GPS jammer left running in a car at Nantes Atlantique Airport delays flights (2017)
What happened
In April 2017 a 50-year-old motorist from La Rochelle parked at Nantes Atlantique Airport, left a GPS jammer running in his car and boarded a flight to Africa. The device disrupted the tracking systems of aircraft arriving at and departing from the airport, causing delays to several flights before it was located and disabled. The tribunal correctionnel de Nantes fined him 2,000 euros; prosecutors had also sought a three-month suspended sentence. Public use of GPS jammers is illegal in France; the Agence Nationale des Frequences notes that such devices create a bubble around the vehicle blocking GPS signals for up to 500 metres, and that motorists use them to avoid road tolls or vehicle tracking. As at Newark Liberty in 2012, the operator had no intent to affect aviation and the airport effect was collateral.
Thinly sourced by the standards of this corpus: one contemporaneous report in The Connexion, a general-interest English-language news outlet covering France, carrying no named author, and one advocacy-foundation relay that reproduces it, with no French court record, DGAC statement or ANFR statement retrieved. The only technical description available says the jammer 'disrupted the tracking systems of planes' without stating which systems failed or how, which is compatible with several failure paths since ADS-B surveillance derives aircraft position from their own GNSS receivers. Confidence is moderate for that reason and not because the event is doubted. An editor should seek a French primary record before publication.
Attack vector
A consumer GPS jammer left radiating continuously in an unattended vehicle parked within the perimeter of an active civil airport.
Operational impact
Disruption of the tracking systems of aircraft arriving at and departing from Nantes Atlantique Airport, causing delays to several flights before the device was located and disabled. The number of flights is not stated in the source.
Affected segments
user, link
Disclosed
2017-08-10
SPARTA techniques evidenced
Each row is a technique this record evidences, with the reasoning and the source that attests to it.
What relationship, confidence, and evidence mean on the rows below
- Relationship
What kind of link this is between the technique and the target.
Mitigates: the target actively prevents, detects, or recovers from the technique.
Addresses: the target governs the technique or is relevant to it, without interdicting it. Most governance and policy obligations sit here.
Triggers obligation: the technique occurring is what triggers the duty the target imposes.
Relates to: related to the technique, but the target neither interdicts nor governs it. Used sparingly.
- Confidence
How strongly the source supports this mapping, not how severe the technique is.
High: the source supports the mapping squarely.
Moderate: supported, with a qualification such as a cross-tactic reading that stays operationally sound.
Low: the source reaches the technique only in part.
- Evidence
How close to the source text the mapping was made.
Direct: a verbatim excerpt of the cited source was read against the technique, and the rationale argues from that excerpt.
Derived: the mapping follows from the source's scope or structure, with no on-point excerpt addressing the technique.
Inferred: reached by composition through another framework, or by domain reasoning the source does not support on its face.
The source names the device as a GPS jammer and records that it was left radiating continuously inside an airport perimeter, which is EX-0016.03's mechanism of raising the noise floor in GNSS bands. But the source describes the effect only as disruption of 'the tracking systems of planes arriving and taking off', and never states that any receiver failed to acquire or track GNSS. The technique's mechanism is evidenced by the device itself; its consequence clause is inferred from an effect description that does not distinguish between onboard navigation and the surveillance chain that derives aircraft position from onboard GNSS. SCOPE FLAG: source-mechanism vagueness, a narrower evidentiary gap than the spacecraft-victim question elsewhere in this batch.
The source states in terms that the disruption led to delays on several flights before the device was located and disabled. Temporary impairment of the use of a system is IMP-0002's definition, and here it is reported as fact rather than inferred, so the edge is direct. Confidence is moderate because a single trade-press account carries it and no count of delayed flights, and no duration, is given. SPARTA's own bibliography places this incident at IMP-0002, and the mapping agrees.
Considered and not mapped
These techniques were considered for this record because a source, a related record or SPARTA's own catalogue pointed at them. Each was read against what the sources say and not mapped. The reason is given in full.
Where SPARTA's bibliography puts this incident. Rejected on the same reasoning as in
newark-liberty-gbas-gps-jammer-2012: EX-0013 Flooding scopes to overwhelming a communication or processing path by injecting traffic, and EX-0016.03 names the GNSS-band jamming behaviour and its consequence directly. Flagged for the editor.The technique is renting commercial ground-network time to reach a spacecraft. A consumer jammer in a parked car is not that. Rejected for the same reason in the Newark record.
Sources
The published accounts this record rests on. The tier is SafeMode Space's own assessment of the source, and the reason for it is given beside it. What the tiers mean and how they are assigned: the source tiers.
A source is listed when a mapped technique rests on it, or when it disputes the account. One the curators read but neither cited nor recorded as disputing the record is not listed, so an absence here means neither is true rather than that nobody looked.
- 'Forgotten' GPS jammer costs motorist €2,000Trade press
Tier 3: English-language French news outlet reporting a hearing at the tribunal correctionnel de Nantes. Contemporaneous and specific on the legal outcome, but secondary reporting of a court proceeding rather than the court record, and its technical description of the interference is a single vague clause.
Tier 3: Named advocacy foundation on PNT resilience, relaying The Connexion's report. It adds framing but no independent reporting, so it inherits rather than raises the tier of the underlying account.
Every source SafeMode Space reproduces, and on what terms: sources and attribution.