India's GPS disruptions indicate potential electronic warfare, similar to global patterns.
India’s GPS disruptions at major airports signal potential electronic warfare, mirroring global incidents. Since November 2023, anomalies in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have affected seven to eight key airports—Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA), Mumbai, Kolkata, Amritsar, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai—with over 100 incidents at IGIA alone in recent months and hundreds of flights impacted nationwide, as confirmed by Civil Aviation Minister K. Rammohan Naidu in a November 2025 Rajya Sabha reply. GPS spoofing, a sophisticated electronic warfare tactic, is accomplished by broadcasting stronger counterfeit signals from ground or airborne platforms that overpower weak satellite transmissions, deceiving receivers into calculating false positions, velocities, or timestamps—unlike jamming, which merely blocks signals—often via meaconing (retransmitting captured authentic signals) or generating fake satellite constellations. To counter this, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) mandated real-time reporting within 10 minutes since November 2023, issuing SOPs in November 2025; the Airports Authority of India (AAI) enlisted the Wireless Monitoring Organisation (WMO) for radio frequency direction-finding, signal forensics, and source tracing using aircraft logs and waveform captures, while retaining a Minimum Operating Network of ground-based aids ensures safety redundancy. While no flight safety compromises occurred, with pilots reverting to conventional navigation on unaffected runways, failure of redundant ILS system possibly due to jamming during landing of Afghan Airlines Flight FG9826 on Nov 23,2025 is also under investigation.
