In December last year, a rather unnerving disclosure was made to the parliament: satellite navigation signals over Indian airspace had been compromised during civilian aircraft operations.

Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu told the Rajya Sabha that flights operating near Delhi airport had faced incidents of GPS data manipulation, also known as GPS spoofing.

Reports of spoofing and interference with the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) had also emerged from other Indian airports including Kolkata, Amritsar, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai.

Pilots noticed that navigation displays showed incorrect positions or signals briefly dropped or behaved erratically, though the aircraft were fine.

What GPS Spoofing Does

These fake signals trick navigation systems into calculating wrong positions, speed, or time.

If you have watched the 1990 action thriller, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, starring Bruce Willis, you’d know what’s happening here. In the movie, terrorists take over airport navigation systems and feed false signals so aircraft think they are somewhere they are not.

As a result, a plane in the movie crashed because the pilot was misled about the distance between the aircraft and the runway, making him delay the opening of the landing gear until it was too late.

What is happening in recent times is a much more sophisticated version of that.

In fact, GPS spoofing can have a serious impact on both military and civilian settings. In wars, if the GPS receivers of the opponent can be manipulated, it could control autonomous vehicles or drones that rely on GPS.

Experts agree that one way to stop the spoofing is to ensure that aviation data cannot be accessed by unauthorised people.

To that end, NASA announced in January this year that it had developed a blockchain technology to enhance air travel safety and security.

Through a drone flight test at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, researchers tested a blockchain-based system for protecting flight data.

The system aims to keep air traffic management safe from disruption and protect data transferred between aircraft and ground stations from being intercepted or manipulated.

Rising Risks of Manipulation

GPS interference is not new, but the risks now are more widespread. It is easier for hackers to manipulate flight data because aviation systems were built on the assumption that satellite navigation signals would be consistently reliable and that data exchanged within air traffic systems cannot be corrupted.

But as airspace becomes more digital and crowded, the chances of corrupted or spoofed data have increased.

India’s experience last year showed the seriousness of the issue. Though the aviation minister did not disclose when the spoofing happened, multiple reports suggest that the breach was big.

That could be the reason the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in November 2025 — a month before the parliament was informed — ordered that any instance of GPS spoofing or abnormal satellite navigation behaviour would have to be reported within 10 minutes of detection.

The DGCA also ordered a probe to determine whether the misleading signals were a result of deliberate interference or technical anomalies.

What NASA Actually Tested

NASA’s blockchain-based flight test was not designed to stop GPS spoofing directly. The agency tested whether flight data exchanged between an aircraft and ground systems could be protected from undetected alteration.

Blockchain systems are designed to ensure that activities at every stage in an operational chain are well documented, which can be viewed and verified by all parties in the chain.

The tested system ensured that any change to the data would leave a visible record or footprint of authorised parties. If those footprints are missing, that means that the data is not reliable.

Final Words

Aviation depends on multiple data sources that feed into a decision-making system accessed by all parties. Flight permissions, telemetry, identity and intent data all move across that system. If that information can be manipulated without detection, it could be catastrophic.

The NASA test was designed to ensure that information exchanged between the aircraft and ground systems could not be altered without anyone noticing it.

NASA’s focus is more on ensuring that the transmitted data can be verified, strengthening the integrity of data flows without upsetting the existing aviation infrastructure.

While blockchain will not prevent GPS signals from being disrupted, it could make it harder for false data to pass unnoticed through aviation systems.

This series is brought to you in partnership with Algorand.