Flight AMS - PVG (Shanghai) – AMS with KLM

✈️ Flying East

Flying to the east is very interesting and you could write a book about it. Looking at the route on the globe, you might wonder, why do we fly such a wiggly line, and not a straight line? Actually straight lines are not the shortest distance from one point to another on earth. Since the earth is round, a great circle is the shortest distance. However we live in a wiggly universe so a wiggly line will be the shortest distance for us.

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🌍 Geopolitical Routing Constraints

In this instance we have to fly a very inefficient route due to the geopolitical tensions currently present. Russian airspace is closed to most western airliners as a repercussion to sanctions from the west. This is not the case for Chinese and Middle-eastern airlines un-levelling the (economic) playing field. Ukraine airspace is closed due to war. The situation in the middle east still requires us to circumnavigate most airspaces there.

This leaves us with two options to safely navigate to the east:

• To fly over the black sea north of Turkey, and south of Ukraine, over Georgia;

• Or we can fly over Saudi Arabia.

There is also the North-pole option, but I haven’t seen this one yet.

KLM has solid practices and procedures in place that continuously reassess the safety states of the world and communicates this to the pilots. This is a 24/7 practice and is called KFSSB (KLM Flight Safety and Security Briefing). Routes are adjusted as such by flight dispatch.

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🛰️ GPS Jamming & Spoofing

Furthermore, when flying to the east you almost certainly encounter GPS Jamming or Spoofing, which is intentional interference with our GPS based navigation systems. This happens as a consequence of geopolitical conflict or the protection of sensitive military or personal areas which we might overfly.

This usually starts happening when crossing the black sea but can happen at any time. Initially we see our actual navigation performance increasing (this means less accurate). Later if we undertake no preventative measures we might get warnings that would be inappropriate to the current aircraft state, such as “Terrain Terrain, pull-up”, at great altitude. Of course procedural barriers are in place to safe-guard us from inappropriate pilot actions.

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🧭 Navigation Without GPS

As a preventative measure when jamming or spoofing is suspected we are able to navigate with the GPS receivers off, by making use of the ADIRU (Air Data Inertial Reference Unit). This is a beautiful stand-alone unit that on the basis of an initial position, and subsequent measurements of accelerations, calculates the current position. This unit un-spoofable.

We can supplement the ADIRU by cross-referencing our position by the use of ground-based navigation aids such as radio beacons.

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⛰️ Final Thoughts

Then there are still the high-terrain procedures to talk about… Easterly routes underpin the importance of technical and procedural knowledge for pilots and are also very beautiful and fun to fly. At PVG you can even make a selfie.

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I hope you enjoyed.

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