As instances of GNSS denial, jamming and spoofing continue to impact the aviation industry globally, recent breakthroughs in quantum magnetic navigation (MagNav) from SandboxAQ and Acubed, Airbus’ Silicon Valley innovation center, are bringing the aviation industry one step closer to solving this global challenge, and preparing the world for the future of smart automation.
At the heart of this effort is AQNav, our AI-powered MagNav system based on quantum sensors pioneered by SandboxAQ in 2021. Recognized for its innovation, AQNav was chosen from over 120 entries by ACT-IAC for the 2025 Innovations Champion Award and was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2024. AQNav uses advanced quantum magnetometers to read Earth's crustal magnetic anomalies like a geophysical fingerprint, then employs Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) to filter out electromagnetic interference and precisely determine an aircraft’s position without relying on satellite signals.
SandboxAQ has been testing and refining AQNav since 2022 with Acubed, the U.S. Air Force (USAF), and others. AQNav demonstrated its real-time navigation capabilities in USAF flight tests last July, and recently was accepted into the 2025 NATO DIANA cohort, which will further hone its capabilities.
Today, we’re announcing the results from a nationwide initiative with Acubed’s Flight Lab to test the navigational accuracy of AQNav. Meeting the aviation industry’s Required Navigation Performance (RNP) requirements is necessary for the system to be deployed on military, commercial and civilian aircraft.
AQNav performance was tested for different operational scenarios and showed unprecedented precision. Our common objective was to understand if magnetic anomaly-aided navigation could broadly meet commercial aircraft navigation requirements. AQNav’s capabilities clearly exceeded the accuracy required for en route travel between airports with even our longest flight.
To demonstrate how the real-time capable system would operate in real-world conditions, flight data was collected, reprocessed, and streamed in real time to produce statistical insights, offering representative capability data for joint team evaluation.
What makes these results more impressive was the operational realism of the tests themselves. SandboxAQ and Acubed focused on designing tests to mirror authentic, real-world aviation scenarios. For example:
Elijha Williams, AQNav’s technical engagement manager, said: “Our campaign was not about demonstrating proof of concept performance under ideal conditions, it was about proving AQNav’s viability under the noisy, messy, and unpredictable environments real pilots face every day.”
During test flights exceeding two hours, AQNav outperformed the Inertial Navigation System (INS) without GNSS 100% of the time. During a one-hour flight over the challenging mountainous and forested terrain of California, AQNav achieved its best-observed accuracy of less than 74 meters, or roughly two-thirds the length of an American football field.
This campaign represents a major leap forward on the road to widespread use of AQNav in aviation. By consistently maintaining accuracy across an uncontrolled, unfiltered national testbed, SandboxAQ demonstrated the viability and true operational robustness of AQNav in real-world scenarios. Andrew Sosa Sosanya, a quantum navigation machine learning engineer at SandboxAQ, commented on the importance of this data: “Thanks to Acubed, the USAF and other partners, we’ve amassed a highly relevant MagNav dataset. This creates a flywheel effect: the more data we collect, the faster we improve model accuracy across diverse mission profiles.”
Beyond the significant performance metrics, the campaign further proved AQNav’s scalability, which matters deeply for aviation’s future. Demonstrating the system’s success on a single flight is an important proof of concept–but scaling is where real progress happens. Acubed’s Flight Lab enables efficient data collection and analysis at scale, accelerating development and validation. This agile platform delivers significantly more data in realistic operational environments, allowing us to mature technologies faster and gain deeper insights into how it will perform on a global scale.
With every hour and sortie flown, SandboxAQ pushes aviation closer to a world where GNSS is just one of many tools used for accurate navigation and not a single point of failure that jeopardizes lives and impacts commercial and military aviation operations. Through close collaboration with our commercial and government partners, we’re accelerating the deployment of AI- and quantum-powered MagNav systems.
Join us in advancing the future of resilient navigation. By partnering with us, you’ll help accelerate the adoption of AQNav, empowering pilots and operators to overcome the growing threats of GNSS denial, jamming, and spoofing. If you’re interested in collaborating, please click here or email us at AQnav@sandboxAQ.com.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This achievement would not have been possible without the dedication of the AQNav and Acubed teams. Thank you to everyone who contributed to flight planning, system calibration, data analysis, and hardware refinement, especially Eric Euteneuer and the entire Project Wayfinder team at Acubed, as well as Elijha Williams, Jonathan Ouellet, Prasenjit Sengupta, Saurabh Kuruvila, Andrew Sosa Sosanya, Jonathan Montague and Eddie Rodriguez from SandboxAQ.
Eddie Rodriguez, a staff systems engineer at SandboxAQ said: “Partnering with Acubed has been instrumental in the recent successes of AQNav. Their flight planning expertise and rapid feedback loops helped us accelerate hardware and software iterations, improve navigation accuracy, and even characterize aircraft electromagnetic interference noise profiles for future improvements.”
Saurabh Kuruvila, an embedded systems engineer at SandboxAQ, concurred: “Acubed’s flexibility in ground tests and EMI surveys enriched our data pool significantly, pushing the boundaries of sensor placement and denoising capabilities for our next-gen devices.”
