As reliance on satellite navigation grows, the aviation industry faces growing risks from GPS interference and spoofing. Whether from hostile forces or technical glitches, interference threatens commercial and military flight. Engineers are racing to develop resilient alternatives, and promising new technologies are making their way from the laboratory to the sky.

Airbus has teamed up with SandboxAQ, a Silicon Valley company specializing in artificial intelligence and quantum sensing, to conduct field tests of a new navigation method. Their collaboration focuses on quantum sensing devices, specifically MagNav systems. The compact instrument reads tiny magnetic signals from the Earth's crust, allowing it to pinpoint an aircraft's position even in the event of a satellite malfunction.

Airbus subsidiary Acubed's "Flying Laboratory" test aircraft equipped with the MagNav system flew more than 150 hours in the continental United States. The navigation system measures the unique magnetic “fingerprint” beneath each stretch of terrain and uses onboard artificial intelligence to cross-validate these signals with detailed magnetic maps. The end result: Positioning results that reliably meet—and sometimes exceed—Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) flight accuracy standards.

SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary told the Wall Street Journal that while the technology will require additional testing and certification before widespread adoption, the early results are encouraging and represent a turning point.

"The hardest part is proving that the technology works," Hidari noted. "To our knowledge, this is the first new absolute navigation system in the past 50 years."

Traditional GPS relies on signals transmitted by orbiting satellites—a system that, while robust, is increasingly vulnerable to interference. Spoofing attacks emit false position data from the ground to fool airborne receivers, while jamming attacks drown out signals and paralyze navigation systems. Once rare, these attacks are now occurring in hotspots around the world, affecting thousands of flights and posing a serious threat to civil aviation.

    Quantum sensing offers a fundamentally different approach. Unlike GPS, which transmits digital, hackable data, quantum magnetic sensors are "essentially untamperable and unforgeable." All measurements are taken inside the aircraft and the data comes exclusively from the Earth's naturally occurring and unchangeable magnetic field.

    The system works by emitting photons from a laser that strike electrons, which absorb and re-emit the photons during relaxation. The energy signature produced by this process reflects the local magnetic field strength - information unique to every square meter of the Earth's surface. MagNav’s artificial intelligence interprets this signature and matches it with a reference map, converting the raw quantum measurements into usable position data.

    In recent flight tests, MagNav consistently maintained positioning accuracy within two nautical miles. Even more impressively, its higher accuracy—within 550 meters in most cases—generally outperforms competing inertial systems without satellite assistance.

    The potential of quantum sensing extends far beyond aviation. In addition to ensuring safety in navigation, quantum sensors could aid national defense by detecting hidden objects such as submarines or underground tunnels, and improve medical diagnostics by sensing weak magnetic signals from the heart or brain, said Joe Depa, EY's global chief innovation officer. In addition, the implementation of this technology cannot be completed in a few years or even decades.

    “We’re not talking about 20 years from now,” Depa said. “We’re talking about now.”