Flights operating near Delhi and several other major airports have encountered GPS spoofing and GNSS interference over the past year, the Union government informed Parliament on Monday.
The disclosure came through a written response from Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu in the Rajya Sabha, outlining both the scale of incidents and the tightening of aviation-safety measures.
Naidu said that since the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) made it compulsory in November 2023 for airlines to report any suspected GPS jamming or spoofing, authorities have been receiving frequent updates from major airports including Kolkata, Amritsar, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai.
Responding to a query from MP S Niranjan Reddy, the minister confirmed that some aircraft on approach to Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) reported GPS spoofing while performing satellite-based landings on Runway 10.
These flights shifted to contingency procedures, he said, noting that operations on other runways dependent on traditional ground-based navigation remained unaffected.
To counter rising interference, the DGCA issued an advisory in November 2023 and followed it up with a new Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) on November 10, 2025, dedicated to real-time reporting of spoofing incidents around IGIA.
The SOP mandates immediate alerts from both pilots and air traffic controllers whenever unusual GPS activity is detected.
The ministry said India maintains a Minimum Operating Network (MON), a nationwide grid of ground-based navigation and surveillance systems, to ensure aircraft can safely operate even when satellite navigation is compromised.
The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has requested assistance from the Wireless Monitoring Organisation (WMO) to locate the origin of the rogue signals.
At a recent high-level review, WMO was instructed to deploy additional teams and use approximate location data supplied by DGCA and AAI to trace the interference.
Beyond navigational disruptions, Naidu flagged growing cybersecurity threats such as ransomware and malware aimed at aviation networks.
The AAI is now rolling out advanced cyber protections across its systems, aligned with guidelines from the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) and CERT-In.
Source: News18