A US military reconnaissance plane came under electronic attack from North Korea and had to make an emergency landing during a major military exercise in March, a political aide said Friday.
The aide said the plane suffered disturbance to its GPS system due to jamming signals from the North's southwestern cities of Haeju and Kaesong as it was taking part in the annual US-South Korea drill, Key Resolve.
I confess I have no idea why a GPS jamming attack would force an emergency landing.
I hope we were equally imaginative in retaliating. Since I don't recall anything going "boom" over there back in the spring, we clearly didn't retaliate in conventional ways.
UPDATE: I guess I was right to express my confusion over how a GPS signal jam would force down one of our planes. We deny it:
"We have no indication that any aircraft at the time of, or in the vicinity of, this alleged incident was forced to land on an emergency basis," the defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Or if our plane was forced to land, it wasn't from GPS jamming.
UPDATE: Now Strategypage says that we confirm the incident:
The U.S. recently revealed that one of its RC-7C reconnaissance aircraft was forced to land last March 8th, after a North Korean GPS jammer disrupted the aircraft’s navigation system.
I'd really like to know how jamming the navigation system forces a landing rather than simply makes the crew rely on older methods for navigation? How does it actually force a crew to land the plane? Is the navigation system so tied in to the flight controls that this makes the link?
I totally don't understand. Unless the North Korean jamming caused an aerial version of drivers blindly following a faulty GPS navigation system into a river because the system thinks is a road, I really don't get this.
