Honeywell demonstrates military-grade alternative navigation tech

New technologies use different inputs to ensure trouble-free navigation, even when GPS reception fails due to interference or interference.

Honeywell successfully demonstrates the set alternative navigation technologies for military aircraft. These new products are designed to help ensure trouble-free navigation – even when GPS signals are blocked, interrupted or inaccessible.

For military operations, GPS jamming – intentionally or not – can block vital signals from transmitting critical positioning, navigation and time information (PNT). In these cases, it is important that military vehicles and aircraft be equipped with alternative navigation technologies, such as sky or visual navigation, to maintain operational readiness.

“For military operations, a lack of access to critical positioning and synchronization information can make or disrupt a mission,” said Matt Pickett, vice president and general manager, Navigation & Sensors, Honeywell Aerospace. “We are very excited to launch this stable range of alternative navigation solutions that are specifically designed to meet the needs of our military customers and provide them with the additional levels of redundancy needed for their successful implementation, even if they lose access to GPS signals. “

Illustration: Honeywell

Alternative navigation technologies provide a variety of tools for measuring position, speed and direction when GPS is impaired. These technologies include:

• Visual aid navigation. This technology uses live optical or infrared camera emission and compares it to maps to provide a passive, incapacitating, high-precision alternative PNT solution that provides GPS-like accuracy in GPS failed or stuck conditions.
• Navigation with celestial help. Honeywell’s celestial assistive navigation technology observes stars and “reference objects” orbiting the Earth as satellites that have known positions and speeds. This technology compares these reference objects with the stars and can determine the position and speed in the same way as the GPS receiver can.
• Navigation with magnetic anomaly. This navigation technology measures the magnetic force with the help of sensors and compares this data with known geographical magnetic maps to accurately identify the position of the aircraft relative to the Earth.

Prototypes of these alternative navigation systems will be available in 2022, with initial deliveries expected to begin in 2023.

Honeywell navigation systems are used by almost every aircraft that flies to direct millions of passengers to their destinations. Since 1914, when the first autopilot used Honeywell’s gyroscopes to keep the aircraft stable in flight, Honeywell has delivered more than 500,000 high-performance inertial sensors across several platforms on land, in the air and at sea.