WARSAW (Reuters) – GPS navigation interference in Eastern Europe is a “relatively small problem” for Ryanair at the moment, its chief commercial officer said on Tuesday, after a couple of its flights were diverted because of GPS problems.
Estonia and Finland last year blamed Russia for jamming GPS navigation devices in the region’s airspace. Russia has denied interfering with communication and satellite networks.
“We are guided by air control and our safety department, they both talk on daily basis… At the moment it’s a relatively small problem, but we review this on a daily basis,” Jason McGuinness said during a press conference in Warsaw.
“We can’t really predict the future on this, it’s very hard to know. I’m not going to make predictions on what may or may not happen.”
A Ryanair plane about to land at Vilnius airport was diverted to Warsaw in Poland because of GPS interference, Lithuania’s air navigation authority said last week.
In December, a flight bound for the Austrian capital Vienna had to land in the neighbouring Czech Republic after encountering GPS problems and poor visibility, the company said.
The CEO of Ryanair’s Buzz Group, Michal Kaczmarzyk, added that the scale of such incidents was not large enough at the moment to have any impact on Ryanair’s routes in Poland or the Baltic countries.
(Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk. Editing by Mark Potter)
