Flying the denied environment
Your next flight deck could rely on the Earth’s crust.
By Luca Ferrara
Gen Mgr of Navigation,
SandboxAQ
Ben Yaffe
Principal, Business Operations
& Strategy, SandboxAQ
If you’ve flown through the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea region, or the Baltics in the past 18 months, you’ve likely experienced the effects of GPS spoofing.
Sometimes it’s subtle – the map shifting slightly while the autopilot stays engaged, or the “check position” message appearing when you know you’re on the airway.
At other times, however, the signs are impossible to ignore, with the synthetic vision system (SVS) going into reversion or numerous aircraft systems indicating you’re at ground level hundreds of miles away.
For 3 decades, we built our entire global airspace system on the assumption that Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals – primarily GPS – are the truth. We trained for receiver failure or temporary signal loss from jamming. We didn’t train for the signal to lie to us.
However, the new operational reality in 2026 is deceptive normalcy in the cockpit. The threat has shifted from denial to spoofing.
The former gives you a clear failure flag, while the latter undermines pilot decision-making.
The map looks correct, the flight management system (FMS) reports high integrity, and the SVS shows you on the proper flight path, yet the aircraft is slowly drifting miles off course or reporting a position on the ground.
This is no longer a military problem or a rare edge case.
In September 2024, the OpsGroup’s GPS Spoofing Workgroup issued a report showing that, in January 2024 alone, an average of 300 flights per day were being spoofed.
By August 2024, spoofing incidents had grown 500% to 1500 flights per day, with more than 41,000 incidents reported from July 15 through August 15.
For Part 91 and Part 135 operators, GPS spoofing is a baseline hazard that threatens schedule reliability as much as safety.
Flying without the magenta line
When GPS fails or gets flagged as unreliable, modern avionics revert to “blue data,” relying on inertial or radio-based navigation. We revert to VOR/DME and lose SVS and RNP capability.
In domestic airspace, this is a workload multiplier. It means asking for vectors, reporting systems failures, and dealing with the nuisance of degraded enhanced ground proximity warning system (EGPWS).
In the long-range environment, the complexity increases and the cost is tangible. For example, a client charters a Gulfstream G650ER for a non-stop flight from TEB (Teterboro NJ) to DXB (Intl, Dubai, UAE). The aircraft loses GPS integrity just before entering the North Atlantic Tracks (NATs).
With no RNP-4 or RNP-10 capability, the aircraft is no longer eligible for the NATs or optimum altitudes, forcing the operator to slum it below reduced vertical separation minimum (RVSM) airspace, where fuel burn is horrific.
The operator is forced to stop at SNN (Shannon, Ireland) for a tech check, burning extra fuel, adding a cycle to the airframe, and having to tell the client they’re landing in the wrong country because a computer lost confidence in the aircraft’s position.
While dispatchers currently manage GNSS reliability uncertainty by watching NOTAMs and industry alerts, they’re planning with fuel and route conservatism, but this defensive planning comes at a real cost, as every pound of contingency fuel and every extra mile flown increases costs and reduces loading.
When “truth” expires
Pilots are taught that, when the satellite signal dies, the inertial reference system (IRS) takes over. We treat the laser-ring gyro as the ultimate backup. However, every professional pilot knows its limitation – it drifts. An IRS is only as good as its last update.
It requires a “ground truth” to zero-out the error. Without GPS to update the IRS, that error grows with time. An hour into a GPS-denied flight, your position uncertainty may be acceptable.
Four hours in, however, you could be miles off course, facing unexpected airspace boundaries, range limitations, or separation concerns.
We are operating with a navigation stack that relies on a single point of failure (GPS) to keep our backup system (IRS) honest, especially over oceans. Consequently, we need a third layer – a source of positioning that is passive, global, and physically impossible to spoof. We need the Earth itself.
Physics of resilience
While we have spent 30 years looking up at satellites for guidance, the most reliable map has been beneath us the whole time – Earth’s magnetic field.
Most pilots know only of the core field – the north-seeking magnetic force that affects our compasses.
But superimposed on that core field is the crustal magnetic anomaly field created by minerals that amplify and modify the local magnetic field.
These deposits create a complex, high-definition fingerprint of stable magnetic variations that are unique everywhere around the globe.
They’re available any time, in any weather, at any altitude.
Because one cannot fake a magnetic anomaly signal, it’s fundamentally unjammable and unspoofable, setting the stage for magnetic anomaly navigation (MagNav).
If an aircraft can match this magnetic fingerprint to a known magnetic map, it acquires an absolute position fix without reliance on other navigation systems.
Such systems are currently in development and testing by defense agencies, major aerospace manufacturers, and other organizations. The challenge is signal-to-noise ratio.
A modern business jet generates roughly 10,000 nanoTeslas (nT) of magnetic noise from engines, strobes, pumps, and avionics.
