A lack of basic seamanship skills is undoing vessels when jammed

JAMMING and spoofing incidents are on the increase, especially as geopolitical tensions heat up in the Red Sea, Strait of Hormuz and Black Sea.

The consequences for both jamming and spoofing can be disastrous for shipping. Only in May this year did MSC Antonia (IMO: 9398216) run aground off Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, following clear signs of GNSS jamming beforehand.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence data has been at the forefront of identifying cases of jamming and spoofing, but what does an episode look like for the crew on board? How can they respond and what tools can they fall back on if their usually reliable GPS systems are rendered redundant.

First of all, it’s important to distinguish between GNSS jamming and spoofing.

Jamming identification

Jamming is usually performed by state actors in regions of conflict to protect aircraft and land assets from attack.

CyberOwl chief executive Daniel Ng told Lloyd’s List the signs of this would be quite obvious to the crew, as any systems that use GNSS would register that they were not receiving signal.

Synergy Maritime senior superintendent Marshall Edward, who spent more than a decade at sea with Maersk Line, described the alarms that can go off on the bridge as a “cacophony of noises”.

The first job for the crew was find out what was causing the alarm, he said. That was not easy if you were in the middle of an action, for example, a collision-avoidance manoeuvre, Edward said.

“You lose focus, and then you’ll have to go around to all the equipment and individually acknowledge all the alarms.”

There were some occasions when crew acknowledge alarms without knowing the true cause, simply due to the sheer magnitude of the noise created, he added.

So what instruments go down? First and foremost, the ECDIS will be affected. But Edward said the problem was deeper than that during a jamming incident, as GPS was the “mother of all instruments”, informing the vessel’s Automatic Identification System, gyrocompass and echosounder, to name just a few pieces of equipment.

Equipment lies

Spoofing, however, was much harder to identify, as Ng explained.

Depending on who is doing it and what they are spoofing, the crew could have little to no idea it is even happening.

“If you’re not paying attention to the flicker of the change, then all of a sudden you are just getting the wrong information,” he said.

“And most of the systems on board most vessels are not set up in such a way to raise any alarm at all around that, because as far as the system is concerned, it’s just receiving information on a pretty open protocol.

“There is no way of being able to determine whether information is real or not, so it just then plays the information back to you.”

The difference was summed up by Edward: “When jamming happens, your equipment dies, and when spoofing happens, your equipment lies.”

So once the crew have realised they are the victims of a jamming or spoofing episode, what can they do?

As Lloyd’s List Intelligence ship-tracking manager Richard Smale, a fellow Maersk Line veteran, put it, then it’s time to “dust off the parallel rulers” and go old school.

In this respect, Edward said he’d rather be nearer the coast than out to sea when a

jamming incident occurs, simply because there is more to help in terms of navigation.

Radar and visual aids can be used to help vessels fix positions, as can echosounders, which Edward said he implored relatively new seafarers to use in jamming cases by capturing depths that can be cross-referenced with charts.

But the nearer to land you are, the more congested the water is and the more dangers can present themselves.

And as in the case of MSC Antonia, grounding can become a real issue. Edward said all things in this incident pointed to a “clear failure in basic seamanship”.

“Running aground so close to a cardinal buoy? I would say that’s a cardinal sin,” he said.

Cardinal buoys indicate where safe water is near hazards, for example, near the Eliza Shoals near Jeddah.

Both Smale and Edward admitted that there was now an over-reliance on technology, due in large part to just how much easier it has made navigating.

But what this increase in jamming and spoofing has shown is that traditional skills are still absolutely necessary.

Edward said eight years ago he sailed with cadets who couldn’t correctly identify lights, and he thought the situation had likely to have become worse since then.

The basics of seamanship and navigation had suffered with the advent of improving navigational aids, he said.

But even if a crew identifies a jamming episode and uses manual navigation and radar if possible, congested waterways can still prove very dangerous.

OrcaAI co-founder Yarden Gross explained that the interface of a radar can be quite basic, and in a maritime chokepoint the sheer number of vessels that appear on it can be overwhelming.

A human pair of eyes are of course the most basic line of defence in such an instance, unless of course it’s foggy or nighttime. The image above shows just how hard it can be to identify a large vessel even at a relatively close distance.

This is where good captaincy comes in, Smale said. If a vessel is transiting an area known for jamming, such as Black Sea, the master might call for a more experienced watch or even supervise the entire period themself on the bridge.

In these situations, where the crew are already on high alert, the most severe consequences of jamming and spoofing should be avoidable, Ng said.

In some ways, the recent attention on this issue thanks to the Israel-Iran conflict may serve as a welcome wake-up call for the industry as far as training is concerned.

A course correction was required, Edward said.

“I mean we have all been complacent. Complacency has probably crept in over the past 20 years,” he said.

“Ship handling is still an art, not a science.”

These kinds of incidents did “throw you off for a couple of seconds”, Edward said.

“But that is exactly why we say we need to recover and recoup faster. That’s where

your training kicks in, your fundamentals. You’re just going back to your roots.

“You’re still plotting positions; the only thing is you don’t have an electronic means of doing it.”

The skill and ability of the vessel’s officers could make all the difference between safe passage and a grounding, Edward said.

Lloyd's List Daily Briefing 03 July 2025

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