Don't know if this is the right place for this question, but here goes. (I'm a wannabe author, and am working on an exciting book of fiction that will involve aviation.)
If pilots landing planes at a specific airport start experiencing and reporting GPS jamming, what will the consequences be for the jammer? Who looks into this sort of thing, the NTSB? How many days will it take before they can locate and apprehend the culprit?
I'm proposing that the jammer is technically competent and has no financial limitations, so he can build a jamming system involving a steerable parabolic antenna that follows the plane as it makes its approach. If necessary, I can even claim that he mounts his jamming system in the back of a pickup truck and performs his jamming while on the move. (Unrealistic? Never mind, it's fiction, although I'd like to keep things somewhat realistic.)
Incidentally, the culprit is not trying to crash the planes, he's just trying to push the targeted airline into buying and installing an upgraded GPS receiver avionics box. And it works! For each plane with the new GPS box installed, no GPS jamming occurs - because the nasty bad guy stops jamming those planes!
Thanks for any feedback, or even for suggestions as to where I should post this question.
Edit:
Thanks for all the answers. But I'm proposing that the bad guy is specifically targeting the incoming airplane using a parabolic antenna. That should mean that the jamming radio-frequency energy is in a narrow beam up into the sky.
So I'm assuming this means that all the suggestions that the jammer will be easy to find via directional receivers on the ground are not viable. I'm assuming that there won't be any "leakage" of radio waves in any direction other than the focused beam up into the sky. (Is this a valid assumption?)
Thanks again for the answers, and I'm hoping this info makes the situation clearer.
Edit no. 2 - 19 Oct.
Thank you to the many who responded; some of the comments were incredibly detailed and very helpful, I'm really impressed and very grateful.
And sorry for my lack of response; I think I've been hit by an attack of writer's block. I didn't appreciate how complicated this is.
With the help of the many comments, and with a bit of Googling, my current understanding is as follows:
I was wrong in believing that a parabolic transmitting antenna would be undetectable because all the RF energy would be directed up in the air toward the incoming plane. There is "leakage" to the sides, and that could make it possible to detect the location of the jammer.
It is indeed the FCC that would be tasked with finding and arresting my bad guy.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/CISA-Insights_GPS-Interference_508.pdf
When the FCC receives a complaint they dispatch some agents with specialized equipment (but not the military Prophet system) to drive around and try to locate the source of the interference.
https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/interference-resolution
OK, so here's my present plan for this part of the story in my next book:
The situation is that the bad guy owns and runs a company that makes GPS (and radio navigation) receivers for airplanes, in competition with Honeywell and Collins-Aerospace. For Boeing 737's these are called MMR (Multi-Mode Receiver) boxes.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fboeing-737-max-control-boxes-diagram-v0-2d0gsaex0ovh1.png%3Fwidth%3D1250%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcabb22d1a581b3c3d08e25835ae504a4bc32618f
There's a (fictional) small airline named Alabama Air based at Huntsville International Airport. It's a bit like Southwest Airlines, although much, much smaller, having only about 25 Boeing 737 Maxs. It flies to various destinations in the southeast USA.
The boss of Alabama Air is a bit of a rebel, very outspoken and boastful, he talks about out-competing everyone else. And it is true that Alabama Air is growing faster than other American airlines. (European readers will recognize this guy as being somewhat like Michael O'Leary, the boss of Ryanair.)
The Alabama Air boss has chosen the bad guy's MMR boxes for his 737's, not the more common ones from Honeywell and Collins-Aerospace. Perhaps they were cheaper, or he just wants to show that he can be different.
Now the bad guy has a really nasty and insidious and incredibly destructive plan. (For more information, read my book if/when I get it written and published.) The first step in this mega-plan is to get the boss of Alabama Air to go along with replacing the MMR boxes on his planes with a new and improved, second-generation MMR box.
So here's where the GPS jamming comes in. The bad guy builds a jamming transmitter and uses a parabolic antenna that is steerable, and mounts it on the back of a pickup truck, along with a tent-like canvas covering. He drives to one location, some parking spot, about 10-15 miles from the airport, and parks there. When a plane is landing at the airport he targets it and follows it via flightradar24 coordinates, and transmits powerful GPS interference. This knocks out the GPS navigation. This is no really big deal for the pilots, they can use ILS or visual landing, but it irritates them and they report the jamming.
The first couple of days the bad guy stays put in one location all day, he's assuming it will be at least two days before the FCC starts looking for him. After that, the bad guy drives to a different location for each plane he jams, still about 10-15 miles from the airport. At each new location he waits for the next plane and jams its GPS reception.
So he's jamming a lot more planes the first two days (Huntsville International can have about 50 flights per day), and after that maybe only 10 flights per day.
He doesn't focus on Alabama Air planes (that would be suspicious); he jams whatever happens to be landing. (American Airlines, Delta and United have flights to Huntsville, along with Alabama Air and a couple of other small airlines.)
So after four or five days of this it works! The bad guy receives a phone call from the boss of Alabama Air, complaining about the MMR receiver not being sufficiently jammer-proof. The bad guy shows up for a meeting, and apologizes, and offers to install, free of charge, a new version of the MMR box. He says he's pleased that this will be a great chance to test this new version of his MMR box.
There's one minor problem. This new box hasn't been certified by the FAA yet. They're working on that. The Alabama Air boss says OK, he'll take the chance, go ahead and install this new box on one plane, and we'll see how it works. The box is installed right away, and everything looks OK.
For the next 10 days nothing much happens. The bad guy and the FCC are playing cat-and-mouse, and the bad guy is jamming 10 or more planes a day. One exception: he avoids jamming the Alabama Air plane with his new MMR box. So the obvious conclusion, at least for the Alabama Air boss, is that the new box works fine, and it does seem to be jammer-proof.
Result: the bad guy's company is invited to replace all of the MMR boxes on all of Alabama Air's fleet of 737 Maxs.
Mission accomplished!