Dimetor joins Boeing Aerospace Spain led advanced air mobility project to address GNSS spoofing and jamming

Advanced Air Mobility is no longer a concept on a roadmap. Air taxis, autonomous cargo drones, and eVTOL vehicles are entering operational environments, and with that comes a safety challenge that is fundamentally different from anything commercial aviation has faced before: these aircraft fly low, fly autonomously, and depend entirely on GNSS for navigation in the most signal-hostile environments imaginable.

Boeing Aerospace Spain, SkyGrid and Dimetor GmbH will collaborate on a three-year project to address exactly this challenge. The collaboration will integrate Dimetor’s AI-powered NAVSentry platform into Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) operations, with the goal of automatically monitoring, detecting, and alerting against GNSS interference, including spoofing and jamming, to ensure the safe, efficient, and scalable integration of autonomous eVTOLs into current airspace.

The project, VARIANT (Validation of AiRspace Integration Applications and New Technologies), is a strategic industrial research initiative to enable the safe, efficient, and scalable integration of next-generation electric and autonomous aircraft into current and future airspace.

Led by Boeing Aerospace Spain, the consortium consists of ANZEN Engineering, AI Methods, and QCentroid Labs, and includes the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), ENAIRE, the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), and CRIDA as subcontractors. The project is partially funded by the Directorate General for Technological Innovation of the Community of Madrid, under a public call from the Regional Ministry of Education.

VARIANT will contribute not only to providing GNSS spoofing detection services, but also to improving  ground-based traffic surveillance, monitoring local weather phenomena, and managing resources at vertiports. This aligns with the strategic objective of SkyGrid—a Boeing subsidiary dedicated to digital airspace management—by developing ground-based digital air traffic management capabilities that facilitate autonomous air operations in complex urban and suburban airspace.

Why GNSS integrity is the central safety problem for AAM

Commercial airliners operate at cruising altitudes with multiple redundant navigation systems, extensive radar coverage, and direct communication with air traffic control. When GNSS degrades, crews have fallback procedures and fallback systems. Most importantly, they have a pilot on board the aircraft. The airspace around them is sparse enough that a navigation uncertainty of even a few hundred meters rarely creates an immediate collision risk.

eVTOLs operate in a completely different environment. Unlike conventional aircraft, eVTOLs for air mobility are typically designed to operate in densely populated areas, where they need to fly at lower altitudes and closer to urban environments. Obtaining and maintaining precise localization signals is therefore crucial for their safe and stable operation.

For multiple aircraft to operate simultaneously within the same airspace, both precise self-localization and real-time awareness of other aircraft positions are necessary to prevent collisions. As traffic density increases and automation takes over separation management, the integrity of every GNSS signal in the system becomes a systemic requirement, not just an individual aircraft requirement.

The threat landscape: jamming and spoofing

There are two distinct GNSS threat types, and they have very different consequences.

Jamming floods the signal environment with noise, drowning out the satellite signal. The result is a loss of positioning; the aircraft knows it has no fix. That is a serious operational problem, but at least the system knows something is wrong.

Spoofing is more dangerous. A spoofing attack broadcasts false GNSS signals that appear legitimate. The aircraft continues to report a position, just the wrong one. Instability or compromise of positional information caused by cybersecurity threats such as spoofing, jamming, or other communication attacks can trigger cascading failures across multiple aircraft systems. In an automated eVTOL with no pilot to sense that something is wrong, a spoofed position fed into the flight management system can propagate undetected through every layer of the navigation stack.

Impacting AAM and beyond

Modern systems such as UAVs and future technologies such as eVTOLs are expected to place additional dependencies on GNSS as their prevalence in the aviation system grows. In addition, various forms of military equipment, both crewed and uncrewed, rely on GNSS for navigation and targeting, giving militaries and non-state actors an interest in interfering with signals. Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in GNSS radio frequency interference associated with conflict zones globally, and civil aircraft often suffer from the collateral impact of the interference, which can extend far beyond conflict zones themselves.

The threat is not confined to conflict-adjacent airspace. GNSS jamming devices are commercially available and used routinely for criminal purposes, such as cargo theft, vehicle tracking evasion, and other illicit activities, generating interference events along transport corridors with no military intent but real operational consequences for any aircraft in the area.

