A Widerøe airlines regional flight from Vadsø in Northern Norway had to abort landing in Vardø at noon on Friday because of GPS signal jamming believed to be coming from Russia. The flight had to continue on to Båtsfjord farther west in the northern county of Finnmark, where Vardø-bound passengers would be re-routed.
Widerøe reported that the jamming of the GPS satellite-based navigation system combined with low clouds made it unsafe to land. “We are very concerned about such GPS jamming,” Catharina Solli of Widerøe told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK). “Unfortunately it’s nothing new here in eastern Finnmark.”
GPS jamming has been a problem in recent years and is widely viewed as part of Russia’s cyber attacks against Norway as a NATO ally. “We could see that we wouldn’t be landing at Vardø,” Bill Iversen, a Vardø-bound passenger on the Widerøe flight, told NRK. “Then the captain said we couldn’t land because of Russian jamming.” It was the first time he had experienced it personally, but said “we see this often in the news. This has to be addressed at a higher level, so we can bring an end to it.”
NewsinEnglish.no staff
