Airbus has chosen Safran Electronics & Defense’s SkyNaute inertial navigation system for the A220, the first airliner to carry a navigation core already hardened on military platforms.
The selection was confirmed by the French aerospace group this week. SkyNaute holds an aircraft’s position when satellite navigation is disrupted, unavailable, or being actively jammed and spoofed.
A gyroscope with nothing to wear out
The system fuses inertial data with satellite navigation. Its centerpiece is a hemispherical resonator gyroscope, a Safran-patented design with no moving parts, built to work through vibration and temperature swings.
That pedigree matters. SkyNaute has flown on helicopters in harsh vibration, on military aircraft facing jamming attempts, and on drones needing precision navigation while resisting electromagnetic interference. Moving it to an airliner says something about how common those conditions have become.
Jamming is no longer an edge case
Satellite interference over Europe and the Middle East has grown routine enough that regulators treat loss of navigation as a planning assumption. Aircraft flying only on satellite-derived position have no answer when the signal is overwhelmed or replaced with a counterfeit.
The industry response has been to push inertial systems back in as a genuine second source rather than a backup. SkyNaute’s selection gives that argument a commercial reference customer.
What it does not solve
Inertial navigation drifts. It buys time and holds position long enough to reach clean signals or complete an approach on other means, but it is not an independent navigation service.
The deeper exposure sits elsewhere. A crew protected by an inertial core still flies an aircraft whose surveillance, timing and communication links depend on the same contested spectrum. Hardening navigation narrows one gap, not the whole attack surface.
