Rise in laser and GPS spoofing attacks on Swiss aircraft

Keystone/Gaetan Bally

In 2023, a quarter more incidents were reported on flights by commercial aircraft and small aeroplanes than in 2022.  

This was announced by the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA) in a new report.  

Specifically, in 2023 FOCA processed nearly 10,000 incidents.  These included an aircraft damaged during ground handling and a near-collision between two aircraft in the air. A collision with birds was also investigated, according to FOCA’s annual safety statistics.  

GPS malfunctions were recorded 55% more often than in 2022. The number of incidents involving GPS malfunctions has therefore quadrupled since 2019. In 2023, the FOCA received over 2,100 related reports.

The airline SWISS, for example, registers so-called ‘GPS spoofing’ almost daily on its routes to Asia, Southeast Asia and when flying over the Middle East, as it recently reported. Spoofing is particularly common over war zones such as Ukraine and the Middle East.  

Other kinds of reports have also increased since 2019, according to FOCA. The main causes include more large-scale interference with GPS signals from aircraft and the increased use of lasers and drones. Incidents involving drones were reported 10% more often last year. There were also more laser attacks on commercial flights.  

According to FOCA, there were also two accidents with a total of five fatalities in recreational aviation: one accident involved the crash of a small aircraft in November near Grenchen (canton Solothurn), in which both occupants died. Three other people died when a small aircraft crashed on the Jura mountain range on approach to the airfield in La Chaux-de-Fonds (canton Neuenburg) in May. 

Adapted from German by DeepL/kc

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.  If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].