This week, the UAE announced that air navigation has returned to normal after months of precautions due to the Iran war. Fletcher and Octavio explore how GPS technology underpins civilian aviation, and what happens when military conflicts break it.
Esta semana, los Emiratos Árabes Unidos anunciaron que la navegación aérea ha vuelto a la normalidad después de meses de precauciones por la guerra en Irán. Fletcher y Octavio exploran cómo la tecnología GPS sostiene la aviación civil, y qué pasa cuando los conflictos militares la rompen.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| señal | signal / sign | El avión recibe una señal del satélite. |
| satélite | satellite | Hay muchos satélites en el espacio. |
| funcionar | to work / to function | El GPS no funciona bien en esa zona. |
| avión | plane / airplane | El avión necesita una señal para navegar. |
| información | information | El piloto necesita información exacta. |
Until a few days ago, if you were a pilot flying anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz, you could not fully trust what your instruments were telling you.
And most passengers had absolutely no idea.
Sí.
Yes.
Los Emiratos dicen: ahora todo es normal.
The UAE says: now everything is normal.
Right, the General Civil Aviation Authority in the UAE announced this week that they've lifted the temporary precautions they put in place back in February when the Iran war started.
Normal traffic operations, they said.
Which made me wonder: what exactly was abnormal?
En una guerra, el GPS no funciona bien.
In a war, GPS does not work well.
GPS stops working well.
For civilian planes.
Tell me more about that.
Los militares tienen una tecnología especial.
The military has special technology.
Cambia las señales del GPS.
It changes the GPS signals.
They spoof it.
That's the technical term.
GPS spoofing.
And this isn't a new problem in that region.
Pilots flying near Iran, Iraq, and Israel have been reporting GPS errors for years.
Long before this war started.
Es un problema muy serio para los aviones civiles.
It is a very serious problem for civilian planes.
It is.
And here's the thing that gets me: GPS was invented as a military system.
The U.S.
Department of Defense built it.
For decades, civilians weren't even allowed to use the full signal.
They got a deliberately degraded version.
Sí.
Yes.
Antes, el GPS civil era menos exacto.
Before, civilian GPS was less accurate.
Intentionally less accurate.
They called it Selective Availability.
Bill Clinton turned it off in 2000, opened the full signal to everyone.
And overnight, GPS went from a military tool to basically the nervous system of global civilization.
Ahora los aviones, los barcos, los coches, todos usan GPS.
Now planes, ships, cars, everyone uses GPS.
Everything uses it.
And that dependency is the vulnerability.
When a military starts broadcasting false GPS signals to confuse enemy drones or missiles, every civilian phone, every ship, every plane in range gets confused too.
Un avión puede pensar que está en un lugar diferente.
A plane can think it is in a different place.
Which is terrifying when you say it out loud.
There have been documented cases near Tel Aviv where aircraft GPS showed them over a completely different country.
Pilots suddenly seeing an alert telling them they're approaching Cairo when they're actually over the Mediterranean.
Por eso los pilotos tienen otros sistemas también.
That is why pilots have other systems too.
Backup systems.
Inertial navigation, radar, radio beacons from the ground.
The old technologies that GPS was supposed to make obsolete.
Turns out they're still very much in use.
And when GPS goes wrong, those older systems become the lifeline.
La tecnología vieja es importante.
Old technology is important.
No podemos olvidar.
We cannot forget.
That's a point I want to sit with.
There's this assumption in Silicon Valley and in tech culture generally that newer is always better, that you can just deprecate the old system and move on.
But the aviation world learned something different: you keep the backup, because your shiny new system has enemies.
Los militares quieren controlar las señales.
The military wants to control signals.
Es poder.
It is power.
It is power.
And this is where it gets geopolitically interesting.
The U.S.
owns GPS.
Europe built Galileo.
Russia has GLONASS.
China has BeiDou.
Every major power decided they needed their own satellite navigation system, because depending on someone else's is a strategic vulnerability.
China no quiere usar la tecnología de Estados Unidos.
China does not want to use United States technology.
Absolutely not.
And BeiDou is now genuinely competitive with GPS in terms of accuracy.
China finished the full constellation in 2020.
