The Secret to Better Airplane Navigation Could Be Inside the Earth's Crust (www.wsj.com)

Airbus’s innovation arm Acubed and Google spinout SandboxAQ announced a demonstration of a GPS-independent navigation approach that leans on the Earth’s crustal magnetic field. The prototype is a compact, “toaster-size” unit that uses lasers, a single GPU chip for onboard processing, and machine-learning/quantum expertise from SandboxAQ to match local magnetic anomalies against maps. In short, instead of satellites, the system reads distinctive magnetic signatures in the crust and uses AI-powered pattern matching to estimate position — a lightweight alternative intended for aircraft navigation. This matters because GPS is vulnerable to jamming and spoofing, and the aviation sector urgently needs resilient backups. A magnetic-anomaly-based system would provide an independent navigation source that is difficult to spoof and can operate in GPS-denied environments, improving safety and autonomy. Key technical implications: success depends on high-resolution magnetic maps, robust ML models to handle temporal/noise variations, and certification for airborne use; the small hardware footprint suggests practical onboard deployment if accuracy and reliability reach required standards. The announcement is an early-stage but concrete step toward diversifying navigation modalities for aviation and other critical systems.