Just for one Over 10,000 Aircraft Navigation Disturbances and Crashes a Year in the Baltic Sea Region: What Causes This? Experts are convinced that the cause is disturbing signals from the Russian Kaliningrad.
One of the latest examples was during a training flight over the Baltic Sea, the German public media ARD reports and quotes the Swedish flight instructor Henrik Edshammar, who was returning from the Polish city of Gdansk to Sweden with his students who were training to become pilots. Visibility was excellent and by all accounts it looked like a very pleasant flight ahead. But at a height of 150 meters, the navigation devices suddenly lost the signal. The pilot restarted the system, but again he did not find a fault - everything worked normally, only the jeep signal was missing.
"And then the colleague who had taken off shortly before us called to report the same problem. It immediately became clear to us that the reason was not our planes," Edshammar told ARD.
Cockpit crash
The case of the Swedish flight instructors is just one of thousands of such examples. While less than 100 cases of problems with the navigation system were registered in the entire year 2018 in the Baltic Sea region, in 2023 they were already more than 10,000, and this year they are increasing again, according to the data of the European Aviation Agency safety.
The Finnish airline Finnair was forced this spring to temporarily stop flights to the Estonian city of Tartu precisely because of the constant disruptions. In case of navigation failure, the aircraft can be guided by additional, backup systems, which, however, Tartu Airport is not equipped with.
That's exactly what Edshamar did - he allowed himself to be navigated by dispatchers on the ground. After half an hour of jeeps, the signal suddenly appeared again. "The feeling is like suddenly seeing the sun after flying through dark clouds all the time," says the Swedish pilot.
Baltic countries blame Russia
Experts from Lithuania and Estonia link these problems in the Baltic Sea region to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Hans Liwang from the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm shares this opinion: "The Baltic Sea region is feeling the effects of the tension between Russia and the West. By all accounts, it seems that the cause of most disruptions and breakdowns in navigation comes from Russia - and more precisely from Kaliningrad," says the expert.
These technical problems do not only affect airplanes: ships, mobile phones and even in the field of agriculture work with data from the Global Positioning System (GPS). Farmers on Finland's border with Russia are complaining about problems with their tractors losing their orientation in the field.
The new normal for pilots?
Such disruptions seem to be the new normal, says Swedish flight instructor Henrik Edshammar. For him, this means that each flight must be planned more intensively - for example, the plane should carry more fuel in case it has to travel more distance before landing.