We Need A New Way To Fly In A GPS-Jammed World

GPS has become so commonplace that it's easy to think of it as just universally available, like air or gravity. There's a reason everybody uses it: it's precise enough for ground and air traffic, it covers the entire planet, and unless you're in a tunnel, it pretty much never has an outage. Or at least, it didn't. As warzones proliferate around the world, GPS jamming — or, worse, spoofing — is becoming more and more widespread. Over the last few years, eastern Europe in particular has gotten hard for airlines to fly through, simply because the war in Ukraine has carpeted the region with electronic warfare. When the war in Iran started earlier this year, the Middle East started suffering the same issues. As 21^st century warfare develops, this is only going to get more severe. The world needs another way for aircraft to navigate.

There are some existing alternatives, but they do have their drawbacks. There's radar and lidar, of course, but these can also be jammed, sending you back to square one. Then there are systems that can visually scan the terrain and match it to a map. These work great — provided there aren't any clouds in the way. But the main backup for GPS, the one already in use by most planes, is called an inertial navigation system (INS). Using a series of accelerometers and gyroscopes, an INS can track exactly how a plane has moved from its origin point. Overlay that over a map, and you know just where you are. Awesome! What's the problem?

The problem is that INS suffers badly from drift, or small measurement errors that add up over time into big discrepancies. Fly for long enough, and the INS becomes so off-course as to be useless. For that reason, INS systems need some sort of aid to correct itself. And the most commonly used aid is... GPS. So the backup for GPS relies on GPS to stay accurate. Fortunately, there are some emerging technologies that may provide a more self-contained solution. Welcome, friends, to the quantum realm.

Quantum technology is one of the buzzwords of 21^st century R&D, and that extends into navigation as well. Last year, the U.S. Space Force tested a quantum INS on a Boeing X-37B spaceplane. This uses the same principle as traditional INS, in that it tracks the movement of the vehicle in order to navigate, but it does so by measuring atoms in their waveforms. If the atom-waves ever deviate from a steady velocity, then they interfere with one another in noticeable patterns, telling you exactly how the vehicle moved. Quantum is weird, man.

But quantum INS is still in development, and thus far, it hasn't proven to be radically better than traditional INS. But what if there were a way to combine the two, marrying the tried-and-true accelerometer approach with the bleeding-edge tech that quantum provides? This is the approach that Australian startup Q-CTRL is taking with their Ironstone Opal system. Already recognized by Time Magazine as one of the best inventions of 2025, Ironstone Opal is designed to measure geomagnetic fluctuations caused by the terrain below. Since these fluctuations are constant, all the system needs to do is match what it is "seeing" with pre-existing geomagnetic maps. It's effectively like the visual map-matching system mentioned earlier, except clouds don't get in the way of magnetic fields, so it always works.

While quantum geomagnetic technology isn't quite ready to stand on its own, it can be wedded to a traditional INS device as its corrective aid. Combined, that allows for a true backup solution to GPS if it becomes jammed, since the INS no longer needs GPS or other beacon-based aids at all. That's really the coups de grace of Ironstone Opal and other quantum tech: since it passively measures the fields around it, there's no active signal for anyone to jam in the first place. It just always works, even if a war is on. If we're going to keep flying planes near conflicts, we're going to need solutions like this.

You won't be surprised to learn that the military is also investing heavily in quantum nav. Q-CTRL is already working with Lockheed Martin on a DARPA contract, and then there are those Space Force spaceplane tests. GPS jamming is bad for the planes obviously, but it's also an issue for guided bombs. Worse, GPS can be spoofed, meaning the enemy tricks the receiver with a bogus signal, making it think it's somewhere it's not. Do that with a guided bomb, and bad things happen.

Already, CNN says that 900 commercial flights per day are getting jammed. And now, we're learning that Russia may be jamming GPS from space. The need for a useable backup is now. Q-CTRL says that Ironstone Opal should be ready for production in 2027; other quantum systems are farther out, but hopefully will be coming sooner than later. Until then, fly safe, and tell the pilot not to trust the GPS too much.