In March, an American Airlines jet, a Boeing triple seven, was making a regularly scheduled

flight from New Delhi to Newark.

It was a normal flight cruising at 32,000 feet.

Over Pakistan, the pilot got this alert saying pull up, pull up.

That's Drew Fitzgerald, who covers telecommunications for the Wall Street Journal.

That system is known as an enhanced ground proximity warning system.

And usually when that system goes off, the pilot listens and pulls the plane up.

Because in almost every normal case where a crew might hear that warning, things are not good.

That sound is there to say, hey, you might be about to fly into a mountain.

You got to take action.

But that is not what was happening on this flight. And thankfully, the pilot knew it.

The pilot of this American Airlines flight knew due to the terrain that he was flying over and the history of this area, that that alert was a false alarm.

The plane was getting a fake signal.

The GPS systems on that plane had been spoofed, it had been lied to, and were telling the

plane that it was somewhere that it was not.

According to Drew's reporting, this isn't a one-time phenomenon.

Passenger flights around the world are being caught up by GPS spoofing and jamming.

We've seen stats from researchers showing that based on the publicly available data that they can

glean from these planes as they're transmitting data back to systems on Earth, that these

kind of fake signals are being picked up by hundreds of flights a day. And it's something that pilots,

depending on where they fly and where they operate, are having to deal with almost every day that

they fly over certain areas. And they've got to adapt to that.

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