Flarebright prepares Tactera GPS-free navigation system for market, having geared up for production

UK navigation technology specialist Flarebright is gearing up to go to market with its Tactera GPS-free navigation system while moving its operation from a research and development (R&D) footing to a production focus. Briefing select journalists in London on 8 July 2026, Flarebright officials said that a campaign for the product would be starting soon and that it will be formally launched at the DSEI defence exhibition in London in September 2027.

Tactera is a low-cost, full-stack GPS-free navigation solution that can add various low-cost sensors, such as a lidar and radar altimeter, to a host air vehicle’s existing navigation stack, which would typically include GPS, vision/a camera and an inertial navigation system (INS). Using a unique set of algorithms to process the data from these various sensors, Tactera can deliver degrees of navigational accuracy in GPS-denied and radio-frequency-jammed environments that approach the performance of navigation suites that are orders of magnitude more expensive.

Thus, while an airborne platform such as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) might feature INS and a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA) to mitigate the effects of GPS jamming, Tactera can deliver much greater accuracy at a price point that does not unduly increase the overall cost or weight of the platform.

Once a firm locational fix can be re-established, either by the return of a GPS signal or other means, Tactera can re-zero itself. The system’s accuracy is good enough even to enable the platform employing it to operate over water, which laser-based and terrain-following navigation systems simply cannot handle.

While Tactera will be offered in the form of a small avionics box with various plug-in sensor options, such as the Tactera Lidar – Single Beam solution, it can also be offered as a software-only solution, Tactera Inertial+, that improves the navigational capabilities of the host platform without the introduction of new hardware. Even this system provides a navigation solution that suffers only a 5 km drift during an hour-long period of GPS-denied flight.

Summarising the company’s recent progress, Flarebright Founder and CEO Kelvin Hamilton noted, “We’ve converted from R&D. We were basically working on one big R&D contract a year, which is a terrifying way to live, and this year we’ve actually converted, so we’re now selling products; a lot of our income now actually comes from product sales, so that’s a real success.” The company has a manufacturing site in Buckinghamshire that covers around 5,500 ft² (511 m²).

Hamilton added that Flarebright has moved from a business-to-government to more of a business-to-business operation with an increasing focus on export sales.

“When you look at all the government growth initiatives for small businesses, they’re all actively encouraging you to make sure you have a solid export market, and that’s what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re fully involved in UK activities, but we’re also ensuring that we are stable enough beyond the UK.”

The Asia-Pacific region was cited by Hamilton as a clear market, with a primary focus on Japan, South Korea and Australia, while the Middle East and Türkiye are also areas of interest, where Flarebright is in the progress of forming joint ventures, and the company is also looking to create a presence in the EU, perhaps with an office in Munich.

Meanwhile, Flarebright is increasingly conducting demonstrations and live evaluations – most obviously to prove to sceptical clients that the Tactera technology performs precisely as Flarebright claims.

As Carl Sequeira, Flarebright’s chief technology officer, explained, “We have been in conversations with sensor manufacturers where they have dismissed our capabilities out of hand, largely because they don’t believe that we can do what we say we do with the quality of sensors we start with. High-end manufacturers have some very high-end sensors, and they can exceed the types of capabilities we’ve talked about; that’s what the world relies on. But the market is a diverging market, and there’s the high-end, highly certified kit, and then there’s the kit that needs to be out there and evolve very rapidly because you’ve got attritable systems, or systems that have very small payloads, and so you want low-cost things. You want things that are tiny, you want things that rely on very small computers, and that’s where we fit; that’s where our USB really sits.”

Hamilton cautioned, however, that timing is a key factor in successfully going to market with a new product.

“What I found in business is that opportunities come in spikes,” he said. “If you’re too early, it’s a killer; if you’re too late, it’s a killer. You have to be just at the right time, and we are kind of at the right time with this subject. And that’s one of my big business worries: if we don’t get this out and right quickly, we’ll just get overtaken by everybody else. We literally spoke to a big prime recently who said, ‘We weren’t bothered about this with one-way effector, cheap market size; we do exquisite things. But now we really want to get into them’, so that fills me with some fear, as you can imagine.”

Flarebright is soon hoping to start participating in events such as NATO exercises and higher-visibility demonstrations of Tactera. The company already hires a single-engine Extra stunt plane that it plans to use to showcase Tactera by negotiating the Mach Loop in the Welsh Valleys – an area renowned for spectacular low-level flying – and might seek to use a twin-engined Beechcraft King Air to do the same, Hamilton suggested.

In terms of market readiness, Tactera Inertial+ is at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 8, meaning that the technology is finalised and has been proved in an operational-type environment, while Tactera Lidar is at around TRL 6, meaning that the system has been demonstrated in a relevant environment.

Flight termination capabilities

Alongside its Tactera product line, Flarebright also offers a flight termination system capability in the form of its Extera solution. This is a highly assured system that can easily be integrated onto any crude or unproven UAV to allow it to be tested within a constrained test range environment: a key consideration for the UK, which does not have extensive flight test ranges over land. If the UAV in question goes out of control, its flight can be terminated before any range limits are breached, with the system also offering an optional gentle, controlled descent of the air vehicle in question if required.

Sequeira noted that developing a UK sovereign flight termination system that complies with the Specific Assurance and Integrity Level (SAIL) regulations of civil aviation authorities is vital in facilitating the rapid development and fielding of airborne systems.

Extera is at TRL 9 and thus market ready, with initial sales already made, although a lower-cost evolution of the system, which Flarebright hopes will broaden its appeal to the commercial market, is on the way and currently at a lower TRL.

Bathymetric navigation

Meanwhile, a future capability on which Flarebright is working is a highly accurate sea and subsea GPS-free navigation capability. Taking the full-stack Tactera terrain navigation ‘engine’ as its basis, this would use the integral sonar system of any vessel – such as an unmanned surface vessel or autonomous underwater vehicle – in combination with pre-loaded subsea bathymetric maps (such as the International Hydrographic Organization’s high-resolution S-102 standard bathymetric maps) to facilitate a navigation capability that would be impervious to jamming or spoofing.

Sequeira noted that recent events in the Strait of Hormuz amid the US/Israeli conflict with Iran had seen significant amounts of GPS jamming in the region. However, he highlighted the fact that spoofing was an even greater threat than jamming “because if you’re being jammed, you know you’ve lost all situational awareness and you can work things out. If you’re being spoofed in a clever manner, suddenly it’s a case of do you trust what you’ve got in front of you, or do you trust something else?”

An advantageous reality for this potential capability is that the areas in which GPS jamming and spoofing – littoral waters – are already well mapped.