2.1 million jamming reports: reading the GNSS-denial numbers
What reported interference on commercial flights tells drone makers about navigating in contested airspace — and why satellite position works best as a check that detects a contested environment.
Electronic warfare can make GNSS-based navigation ineffective in contested environments. That has been true on battlefields for years. What has changed is how visible the problem has become: reported GNSS interference on commercial flights has risen sharply since 2023.
What was counted
The IATA Report 2026 puts numbers on that rise. They are reports from commercial aviation — aircraft with trained crews, redundant systems and, usually, a long way from any front line.
Three things stand out. The jamming count is in the millions. Spoofing, though far fewer in absolute terms, is the line that grew fastest. And these are only the incidents someone noticed and reported.
Field footage makes the same point at a smaller scale. One clip, reported by ArmyInform on 15 September 2026, shows a UAV fitted with an ordinary compass — a reminder of how far operators will go when satellite navigation cannot be trusted.
Jamming and spoofing fail differently
The two words are often used together, but they break a receiver in different ways.
- Jamming drowns the satellite signal in noise. The receiver loses its fix and, in most cases, knows it has lost it.
- Spoofing replaces the real signal with a false one. The receiver keeps reporting a position — the wrong one — with apparent confidence.
A jammed receiver knows it is lost. A spoofed one believes it is somewhere else.
For an aircraft with a pilot, either failure is survivable: a person notices the map no longer matches the window. A UAV has no one on board to notice, and in contested airspace its ground link may be degraded at the same moment.
GNSS as a contested-environment check
That is the design decision behind SenzFusion. The payload navigates on its own sensors and uses GNSS input to detect a contested environment: satellite position is compared against the navigation output, and a disagreement flags jamming or spoofing.
Instead, the estimate is built from what the aircraft can measure itself:
- The IMU predicts position, velocity and orientation 1,000 times a second, carrying the estimate between fixes.
- A radar altimeter builds a ground profile along the track, and a radar map match against the stored terrain map corrects accumulated drift.
- A thermal scene check compares a thermal picture of the terrain with a stored reference scene.
A position fix is accepted only when the radar and thermal matches agree. Because the estimate is built from onboard sensors, the aircraft holds its position through jamming or spoofing — and the GNSS check disagreeing is exactly how it detects the contested environment.
What it means for a drone maker
The commercial numbers describe the environment every UAV now flies into. For a vehicle maker, the practical question is how to add GNSS-independent navigation without redesigning the aircraft.
SenzFusion is built as a payload and SDK that sits alongside the existing autopilot. The host autopilot keeps flight control and receives course corrections over a signed serial link; PX4, ArduPilot and MAVLink are the supported interfaces. It can be fitted at build or retrofitted onto existing airframe programmes.
Read how the full pipeline works on How it navigates, or see what the payload contains on the SenzFusion page.
