Unjammable quantum navigation tech gets first airborne test in UK

According to the government, this is the first test of this type of technology in the UK on an aircraft in flight, and “the first such flights worldwide that have been publicly acknowledged”.

The trials, which concluded earlier this month, involved quantum tech firm Infleqtion, in collaboration with aerospace companies BAE Systems and QinetiQ.

But at present, despite the tiny scale of quantum technology, the equipment itself is large. Henry White, part of the team from BAE Systems that worked on the project, said for that reason he thought the first application could be aboard ships, “where there’s a bit more space”.

However, he told the BBC that in five to ten years it could be the size of a shoebox, and a thousand times more accurate than comparable systems.

There has been concern about the vulnerability of shipping to attacks on satellite navigation.

Mr White sees the system primarily as a back-up to GPS.

“You’re not going to get rid of your satellite systems, they are very convenient,” he said.

Signals from GPS satellites can also be used as an extremely accurate way of telling the time. The test flight also took a quantum clock on board to see if it could work as a backup if GPS were blocked. In the lab, Mr White said the best quantum clocks can be incredibly accurate.

“If you started them at the beginning of the universe, they may have lost a second by now,” he said.

Mr White believes the test is a “major milestone” but acknowledges it will take time before the technology is in active use.

Ken Munro of Pen Test Partners, a cybersecurity firm that works in aviation, said the test was a “big step in the right direction”, but added “it would still be 10 to 20 years before we see any practical implementation”, in commercial aviation in the UK.