The tour of the President of the European Commission to the “frontline countries” on NATO’s eastern flank would have gone unnoticed without the aspect of the interference on her plane, on the leg of her journey from Warsaw to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where she was to inspect a munitions factory and other facilities with the president of the neighboring country.
The information about the interference was information from the Bulgarian side that was officially confirmed by the European Commission. The issue was raised very high, for understandable reasons…
Beyond these, of course, as we reported yesterday and on various radio and television for a, there was, as is now (the absolute and universal rule) of “abuse” by various media.
The list of inaccurate, even fake news that was written is endless. However, we will summarize something that was pointed out to us and that comes from a source that has “saved” us many times, Flightradar 24.
In the “sauces” that accompanied the reports of international agencies, which were supplemented and augmented by the domestic media (of course, the cliché “terror in the air for Ursula” was not missing) there was the claim that the EU President’s aircraft, a leased Falcon 900LX (“OO-GPE”) from Luxaviation, “had to circle” for an hour while waiting for the EEK in Plovdiv “to land it safely”.
However, the truth “which spoils a nice -journalistic- story”, as Flightradar 24 reveals, is that von der Leyen’s flight was scheduled to last 1 hour and 48 minutes and, according to the carrier’s data, it was completed in 1 hour and 57 minutes.
In addition, Flightradar 24 reports that according to its data, the Falcon’s transponder “reported good GPS signal quality from takeoff to landing.”
On the other hand, the Black Sea is a “black hole” in GPS coverage, although commercial traffic is now limited to airspace in the south.
Jamming and spoofing are on the daily agenda, making NATO activities in the wider region difficult. And of course, near the dry ones, the green ones are also burning…
Let us recall that when there were still Russian bases in Syria (until a few months ago), a wide zone of the eastern Mediterranean from the southern coasts of Turkey, Syria, Cyprus and a large part of Lebanon were under continuous Russian jamming and spoofing, that is, the degradation of the quality of the GPS signal through electronic “noise” and the -more sophisticated- “deception” through false signals that can fool the GPS receivers of navigation systems about the real position of the platform. We will talk about the spoofing and the “kidnapping” of the American RQ-170 by Iran another time.
