Strange happenings over the Eastern Med
 

Royal Jordanian RJA112A circling off Cyprus; Wizz3017 diverted to Larnaca;

Several other aircraft are affected in the area - possibly GPS "Interference".

IG

Or simply temporary closure of Israeli airspace , will not be the first time .

GPS Jamming has been taking place there for years. Always get ads outages on approach to LCA and even as far as CAI

Planes fly perfectly well without GPS.

rudestuff

Indeed they do, however judging by the Royal Jordanian attempt to fly a rather wobbly racetrack pattern (I will not call it a hold) while waiting to "cross the gap" would suggest that navigational accuracy is somewhat compromised.

Not to mention the other aircraft transit[ng the airspace north to south suddenly being vectored 90 degrees off track to the West, disappearing of ADSB in the process, on another wobbly effort suggests that the problems were not confined to one aircraft.

IG

I suspect that the instantaneous 90° turns visible on the ADS-B track don't reflect the actual trajectory of the aircraft.

That aircraft did return to ADSB and continued the West bound track after initially dropping off. I did not wait for it to return back onto it's proper course.

IG

FWIW the couple of times I experienced basic GPS jamming over the eastern Med I’m pretty sure the effect would have been invisible on Flightradar or similar tracking sites.

On both occasions the nav system worked as advertised and effectively kicked the GPS updating into touch. IRS/FMC handled the few seconds without radio aid updating fine (no surprise there) and I don’t think aircraft twitched once we enabled VOR/DME updating.

Have a look at today's TK7709 (TLV-SAW) track on FlightRadar24. Quite a twitch, isn't it?

It is indeed. The first two plot points, a tad over 300 nm apart, were traversed in just under 10 minutes - that's a GS of around 2,000 kts ...

Now we know what's been happening, no more spurious FR24 plots, please !