As GPS navigation becomes less reliable, is 2026 the year quantum technology takes us to a safer destination?

In September 2025, a flight carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reportedly suffered a GPS satellite navigation malfunction. Despite some debate about what actually happened, there was clearly a serious issue. It wasn’t an isolated incident - aviation bodies report that over 5% of flights experienced GPS issues in 2024, while over 10,000 ships reported GPS interference in the second quarter of 2025.

In addition to location data, GPS provides critical timing information for key global infrastructure. For example, it provides the financial system with a precise time-stamp for transactions, enabling people to withdraw cash from ATMs without being charged twice. It even helps keep the lights on, ensuring precise timing and synchronisation for the power grid.

However, GPS is more vulnerable to interference than we realise. With governments around the world investing heavily in alternatives like quantum technologies, is 2026 the year we plot a new path for navigation?

Many of us would say we’d be lost without our phones, but have you ever considered if that were literally true?

It’s possible to meet your friends in a restaurant you’ve never visited without using a mapping app. Equally, it’s possible with no GPS to fly a plane across the Atlantic, or ship a container around the world, or plough a field, or find a casualty in the mountains - we used to do all those things without GPS. Without this technology, life would be much harder. The UK government estimates a GPS outage would cost the economy over £7.5 billion per week.

We have become so reliant on access to the timing and location information provided by GPS that we barely notice ourselves using it - until it disappears. The evidence suggests that we will probably experience such a thing in the near future.

GPS disruptions can be caused by jamming and spoofing, where signals are deliberately interfered with, or by space debris hitting satellites. They can also be caused by solar storms, such as in May 2024, which, while allowing many in southern England to see the Northern lights, also sent GPS-guided tractors in America’s midwest veering off course.

GPS disruption is becoming more common. This is partly due to increased GPS jamming in and around conflict zones. We are also at the peak of the current cycle of solar activity, which is expected to extend into 2026, meaning Earth is more likely to encounter intense solar storms that impact GPS.

The UK government thinks this matter is so urgent that it announced £155 million worth of investment in alternative solutions in November 2025. That doesn’t include the investment in quantum technology that could give us new solutions to navigation without relying on signals from space.

Quantum technology may sound like science fiction, but quantum effects already power the semiconductors in everyday modern electronic devices. The next generation of quantum technologies could be equally transformative. One such example is quantum navigation.

Classic inertial navigation works by measuring movement from the last known location using motion sensors, like the accelerometers and gyroscopes found in smartwatches. However, it becomes less accurate the longer you go without an external fix, like a GPS signal. It is like walking across a large dark room towards a door, with a light that turns on periodically. When the light is on, you’re able to adjust and make sure you’re still on track, but the longer the light is off, the harder it is to know if you’re still on target.

On a hike without GPS, the best inertial navigation systems would leave you over a kilometre off course after an hour. With a quantum-enabled system, you could travel 700 kilometres and know your location to within four metres.

It’s possible for quantum sensors to measure magnetic fields and the Earth’s gravity with enough accuracy to use these to navigate. Much the same as birds, which have been ‘seeing’ magnetic fields to migrate successfully for millions of years.

Quantum navigation offers a path to resilience, offering high accuracy while also overcoming jamming and spoofing that threaten current GPS systems. But these technologies are far from ready for your smartphone - they are large, expensive and power-hungry. However, they are not beyond reach. In 2025, the Royal Navy trialled quantum navigation on ships and in the US, DARPA is funding similar. It’s not just defence - Airbus are working with Google to develop quantum alternatives to GPS, and NASA plans to launch quantum sensors on satellites. Ensuring there is collaboration among these efforts will be key if quantum is to replace GPS as a critical global utility.

Ultimately, it can only be a matter of time until we are relying on quantum physics to find our way around. This is ironic, of course, as one of the most famous principles of quantum mechanics is that we cannot accurately know both where something is and how fast it is going at the same time.