in 1995.  Long before the first accounts of spoofing emerged from ships' captains in the Black Sea around 2017, this document warned that because the U.S. had made GPS a gift to the world, complete with an open instruction manual (the GPS interface specification), its signals would be easy to imitate.  The Key memorandum has proven prophetic. Against the backdrop of open war in Ukraine and the Near East, this past year has seen the most intense GNSS spoofing in history. Dr. Humphreys's presentation will examine the motives, patterns, and techniques of GNSS spoofing, from the earliest controlled laboratory demonstrations to the most sophisticated recent manifestations.  

Section 3 with Dr Ramsey Faragher

Ramsey was one of the authors of the OpsGroup report into GPS Spoofing in the Civil Aviation Sector that was published in September 2024. In his talk Ramsey will cover some of the key discoveries and revelations regarding the impact of GNSS interference on aviation GNSS receivers and dependent subsystems, and will cover some aspects of the problem that were revealed during the study but not described in the report. Ramsey will also propose some solutions and recommendations for the spoofing challenges in this and other sectors in order to improve our resilience against these threats in the future.

Speaker Biographies

Captain Bulent Atas:
Captain Bulent Atas is an A330 Captain and risk assessment pilot for Turkish Airlines. He has a strong background in both military and commercial aviation and also serves as a safety consultant on the board of the Turkiye Airline Pilots Foundation.

Capt. Atas holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Turkish Air Force Academy and has trained at institutions like THY Training Center, Istanbul and Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas. His career highlights include roles as a Type Rating Instructor, Risk Assessment Pilot, Captain at Turkish Airlines, a Training Systems Officer for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program at the US Department of Defense, and an F-16 Pilot for the Turkish Air Force.

Specializing in GPS RFI impact on flight operations, he has conducted flights into heavy GPS RFI areas like the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Capt. Atas developed response and mitigation strategies and contributed to GPS RFI Flight Deck Guidance. He actively participated in OpsGroup GPS Spoofing Workshops, IATA/EASA GPS Workshops, and Regional GPS Safety Awareness meetings.
His dedication to aviation safety is evident through his involvement in flight operations risk assessment studies and support to Turkish Airlines Flight Operations. His extensive experience in both commercial and military aviation underscores his commitment to excellence.

Dr Todd Humphreys:

Todd E. Humphreys (B.S., M.S., Utah State University; Ph.D., Cornell University) holds the Ashley H. Priddy Centennial Professorship in Engineering in the department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is Director of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group and of the UT Radionavigation Laboratory, where he specializes in the application of optimal detection and estimation techniques to positioning, navigation, and timing.  His awards include the UT Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award (2012), the NSF CAREER Award (2015), the ION Thurlow Award (2015), the PECASE (NSF, 2019), the IEEE Walter Fried Best Paper Award (2012, 2020, 2023), and the ION Kepler Award (2023). He is a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation and of the Royal Institute of Navigation.

Dr Ramsey Faragher:
Dr Ramsey Faragher is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation and a Bye-Fellow of Queens' College, at the University of Cambridge. He holds dozens of granted patents across more than 40 patent families and has worked on a large range of different navigation systems, from nuclear submarines to Martian rovers. Ramsey was an early pioneer in the field of machine learning SLAM techniques for opportunistic positioning systems and also pioneered the Supercorrelation synthetic aperture processing technique. He has been the recipient of numerous awards from IEEE, RIN, IOP and ION including the Royal Institute of Navigation's highest accolade, the Harold Spencer-Jones Gold Medal.