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I just noticed an interesting AIC: NOTIFICATION OF GPS JAMMING EXERCISE – HEBRIDES RANGES DURING PERIOD 21 JULY - 1 AUGUST 2014.

PDF available on Eurocontrol (official) or Scribd (mirror).

The Ministry of Defence is planning a GPS jamming exercise:

Jamming will occur across the 24 MHz bands centred around 1227.60 MHz and 1575.42 MHz. A Falcon 20 aircraft will be equipped with 2 high power jamming pods (1kw), one for each GPS frequency.

What effect would this have on a plane entering the jammed airspace?

Related: Can a GPS signal sent to a plane be spoofed?

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Danny Beckett
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Jamming GPS means that the GPS receiver is unable to lock-on to the signal from any satellite.

Presumably, pilots of small aircraft would have to revert to more traditional forms of navigation - assuming they have a GPS based navigational instrument or two.

Pilots of airliners would presumably see alerts and (as with most smaller aircraft?) their flight displays would include non GPS sources such as gyrocompasses or magnetic compasses.

I imagine redundant systems would include other sources of position information such as reception of radio-based omnidirectional navigation beacons, inertial navigation systems and looking out the window.

Danny Beckett
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RedGrittyBrick
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    I read an article a while back (it is also described over at wikipedia) about spoofing GPS signals, making the receiver believe it was somewhere else (or rather moving in a different direction/speed, eventually ending up somewhere else). It is a non-trivial process involving sending the equivalent (but stronger) signals of the current position to make the receiver lock on to the false signal and then gradually shifting it away. I'm no expert on the subject so I can't tell if it's actually feasible, but it seems possible to do. – falstro Jul 19 '14 at 13:50
  • @falstro There was at least some speculation that this was how Iran captured one of the U.S. drones. I can't remember if that was ever confirmed or not. – reirab Aug 25 '15 at 14:08