Which means the world now has four separate navigation systems running simultaneously, and depending on where you are, your phone is probably switching between them without you knowing.
Tu teléfono usa satélites.
Your phone uses satellites.
Muchos satélites.
Many satellites.
At any given moment, your phone is communicating with maybe a dozen satellites simultaneously, triangulating your position down to within a few meters.
We carry this around like it's nothing.
I remember using paper maps in the field in Beirut and Jakarta.
The idea that I'd eventually have a device in my pocket that knew exactly where I was anywhere on earth, it would've sounded absurd.
Pero la guerra puede apagar todo eso.
But war can turn all of that off.
Not exactly turn it off.
It's more insidious than that.
Jamming blocks the signal.
But spoofing replaces it with a false one.
You still see a signal, you still see coordinates, but they're wrong.
That's arguably worse than no signal at all, because you don't know you're wrong.
Es como un mapa con errores.
It is like a map with errors.
Muy peligroso.
Very dangerous.
Exactly.
And there are shipping incidents linked to this.
In 2017, more than twenty vessels in the Black Sea reported their GPS showing them positioned at a Russian airport miles inland.
Some analysts think it was Russia testing spoofing technology.
This is not a hypothetical threat.
Los barcos también tienen este problema.
Ships also have this problem.
No solo los aviones.
Not only planes.
The US Navy actually stopped teaching celestial navigation for a while, figured GPS made it obsolete.
Then around 2015 they quietly brought it back.
Sextants.
Reading the stars.
Because a hacker or a military adversary can't spoof Polaris.
Las estrellas son más seguras que los satélites.
The stars are more secure than satellites.
In certain contexts, yes.
Which is a genuinely strange sentence to say in 2026.
También hay otro problema.
There is also another problem.
Los coches autónomos usan GPS.
Self-driving cars use GPS.
And this is where the stakes get much higher going forward.
Autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, precision agriculture, the timing systems inside financial networks.
All of it depends on GPS not just for location but for time.
The satellites broadcast incredibly precise time signals that bank transactions, cell towers, and power grids synchronize to.
If you corrupt the signal, you potentially destabilize infrastructure that has nothing to do with navigation.
Todo el mundo moderno usa esa señal de tiempo.
The whole modern world uses that time signal.
It's one of those invisible dependencies that nobody thinks about until it breaks.
Like the underwater cables that carry almost all internet traffic.
Or the handful of facilities that produce advanced semiconductors.
The global economy sits on top of a very small number of very fragile technical foundations, and most people have no idea.
La tecnología es como el agua.
Technology is like water.
La usas, pero no piensas en ella.
You use it, but you do not think about it.
That's a good way to put it.
And the UAE story is a small signal, if you'll forgive the pun, of how wars in one place ripple through systems that were supposed to be universal.
A conflict over a nuclear program in Tehran ends up disrupting flight paths over Dubai.
That's not a coincidence, it's the architecture of modern technical dependence.
Oye, yo quiero hablar de una cosa.
Hey, I want to talk about one thing.
Usé la palabra 'señal' mucho hoy.
I used the word 'señal' a lot today.
You did.
'Señal.' Signal.
It kept coming up.
Is there something interesting there?
Sí.
Yes.
'Señal' es 'signal' en inglés.
'Señal' is 'signal' in English.
Pero también significa 'sign' a veces.
But it also means 'sign' sometimes.
Wait, the same word for both?
Like a road sign and a radio signal are the same word?
Exacto.
Exactly.
'La señal de tráfico' y 'la señal de GPS.' Es la misma palabra.
'The traffic sign' and 'the GPS signal.' It is the same word.
Huh.
English split those into two separate words at some point.
A sign you read with your eyes, a signal you detect with an instrument.
Spanish just kept them together.
There's something almost philosophically tidy about that.
En español, una señal siempre es información.
In Spanish, a señal is always information.
De la calle, del satélite, no importa.
From the street, from the satellite, it does not matter.
Information is information, wherever it comes from.
Whether it's a stop sign or a satellite broadcast.
I like that.
And I will try to use it correctly, unlike the last time I tried a new word with Octavio's family.
'Señal' es fácil, Fletcher.
'Señal' is easy, Fletcher.
No hay problema posible.
There is no possible problem.