On the evening of November 7, just minutes before landing in New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport, Air India AI302 watched its navigation panel slip into a parallel universe, GPS readings suddenly placed the aircraft miles from Runway 10. It wasn’t fog, not a technical glitch, but a burst of GPS spoofing that jolted IGI Airport. AI302 pulled out of its approach, several other aircraft were forced towards Jaipur and Lucknow, and hundreds of flights fell into delay as controllers switched to traditional ground-based systems. The impact rippled through India’s skies, over 800 flights experienced delays or diversions that day.
Within 48 hours, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Airports Authority of India (AAI) moved into action. On November 10, DGCA issued a new standard operating procedure mandating real-time reporting of any GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) or GPS (Global Positioning System) anomalies within 10 minutes of detection. This includes logging flight details, date and time of the spoofing incident, and aircraft data for investigation.
In the weeks that followed, similar disruptions surfaced at major airports including Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and other hubs. Although no accidents occurred, the interference caused flight diversions and prompted a nationwide investigation into the source of the fake signal. Investigators were surprised the spoofing occurred at civilian zones, not just conflict zones. Over 465 spoofing and interference cases were reported by airlines flying near Amritsar and Jammu.
“GPS spoofing”, or more broadly, GNSS spoofing, refers to the act of broadcasting counterfeit satellite signals that trick the receivers into registering incorrect location, altitude, or timing information, making them believe they are somewhere they are not. Instead of blocking navigation data like simple jamming does, spoofing imitates it, slipping counterfeit coordinates into an aircraft’s systems. GPS spoofing ranks among the most serious emerging threats in aviation because it targets an aircraft’s central nervous system – its navigation, timing, and positioning tools. When that goes wrong, pilots can be steered off the real path, on-board computers can chase phantom waypoints, air traffic controllers are left trying to locate a plane that thinks it’s somewhere else entirely.
When GPS spoofing hits an aircraft, the real danger is to the people on board. Fake signals can corrupt systems like ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) and TAWS (Terrain Awareness and Warning System), making air traffic control see the plane in the wrong place and removing the alerts that protect passengers from nearby terrain or other aircraft.
During landing, the most sensitive phase of flight, spoofed data can mislead pilots about their height, glide path, or runway alignment, creating conditions for hard landings, runway overruns, or dangerously low approaches. Inside the cockpit, the pilot faces clashing readings from GPS, radar, and on-board instruments, raising stress and the chance of human error. And when spoofing hits an entire region, it can disrupt hundreds of flights at once, forcing diversions, go-arounds, and reducing safe distance between aircraft, putting crews and passengers at unnecessary risk.
The parliamentary standing committee on transport, tourism and culture submitted a report on overall review of safety in the aviation sector on August 20. Even as airports grapple with GPS spoofing with flights near Delhi, Mumbai and other major hubs, the report warns that the country’s Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) are already stretched to their limits. A chronic shortage of ATCOs means heavier workload, higher fatigue, and greater chances of human factor errors precisely when pilots and controllers need to be at their sharpest to manage spoofed signals, conflicting readings and emergency go-arounds.
The committee’s call for better staffing, fatigue-risk systems and modernised ATC automation suddenly feels less like long-term planning and more like an urgent safety mandate. India’s current ATC systems lack advanced tools like conflict detection and predictive analytics, exactly the features that could help detect anomalies when aircraft begin “ghosting” across radar screens due to spoofed GNSS data. With GPS manipulation emerging as a real operational threat, the report’s message is clear – upgrading people and technology is no longer an option, it’s the firewall between digital chaos in the sky and the human lives depending on it.
Before 2025, India had no publicly acknowledged cases of major GPS spoofing in civil aviation. Any earlier anomalies either went unclassified or were never reported. The incidents disclosed in 2025 thus mark the first officially reported cluster of spoofing events in Indian airspace, affecting near Delhi, Mumbai, and other major hubs, while GPS interference has caused diversions and near misses, India has no centralised reporting system, and no civilian crash has ever been conclusively linked solely to spoofed GNSS signals. Most events remain officially logged as “navigation failures” or “interference”, highlighting both the novelty of the threat and the gaps in public aviation data.
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