Honeywell launches alternative navigation software to counter threats

Honeywell has launched the Honeywell Alternative Navigation Architecture (HANA) — a software-based solution designed to ensure resilient navigation for crewed and uncrewed aircraft, as well as military surface vehicles, in environments where GNSS signals are degraded, jammed or spoofed.

“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,” said Matt Picchetti, vice president, Navigation and Sensors, Honeywell Aerospace Technologies. “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.”

HANA is a multi-system navigation platform that includes:

• Vision-aided navigation. Using live camera feeds to match ground imagery with map databases.
• Magnetic anomaly-aided navigation. Detecting known variations in Earth’s magnetic field.
• Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite navigation. Offering stronger, lower altitude signals more resistant to jamming..
• Other modalities. Including light detection and ranging (lidar), radar, radios and star trackers.

With this layered architecture, operators can mix and match modalities to meet mission-specific requirements, ensuring maximum resilience, system integrity and signal availability even in GPS-denied environments. To ensure efficiency and ease of use, HANA can run on the operator’s current computing platform or one that Honeywell provides.

Initial release of HANA includes vision-aided navigation. Honeywell also plans to integrate magnetic anomaly and LEO satellite solutions into the platform in 2026.

HANA’s launch marks a major milestone in Honeywell’s five-decade legacy of inertial navigation system innovation, reinforcing its leadership in aerospace navigation and its commitment to mission-critical resilience for defense and commercial aviation.