Are the US Military's GPS Tests Threatening Airline Safety?

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco quotes a new report from IEEE Spectrum:

In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute intervention of an air traffic controller. 'Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their equipment are working as intended, but are in fact leading them into the side of the mountain,' wrote the controller. 'Had [we] not noticed, that flight crew and the passengers would be dead....'

There are some 90 reports on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System forum detailing GPS interference in the United States over the past eight years, the majority of which were filed in 2019 and 2020. Now IEEE Spectrum has new evidence that GPS disruption to commercial aviation is much more common than even the ASRS database suggests. Previously undisclosed Federal Aviation Administration data for a few months in 2017 and 2018 detail hundreds of aircraft losing GPS reception in the vicinity of military tests. On a single day in March 2018, 21 aircraft reported GPS problems to air traffic controllers near Los Angeles. These included a medevac helicopter, several private planes, and a dozen commercial passenger jets. Some managed to keep flying normally; others required help from air traffic controllers. Five aircraft reported making unexpected turns or navigating off course. In all likelihood, there are many hundreds, possibly thousands, of such incidents each year nationwide, each one a potential accident. The vast majority of this disruption can be traced back to the U.S. military, which now routinely jams GPS signals over wide areas on an almost daily basis somewhere in the country.

The military is jamming GPS signals to develop its own defenses against GPS jamming. Ironically, though, the Pentagon's efforts to safeguard its own troops and systems are putting the lives of civilian pilots, passengers, and crew at risk... Todd E. Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, says. 'When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don't do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn't.'

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