Image: Department of Homeland Security
Blog Editor’s Note: A good opinion piece by the CEO at NextNav. We have to agree with almost all the ideas expressed in the article.
The author does say:
“It’s promising that policymakers, infrastructure owners, and businesses are recognizing the importance of alternatives to GPS, and are exploring options for PNT technologies to address vulnerabilities and effectively access location information.”
We very much hope that is the case.
Need for Resilient Position, Navigation, Timing Services
Many are familiar with GPS in the context of driving directions or the phone map app. However, GPS provides position, navigation, and timing (PNT) and is integrated across a wide range of use cases. Reliance on PNT (GPS) leaves many sectors vulnerable to outages, spoofing attacks, signal jamming, and solar flare interferences. The spoofing of GNSS signals due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year forced European aircraft to reroute due to an “inability to perform a safe landing procedure”, resulting in the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issuing a safety information bulletin (SIB) around GNSS interferences in March 2022.
It’s crucial for policymakers and infrastructure owners to deploy complementary PNT solutions to close these gaps and avoid potential chaos – as we’re seeing now, with both the US and EU taking promising steps to study and implement these critical technologies.
Recognizing alternatives to GPS
