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- Civil airline safety is under threat as satellite positioning system signals are routinely blocked around China, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, across the Middle East and other parts of the world
- New experimental alternative to GPS shows the earth’s magnetic field can do the job just as well and with great accuracy
- An on-board black-box system fitted with quantum magnetometers, lasers and a single GPU chip exceeds required commercial navigation accuracy standards, 1,200% of the time
- Airbus and Google companies co-operating to commercialise the breakthrough
In Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley, Acubed, the Airbus innovation lab, is working with a Google company, AI and quantum specialist SandboxAQ, to develop AQNav, an alternative to today’s most ubiquitous global positioning system (GPS) as incidents of GPS jamming and spoofing increase and threaten airline safety. Via a toaster-size black box that houses an AI-powered quantum magnetic navigation system on a single graphics processing unit (GPU) chip, the experimental new solution exploits the Earth’s magnetic field, does not rely on satellites and can provide real-time aircraft positioning data without any reference to GPS.
