The last few weeks have seen a spate of Russian interference in the GPS system depended upon for navigation of commercial aircraft. This is more of an annoyance than a hazard – but it’s worth considering how quickly our infrastructure has become dependent on satellite technology.

As a seafarer myself, I am trained in the science of navigation by the celestial sphere on which we all depended until the USA, in its great benevolence, ‘gave’ us GPS. The technology was made publicly available throughout the Free World towards the end of the Cold War, but the USA were sluggish to extend the necessary satellite coverage to potential strategic hotspots, and Warsaw Pact countries were similarly cagey about relying on foreign technology which could be switched off. 

Speak to any Baltic Sea captain even today and invariably he will know how to use a sextant to navigate by the stars and ground-based infrastructure to help ships and aircraft triangulate their position (those large, hooped, aerials you may have seen on photos of old aircraft and ships masts can be rotated to find the bearing of fixed radio beacons). Out at sea, in hostile territory, things become trickier. Argentine fighter jets resorted to 19th Century celestial navigation technology during the 1984 Falkland war and, should GPS no longer be taken for granted, its loss would pose little long term impediment to jet age civil navigation.

The bottom line is that any pilot or seafarer can find a way to work around GPS jamming. Putin knows that the annoyance he will cause by his actions is rather that navigators must now work under the heavy handed regime of safety regulations which render true expertise redundant. Frankly, I’m sure that many civil captains are itching to go back to the old-school navigational techniques which everyone used until just a few decades ago. The current situation hi lights that these are not skills we can afford to lose.

Perhaps more worrying is the fragility of the fibre optics which carry our internet around the seabed. We are only a few strategic blasts away from a total information blackout – but I won’t speculate further about Russia going for undersea infrastructure. We don’t want to put ideas into their heads now, do we?