Forward-looking: As reliance on satellite navigation grows, aviation faces rising risks from GPS jamming and spoofing. Disruptions – whether from hostile actors or technical failures – threaten commercial and military flights. Engineers are racing to develop resilient alternatives, with promising new technologies moving from labs into the skies.
Airbus has teamed with SandboxAQ, a Silicon Valley company specializing in artificial intelligence and quantum sensing, to field-test a new approach to navigation. Their collaboration focuses on quantum-sensing devices, specifically the MagNav system. This compact instrument reads subtle magnetic cues from the Earth's crust to pinpoint an aircraft's location, even when satellites fail.
For more than 150 hours of flight across the continental United States, Airbus subsidiary Acubed's "flight lab" test aircraft carried MagNav aloft. The navigation system measures the unique magnetic "fingerprints" beneath each stretch of terrain and cross-verifies those signals against detailed magnetic maps using onboard AI. The result: location fixes that reliably meet – and sometimes surpass – the Federal Aviation Administration's standards for in-flight precision.
SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary told the Wall Street Journal that while additional testing and certifications are needed before the technology sees widespread adoption, early results are promising and represent a turning point.
"The hard part was proving that the technology could work," Hidary noted. "It's the first novel absolute navigation system to our knowledge in the last 50 years."
Traditional GPS relies on signals broadcast from orbiting satellites – a system that, while robust, is increasingly vulnerable to disruption. Spoofing broadcasts false location data from the ground to deceive onboard receivers, while jamming overwhelms signals to disable navigation systems. Once rare, these attacks now occur regularly in global hotspots, affecting thousands of flights and posing a serious risk to civilian aviation.
Quantum sensing offers a fundamentally different approach. Unlike GPS, which transmits digital, hackable data, quantum magnetic sensors are "essentially unjammable and unspoofable." All measurements occur inside the aircraft, with data derived solely from the Earth's naturally occurring and immutable magnetic fields.
The system works by firing a photon from a laser that strikes an electron, which then absorbs and re-emits the photon as it relaxes. The energy signature from this process reflects the local magnetic field strength – information unique to every square meter of Earth's surface. MagNav's AI interprets this signature and matches it to reference maps, converting raw quantum measurements into usable location data.
In recent flight tests, MagNav consistently maintained positional accuracy within two nautical miles 100 percent of the time. Perhaps even more impressive, it achieved even finer precision – within 550 meters in most cases – often outperforming competing inertial systems without satellite aid.
The potential of quantum sensing extends far beyond aviation. Beyond securing navigation, quantum sensors could aid national defense by detecting hidden objects like submarines or underground tunnels, and improve medical diagnostics by sensing weak magnetic signals from the heart or brain, according to Joe Depa, Ernst & Young's Global Chief Innovation Officer. Furthermore, this technology is not years or decades away.
"We're not talking about something 20 years out," Depa said. "This is here and now."
Engineers turn to quantum tech to replace GPS in flight navigation
