Boeing Aerospace Spain is to lead a three-year research project aimed at detecting and countering satellite-navigation jamming and spoofing that threatens autonomous air taxis and other advanced air mobility aircraft.
The Validation of Airspace Integration Applications and New Technologies (VARIANT) project brings together Boeing Aerospace Spain (BAS), Boeing’s digital airspace subsidiary SkyGrid and Austrian telecom software firm Dimetor to tackle interference with global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). It will integrate Dimetor’s NAVSentry platform, which uses artificial intelligence to monitor, detect and alert against jamming and spoofing across advanced air mobility (AAM) operations.
The consortium also includes safety consultants ANZEN Engineering, AI Methods and QCentroid Labs, the Carlos III University of Madrid, ANSP ENAIRE, the Polytechnic University of Madrid and Spanish air traffic management (ATM) R&D body CRIDA as subcontractors. It is partly funded by the Community of Madrid’s technological innovation directorate.
eVTOL aircraft and cargo drones could fly low and possibly autonomously in dense urban areas, relying almost entirely on GNSS for navigation in signal-hostile environments. Without a pilot to notice a fault, precise and trustworthy positioning becomes a systemic safety requirement as more aircraft share the same low-altitude airspace.
Jamming floods the signal environment with noise, causing a loss of position that the aircraft can at least detect. Spoofing broadcasts false but plausible signals, so the aircraft keeps reporting a position that is simply wrong, which in an uncrewed eVTOL can propagate undetected through the navigation system.
Rather than deploying dedicated ground receivers, NAVSentry uses existing national telecom networks, as mobile base stations already rely on GNSS for timing and act as passive interference sensors. Aggregating data from tens of thousands of these across a country creates a real-time, wide-area interference-monitoring grid without new hardware.
Dimetor says the approach gives city-scale coverage that fixed receivers cannot, showing where interference is occurring and how it is evolving so operators can reroute traffic before an aircraft enters an affected zone. The platform has already been deployed and tested on military sites.
VARIANT will assess how the detection service applies to AAM operations – including flight planning, contingency management and surveillance – across the different phases of flight, using high-fidelity simulations and real data gathering in Madrid. Alongside interference detection, it will also address ground-based traffic surveillance, local weather monitoring and vertiport resource management.
The work supports SkyGrid’s aim of building ground-based digital ATM for autonomous operations in complex urban airspace. Boeing Aerospace Spain and SkyGrid bring aerospace integration and certification expertise, while Dimetor contributes the NAVSentry platform and its telecom-data partnerships.
