How Quantum Sensors Improve Air Travel

It seems pretty clear that the aerospace industry needs better tech. Planes have relied on satellite-based GPS for decades, but it's increasingly vulnerable to spoofing and jamming from bad actors and nation states, especially around are the Middle East and around Ukraine and Russia. A small toaster-size black box that leverages quantum physics and contains lasers, electrons and a single GPU could provide a solution. Or at least, Airbus's Silicon Valley-based innovation center, Acubed, thought it might. Acubed recently flew over 150 hours to test whether this navigation solution, known as quantum sensing, could be as reliable as GPS, and early results were promising, said Eric Euteneuer, principal systems engineer at the lab. The quantum sensing device is theoretically unjammable and unspoofable because it's completely analogue. Inside the black box, which was developed by Google spinout SandboxAQ, lasers fire at electrons, forcing photons to release a unique signature that's dependent on the magnetic pull at specific location. An AI algorithm that runs on a single GPU then correlates that signature to that exact location on the earth. When I first heard about quantum sensing a couple years ago, I was fascinated. But couldn't find any companies doing anything meaningful enough to cover. That's why my ears perked up when I heard about what Acubed was doing. There are certainly some hurdles before this becomes widely commercialized, but the promise is exciting. “It’s the first novel absolute navigation system to our knowledge in the last 50 years,” said SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary. Read the full story in The Wall Street Journal below for more on how the tech works and why quantum sensing applications go beyond aerospace and can even help doctors measure faint magnetic signals from the brain and the heart. And let me know what you think! Do we need a tech refresh on GPS? Could this be it?

For years, I’ve said quantum sensing wasn’t science fiction. It was our future - and our present. Now the Wall Street Journal is saying the same thing. “We’re not talking about something 20 years out,” EY’s Joe Depa told the WSJ. “This is here and now.” Their recent article highlights SandboxAQ’s partnership with Airbus’s innovation lab to test a quantum-sensing navigation device. After 150 hours of flight across the U.S., their tech proved it could accurately navigate without GPS by reading the magnetic signatures embedded in the Earth’s crust. That means an aircraft could navigate the earth with no satellite required, with real-time analog location monitoring, in a way that’s immune to jamming or spoofing. This is exactly why we’ve made quantum sensing a strategic focus at Innosphere. We’ve known for a long time that the science was sound and the stakes (across aerospace, defense, and health) were massive. Now, with GPS vulnerabilities rising and national security on the line, the world is waking up. And this article is validation that we’ve been betting on the right frontier all along. To founders and funders in deeptech: quantum sensing isn’t “early stage” anymore. It’s in flight labs. It’s in defense pipelines. It’s in the Wall Street Journal. This is one of the moments we’ve been preparing for. Let’s keep building.

Exploiting quantum physics could offer commercial aircraft an alternative to satellite-based navigation, by enhancing the accuracy of inertial systems while avoiding disruption and jamming. Commercial flight trials, using a BAE Systems Avro RJ100 of UK engineering research specialist QinetiQ, have demonstrated the potential of quantum-based technology to achieve more resilient position, navigation and timing services. https://lnkd.in/eDzGtqYx