Pilots, drone operators and shipping companies used to treat satellite navigation as something they could rely on without much thought. That assumption no longer holds. Reported GPS signal loss events climbed 220% between 2021 and 2024, according to data the International Air Transport Association pulled from its Global Aviation Data Management Flight Data eXchange program, and the trend has not slowed since.
The scale of the problem has pushed regulators and safety groups to treat it as a standing condition rather than a temporary nuisance. IATA and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency jointly published an action plan focused on building lasting resilience into civil aviation instead of managing incidents as they occur. Separately, OPSGROUP, a network representing pilots, safety managers and airlines, convened more than 950 aviation professionals for a six week workgroup on GPS spoofing and produced a 128 page report on how widely the disruption has spread. In the United States, an executive order addressed how the federal government responds to disruptions in positioning, navigation and timing services, and the Department of Homeland Security followed with a Resilient PNT Conformance Framework defining four tiers of resilience for equipment.
The industry’s first instinct was to add more onboard capability, including extra sensors, upgraded inertial systems and new software layered onto each aircraft. That works for a single platform, but it stops scaling once a fleet grows past a handful, because every added component needs its own integration process, testing cycle and certification for the life of that airframe. The cost of maturing even one alternative navigation technology illustrates the problem. The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded a $49.7 million contract in July 2026 to advance alternative satellite navigation technologies through 2031, a five-year commitment for a single class of technology. DHS’s own conformance framework, which lets operators choose from four resilience tiers rather than adopt one universal fix, amounts to an acknowledgment that no single piece of onboard hardware fits every fleet size or threat environment.
A different approach has started gaining traction, computing a drone’s position off the aircraft entirely through a network that receives the telemetry a drone already produces and returns coordinates in under a second. Because the heavy computation happens in a data center rather than on the airframe, adding capacity means provisioning servers instead of manufacturing, shipping and mounting new hardware on every unit. That shift matters because the market it serves is sizable. Fortune Business Insights projects the global commercial drone market will reach $65.25 billion by 2032, up from $17.34 billion in 2025, and Grand View Research puts the combined drone hardware and services market at $163.6 billion by 2030. SPARC AI Inc. (CSE: SPAI) (OTCQB: SPAIF) is one company pursuing this network delivered model, integrating its Overwatch platform into existing autopilot software such as PX4 and ArduPilot rather than asking operators to replace navigation stacks they already trust.
The broader defense and drone sector is moving in a similar direction, even where the technology differs. Red Cat Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: RCAT) advanced its Teal Drones subsidiary to the second phase of the Drone Dominance Program, one of 19 companies invited to the Gauntlet II evaluation at Fort Carson, Colorado, in August. ZenaTech, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZENA) completed the acquisition of a Georgia based land surveying firm to expand its aerial data collection business into solar and transportation infrastructure inspection, a segment analysts say is growing at roughly 25% a year. AeroVironment, Inc. (NASDAQ: AVAV) received its first international purchase order for its LOCUST laser weapon system, a deal worth more than $50 million that points to rising demand for counter drone capability. Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: KTOS) completed a ballistic missile target mission during the multinational Pacific Dragon 2026 exercise, part of a broader push to test missile defense systems against increasingly capable threats.
None of this activity looks like a single company solving a single problem. It looks like an entire sector rebuilding the infrastructure that autonomous systems depend on to know where they are, sector by sector, contract by contract. Positioning is shifting from something built into each aircraft to something delivered as a service, and the companies adapting fastest are treating GPS denial as a permanent operating condition rather than a temporary inconvenience to patch over.
