Boeing Aerospace Spain (BAS) is heading a three-year research effort, VARIANT (Validation of Airspace Integration Applications and New Technologies), to address GNSS jamming and spoofing risks for advanced air mobility (AAM) aircraft such as eVTOLs and cargo drones. The consortium pairs BAS with SkyGrid, Boeing's digital airspace unit, and Austrian firm Dimetor, whose NAVSentry platform will be integrated to detect and alert on GNSS interference. Subcontractors include ANZEN Engineering, AI Methods, QCentroid Labs, Carlos III University of Madrid, ENAIRE, the Polytechnic University of Madrid and CRIDA, with funding from the Community of Madrid.
The project targets a specific safety gap: without a pilot on board, an autonomous eVTOL has no way to catch a spoofed position fix, unlike jamming, which at least produces a detectable loss of signal. As low-altitude urban airspace fills with GNSS-dependent traffic, undetected spoofing becomes a systemic risk rather than an isolated fault.
NAVSentry's method avoids installing dedicated ground receivers. It instead draws on existing telecom infrastructure, since mobile base stations already use GNSS timing and can double as passive interference sensors. Aggregating signals from tens of thousands of these stations produces a real-time, wide-area interference map, letting operators reroute traffic away from affected zones. The platform has previously been tested at military sites.
VARIANT will evaluate this detection capability across flight planning, contingency management and surveillance phases, combining high-fidelity simulation with real data collected in Madrid. The programme also covers ground-based traffic surveillance, local weather monitoring and vertiport resource management, feeding into SkyGrid's broader work on digital air traffic management for autonomous urban operations.
Source: Aerospace Testing International — read the original article