By Anne Kauranen
HELSINKI (Reuters) – Three airports in Eastern Finland are reintroducing radio navigation equipment to facilitate aircraft landings during times that authorities believe Russia is interfering with satellite navigation, their operators told Reuters.
Finland believes Russia is disturbing signals used in navigation, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Global Positioning System (GPS), in eastern Finland and the Baltic Sea region, to protect its oil ports and other strategic assets from Ukrainian air strikes or drones.
Russia has denied interfering with communication and satellite networks.
Two Finnish airports operated by Finavia in the towns of Joensuu and Savonlinna, both about an hour’s drive from the Russian border, introduced refitted ground equipment in September, while another airport in Lappeenranta is planning to do the same as soon as possible, the operators said.
The radio-based Distance Measuring Equipment, previously widely used in aviation, provides “an alternative approach method” for aircraft during GPS interference, said Finavia’s head of infrastructure and security, Henri Hansson.
“We have kept some earlier system infrastructure, even if it has not necessarily been in operational use. Now we have been able to update it to put it back into use,” he told Reuters.
Hansson declined to comment on the cost of the upgrades.
Finavia reintroduced the equipment after two domestic flights of national carrier Finnair to Joensuu had to be aborted in June and August due to GPS interference.
Different levels of GPS disruption are detected daily in aviation in the country, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom said, with most reports coming from southern Finland.
Ryanair has operated its regular flights to the smaller Lappeenranta airport without disruptions, despite being affected by the signal interference, the airport’s chief executive Jukka Himanen said.
“A few individual flights, with smaller equipment, have been cancelled or gone to an alternate airport due to interference,” he told Reuters, adding the airport was planning to add a landing method based on radio navigation.
In April, Finnair paused some flights to Tartu in eastern Estonia for a month for the same reason, but resumed them in June after the Estonian airport installed a new approach solution that did not require GPS signals.
Estonia, too, has accused Russia of violating international airspace regulations by interfering with GPS signals.
(Reporting by Anne Kauranen in Helsinki; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