The crustal signal we’re trying to detect is often as faint as 10 nT, so trying to read this signal from a moving aircraft is comparable to trying to hear a whisper at a rock concert.
However, recent breakthroughs from the convergence of quantum sensing methods and AI have enabled platform-agnostic denoising. By training AI models on an airframe’s specific magnetic signature, the system can detect and scrub this interference from the sensor data in real time.
Once the noise is stripped away, only the clean, immutable signal of Earth remains, enabling MagNav systems to derive a precise position.
The canary and the lighthouse
MagNav serves 2 critical roles in the modern cockpit. First, it acts as a canary. When spoofing occurs, the FMS is often the last to know. It chases the fake signal until the map shift becomes obvious or ATC queries your position.
Because the magnetic field cannot be spoofed, MagNav acts as an independent integrity monitor – a GPS lie detector. If satellite and magnetic positions diverge, the system knows GPS is compromised and creates a “POS DISAGREE” alert before the aircraft leaves its protected airspace.
Second, it acts as a lighthouse. When GPS is lost or rejected, the FMS typically defaults to “IRS NAV ONLY” and accuracy begins to degrade.
MagNav eliminates this by providing a continuous stream of absolute position fixes to the FMS, anchoring the IRS and zeroing out the drift. With MagNav, you could fly 10 hours in GPS-denied airspace and still achieve RNP-1 or better, allowing you to arrive at your destination safely.
From lab to line
Until recently, the sensors required for MagNav have, essentially, been part of lab-grade physics experiments – bulky, power-hungry, and fragile. But now, quantum sensors have shrunk to the size of a deck of cards, and are rugged enough to handle the vibration and temperature swings of flight.
Similarly, the processing and power requirements for AI denoising models have decreased as well, allowing MagNav to fit in a standard avionics bay. This is not theoretical.
The US Department of Defense’s Transition of Quantum Sensing program is currently testing several quantum navigation systems with various manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, AOSense, and SandboxAQ.
The US Air Force is also conducting various system tests, as are aircraft manufacturers like Airbus and Boeing.
With each sortie, MagNav demonstrates new capabilities, such as becoming the primary navigation source or increasing RNP accuracy, bringing this technology closer to certification and implementation.
“The ultimate goal would be aircraft autonomous navigation, with approach capability to at least RNP 0.3 nm,” declares Captain Alan “Tracy” Barnett, whose 45-year commercial aviation career spans flight management positions in training, operations, and program development, and contributing to the development of RNP AR Operations.
Barnett continues, “More realistically, in the near to medium term, we need an augmented/hybrid sensor solution that is not vulnerable to current and future threats.
I am cautiously optimistic that a solution will come. However, as pilots, operators, OEMs, and regulators, we need to encourage this development.
With so many secondary systems using GPS-augmented positioning – including safety systems – it is imperative that we move as quickly as possible to eliminate this vulnerability.”
What you can do today
In 1990, the movie Die Hard 2 presented a terrifying scenario where bad actors hacked the ILS to trick a plane into crashing. At the time, it was pure Hollywood fiction. However, 35 years later, that fiction has become an uncomfortable reality.
Today, the tools needed to spoof navigation signals are as simple as software-defined radios that can be bought online.
As an industry, we cannot simply accept loss of integrity as the cost of doing business. We cannot normalize EGPWS warnings as “crying wolf” and stop listening. And we cannot accept a flight deck that degrades into 1970s-era capability the moment a jammer turns on.
As integration and automation become more prevalent, GPS becomes a single point of failure for more and more systems. Jamming and spoofing extend beyond navigation into SVS, EGPWS, and FMS integrity, and their effects persist long after the interference stops.
The solution is not simply deploying better GPS satellites and stronger signals – it is diversity. We need a robust, resilient navigation layer that complements existing systems but can also navigate independently without relying on the RF spectrum.
For flight department managers and crews, the primary call to action is vigilance. When you encounter spoofing or jamming, report it to ATC, the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP), and NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), and to your safety officers.
The data is essential for tracking this growing global issue and builds on the evidence gathered in the OpsGroup GPS Spoofing report.
Beyond reporting, you can also seek assurance from your avionics partners and aircraft manufacturers, asking about their plans to protect flight decks against these increasingly common threats.
As technologies progress, we are moving from an era of managing errors to one of systematic assurance. MagNav technology is here, it’s flying, and it’s the only way to guarantee that the flight will continue when satellites become unreliable or go dark.
Luca Ferrara is General Manager of Navigation at SandboxAQ, where he oversees development of the AQNav quantum-based magnetic anomaly navigation system.
Ben Yaffe is Principal, Business Operations & Strategy at SandboxAQ. He holds a Private Pilot certificate with Instrument Rating and has logged over 850 hrs TT.