They can also rely on visual references like monuments, hills, rivers and other terrain features to find the right airport.But the Embraer in this case had flown over featureless ocean.
On board was a piece of tech many countries, including ours, have been racing to perfect, called quantum navigation.
For 30 minutes, Shapps’s jet had no GPS or onboard internet, suggesting satellite signals to it were being jammed.
A month later, two airliners over Estonia had to abort landings after pilots noticed GPS interference.
Later this year, US military is set to test quantum navigation on a much bigger plane, a C-17 transporter.
pilots are not entirely lost without GPS; they have other “nav aids”
GPS vs NavIC
Earlier this month, an Embraer 170 took off from Seattle in the US, flew over the Pacific, landed in Alaska and flew back, completing a four-hour round trip over open ocean, a fairly regular flight except for one key detail — it flew without GPS.Now, pilots are not entirely lost without GPS; they have other “nav aids” such as charts, maps, beacons and air-traffic control. They can also rely on visual references like monuments, hills, rivers and other terrain features to find the right airport.But the Embraer in this case had flown over featureless ocean. So without satellite positioning or monuments to go by, how did the pilots know their position? On board was a piece of tech many countries, including ours, have been racing to perfect, called quantum navigation. It uses minutely sensitive quantum sensors to read variations in the Earth’s magnetic field (caused largely by magnetised rock underground) and compares them with an onboard magnetic map. By matching the patterns, and combining the data with inputs from gyroscopes and accelerometers, the aircraft can determine its position even without GPS.The Sept 4 Embraer test was the first publicly reported long-duration, open-sea demonstration of one variant of quantum navigation, using a conventional plane with no cockpit retrofits.The test was a success; the technology proved 89% more accurate than the “nav aids” pilots use if GPS fails. It’s an important development, especially if one considers what happened in March 2024 to UK defence secretary Grant Shapps’s plane, near Russia’s Kaliningrad. For 30 minutes, Shapps’s jet had no GPS or onboard internet, suggesting satellite signals to it were being jammed. A month later, two airliners over Estonia had to abort landings after pilots noticed GPS interference. The next year, a plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, had to circle a Bulgarian airport for an hour after it experienced similar glitches. Ships have been hit too. Between 2016 and 2018, over 1,000 commercial vessels saw their GPS being “spoofed” or fed false location data.The cases have alarmed experts who now believe global satellite navigation is under sustained attack, an unsurprising inference given how easy it is to jam GPS signals — they have the strength of a “whisper” by the time they reach the ground.The Embraer that flew without a satellite signal bypasses these flaws in GPS. It showed that in the future, if satellites were to be knocked out of the sky, a plane would still be able to find its way. Later this year, US military is set to test quantum navigation on a much bigger plane, a C-17 transporter. tnn
