Honeywell Aerospace has launched its new Honeywell Alternative Navigation Architecture (HANA), a software-based solution created to provide resilient navigation for both crewed and uncrewed aircraft, as well as military surface vehicles, when Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals are compromised by degradation, jamming, or spoofing.
HANA operates as a multi-system navigation platform that allows operators to combine different modalities to meet their mission-specific needs, ensuring resilience and consistent availability in GPS-denied environments.
The layered architecture includes several systems. These are vision-aided navigation, which uses live camera feeds to match ground imagery with map databases; magnetic anomaly-aided navigation, which detects known variations in Earth’s magnetic field; and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite navigation, which offers stronger, lower-altitude signals that are more resistant to jamming. Other modalities that can be included are Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), radar, radios, and star trackers.
Matt Picchetti, Vice President, Navigation and Sensors at Honeywell Aerospace, said, “Due to the proliferation of low-cost tools, the number of jamming, spoofing and blocking incidents is growing and is leaving more pilots and operators in the air without access to GNSS data. HANA is our latest alternative navigation system designed to counter these threats by providing precise information on the aircraft’s position, velocity and orientation when GNSS signals are unavailable.”
For efficiency, HANA can operate on the operator’s existing computing platform or one supplied by Honeywell. The initial release of HANA features vision-aided navigation, with plans to integrate magnetic anomaly and LEO satellite solutions into the platform in 2026. Further details.
