Commercial aviation can become statistically safer while feeling operationally more fragile. Fatal accident rates may improve, yet pilots, controllers and airport teams may still face a growing stream of smaller disruptions. An aircraft or vehicle where it should not be on a runway, a navigation signal that is jammed, or worse, a signal that appears reliable while feeding the aircraft false position data.
That is the warning emerging from IATA’s latest safety agenda. At its World Safety and Operations Conference, IATA highlighted runway incursions and global navigation satellite system, or GNSS, interference as major operational risks despite improving accident statistics.
The numbers illustrate the paradox. IATA said its member airlines recorded one accident for every 5.6 million flights in 2025, while IOSA-registered carriers recorded one accident per 1.09 million flights. At the same time, IATA said reported GNSS jamming events rose 67 percent from 2023 to 2025 and reported GPS spoofing rose 193 percent.
A runway incursion occurs when an aircraft, vehicle or person is incorrectly present on a runway or in its protected area. The definition sounds technical. The risk is brutally simple, one aircraft may be accelerating to take off or landing at high speed while another object is where it should not be.
Most incursions do not become collisions. They are caught by a controller, a crew, airport-surface surveillance system or a last-second rejected take-off. That is precisely why they matter. They are near-misses: evidence that safety barriers worked, but also evidence that the system was required to work under pressure.
Runway safety is not one person’s responsibility. It sits at the intersection of pilots, controllers, airport operators, vehicle drivers, ground handlers, signage, lighting, radio phraseology, weather and workload. A crew can misunderstand a clearance. A controller can issue two instructions that interact badly. A vehicle driver can take a wrong turn. Construction works can alter a familiar taxi route. Low visibility can remove visual cues.
GNSS interference creates a different problem. The aircraft may know less accurately where it is, or believe it knows something that is not true.
GNSS includes satellite-based systems such as GPS. Modern aviation relies on it for navigation, surveillance and timing. It supports area-navigation and required-navigation-performance procedures, electronic flight bags, some approach and departure functions, and elements of how aircraft report position to air-traffic services.
How does the signal jammed and spoofed. Jamming blocks or degrades the signal. Crews may recognise that the system is unavailable and revert to other sources: inertial navigation, ground-based aids, raw radio navigation, radar vectors and established contingency procedures.
Spoofing is more unsettling. It transmits a false signal that can appear credible. An aircraft may receive position information that looks valid but is wrong, requiring crews to detect inconsistencies by cross-checking independent sources.
EASA’s July 2026 update to its GNSS-interference safety bulletin reflects the scale of that concern. It added guidance on pilot-controller phraseology, electronic-flight-bag technology, operational and training requirements, and air-traffic-control capacity; the agency said it and EUROCONTROL would continue monitoring affected regions and encouraged stakeholders to implement mitigations promptly.
The point is not that every GNSS disruption creates an imminent accident. Aviation has backups. The point is that each disruption consumes attention. It makes pilots verify, controllers accommodate and airlines revise procedures. That reduces the spare mental and operational capacity that normally protects a flight from unrelated problems.
Runway incursions and GNSS interference may appear unrelated but one is a surface-movement hazard, the other a navigation and surveillance problem in flight. In practice, they share the same safety currency which is a situational awareness.
At an airport, crews and controllers need a common, accurate picture of who is on a taxiway, runway or approach path. GNSS degradation can affect navigation displays, surveillance inputs and the systems that support predictable routing. It can also increase radio traffic as crews request vectors, verify position or report loss of capability.
That does not mean GNSS interference directly causes runway incursions. Such causation must be established case by case. But the risks can overlap operationally: a system dealing with degraded navigation information has less room for ambiguous clearances, unfamiliar taxi routings, poor visibility or high traffic.
That is why IATA, Airports Council International and the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation launched a joint runway-safety initiative in July. It focuses on better reporting and data capture, stronger local runway-safety teams and shared lessons from incidents, near-misses and frontline observations.
EASA and IATA’s GNSS resilience plan is built around that idea of better information gathering, prevention and mitigation, infrastructure and airspace management, and stronger coordination and preparedness.
Near-misses are safety data, not embarrassment
The most useful safety reports are often the ones that end with nothing damaged. A rejected take-off after a runway conflict, a controller’s late correction, a pilot’s navigation cross-check or a vehicle driver’s stop before entering a runway are not failures of reporting. They are clues about where the system came close to a limit.
IATA’s runway initiative explicitly calls for stronger reporting of incidents, near-misses, precursor events and observations from frontline personnel. That matters because a runway collision is rare precisely because many earlier barriers have already intervened. Studying the moments before those barriers were needed is how aviation prevents the next event.
The same applies to GNSS. Airlines should report jamming and spoofing even when crews navigate safely using backups. A report can identify a geographic pattern, improve charts and procedures, alert other operators, and help regulators decide where conventional navigation aids or additional controller support are needed.
Silence makes both threats harder to manage. A system learns only when its close calls are visible.
Runway incursions and GNSS interference reveal how that margin is changing. They are not necessarily the next catastrophe. They are the daily warning lights of a system dealing with denser traffic, more digital dependence, geopolitical disruption and less tolerance for ambiguity.
The challenge for Europe’s safety chiefs is to keep those warning lights from becoming normal cockpit wallpaper. A low accident rate is an achievement. It is not permission to ignore the operational threats that, through repetition and coincidence, can turn a near-miss into something worse.