NAVSentry: telecom infrastructure as a detection network

The conventional approach to GNSS interference monitoring relies on dedicated ground-based receivers deployed at strategic locations: airports, control centers, and key infrastructure. This works for fixed, high-priority points but does not scale to wide-area, low-altitude coverage of the kind that urban AAM operations require.

Dimetor’s NAVSentry takes a different approach. Rather than building a new sensor network, it uses the one that already exists: national telecom infrastructure. Mobile network base stations rely on GNSS for timing synchronization, which means they are themselves receivers constantly processing satellite signal quality data. NAVSentry aggregates and analyzes this data at scale, turning tens of thousands of passive sensors distributed across entire countries into a real-time GNSS interference monitoring grid.

NAVSentry provides live large-scale sensor network-based feedback on interference, spoofing, or jamming events, pinpointing not just the what, but the where, when, and how. NAVSentry stands out by using existing nationwide telecom infrastructure. With access to tens of thousands of passive and active sensors already embedded in different networks, there is no need to deploy additional costly hardware or build bespoke networks. This approach not only reduces deployment costs but also enables seamless and continuous operation across vast geographical areas.

This operational capability is not theoretical. NAVSentry has been successfully deployed and tested on military grounds.

For AAM specifically, this wide-area coverage is essential. A vertiport network across a city, or a corridor connecting two urban centers, cannot be protected by a handful of fixed receivers. The interference environment is dynamic: it moves, it appears and disappears; it comes from sources that have no fixed location. A monitoring system that provides continuous, city-scale situational awareness of where interference is occurring, when it started, and how it is evolving gives operators something that point-solution monitoring cannot: time to respond before an aircraft enters the affected zone.

Integration with AAM data infrastructure

GNSS interference does not affect navigation data in isolation. Modern AAM platforms integrate GNSS-derived position data with multiple other feeds: ADS-B surveillance, Eurocontrol SWIM data, aircraft telemetry, UTM/ATM system inputs. When GNSS is compromised, corruption propagates. An aircraft reporting a spoofed position to a UTM system is not just creating a navigation problem for itself but injecting false data into the shared operational picture that other aircraft and automated separation systems are relying on.

This is why multi-sensor data fusion and cross-referenced monitoring matter as much as the detection capability itself. NAVSentry is designed to operate as one layer in a broader situational awareness architecture, providing interference alerts that can be correlated against other data streams to detect anomalies, validate position reports, and trigger contingency procedures before a degraded navigation state escalates into a safety event.

For UTM and ATM operators managing high-density urban air traffic, advance warning of a GNSS interference event —its location, its intensity, its probable extent—is operationally transformative. It shifts the response from reactive (an aircraft has already lost navigation integrity) to proactive (reroute traffic around the affected zone before any aircraft enters it).

Scope and significance of partnership with Boeing Aerospace Spain and Skygrid

The VARIANT project will assess the applicability of this GNSS jamming/spoofing detection service to AAM operations, including concepts of use (e.g. flight planning, contingency management, surveillance), performance, safety and security requirements for the different phases of flight. The assessment will include high fidelity simulations and real data gathering in Madrid.

BAS and SkyGrid bring deep expertise in AAM, aerospace systems integration and certification processes. Dimetor brings the operational NAVSentry platform and its established telecom data partnerships. Together, the project addresses the full chain from interference detection through alerting, integration with airspace management systems, and operational continuity under degraded GNSS conditions.

What this means for AAM at scale

As the AAM industry matures, AAM aircraft will operate where traditional air traffic control services may not be readily available due to the configuration of a particular airspace, insufficient radar surveillance, or inconsistent GNSS coverage. Substantial technological and regulatory changes will be required to achieve the full benefits of AAM and to accommodate higher volumes of aircraft.

The VARIANT project represents a concrete step toward closing that gap: not through additional hardware or new infrastructure build-out, but through intelligent use of the telecom sensor network that already covers the cities where AAM will operate.

Reliable PNT is the foundation on which automated navigation, separation management, contingency handling, and vertiport operations all depend. Protecting it at scale, in real time, across urban environments is what makes the difference between a demonstration project and a deployable system.

That is what this project is building toward.