Skyband Puts Numbers To GPS Jamming Faced By Business Aviation

After the Airbus A320 family and Boeing widebody airliners, business jets were the worst hit by GPS interference over the 12 months to August, ahead of the Boeing 737 family and Airbus widebodies, according to analysis by Skyband Systems.

The analysis using Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data shows the number of tail-days of GPS degradation—a measure of the number of aircraft exposed to GPS denial—rising from 40,000 in August 2025 to 80,000 by the end of July.

The analysis is restricted to aircraft observed transmitting degraded GPS integrity inside a mapped conflict-zone corridor. Non-corridor detections, including U.S. domestic and equipment-related low-integrity reports outside jamming zones, are excluded.

U.S. startup Skyband is developing the M100, a unit that combines Iridium’s position, navigation and timing (PNT) service, which uses low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, with inertial sensing to alert flight crews in real time to GPS spoofing and jamming.

The M100 will alert the crew via a cockpit annunciator light and an electronic flight bag application that provides the pilot with supplementary situational awareness. The app presents the same data Skyband uses to build its GPSthreatmap.com website, which provided the basis for its analysis of the extent of GPS denial.

“It’s similar to GPSjam.org. It shows you exactly where there’s GPS interference, but there’s a lot of aviation-specific features, so you can search by airline, by flight number and by tail number,” says Skyband President Robert Wiggenhorn.

Of the more than 18,600 unique aircraft affected by GPS degradation in conflict zones over the 12-month period analyzed by Skyband, almost 2,700 were business jets compared with just over 13,000 commercial airliners.

The majority of GPS denial events occurred in the Black Sea, Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Baltic regions affected by the Ukraine-Russia war and in the Eastern Mediterranean, Levant and East and South Asia regions affected by conflict in the Middle East.

Airlines most affected included European low-cost carrier Ryanair and Turkish Airlines. Among identifiable business-jet operators, fractional-ownership companies NetJets Europe and VistaJet were most affected, followed by long-range charter provider Qatar Executive.

“We can filter by OEM, say Gulfstream versus Bombardier,” Wiggenhorn says. “Within Gulfstream, we can see across the family. It’s no surprise the G650 is most affected . . . But if you look at the [newer] G700 and G800, it’s almost every one built.”

Bombardier’s long-range Global family was most affected, with around 550 unique airframes experiencing GPS degradation over the 12 months analyzed, followed by Cessna Citations. “That surprised me. It’s Citation XLs and XLSs, so this is NetJets Europe,” he says. “It’s European aircraft flying around in Eastern Europe and through the Baltics.”

Skyband is targeting business aviation as the initial application of its M100 system, beginning with the Embraer Legacy 450/500 and Praetor 500/600. The startup is working with avionics installer AeroMech, targeting supplement type certification on the Praetor 600 in November and entry into customer service before year-end.

Skyband plans to expand into commercial aviation. Iridium’s PNT service requires a dedicated channel on the company’s LEO satellite-communications terminal, which is deployed on thousands of business jets globally. Iridium is less well known in the airline industry but is used for controller-pilot data link communications.

“They are fairly well-established from a critical comms perspective,” Wiggenhorn says. “These are on widebody jets, so it seems to us that the [airline] market is pretty engaged with Iridium on the communications side of the business.”