A Lisbon Tech Team Will Modernise Eurocontrol's DEMETER Navigation Tool as Satellite Jamming Spreads
GMV's Portuguese operation will migrate and maintain DEMETER, a Eurocontrol tool that helps aircraft navigate using ground-based beacons when satellite signals fail, under a contract running to 2030 — work that matters more as GPS jamming rises across Europe.
A Lisbon-based technology team has been handed the job of overhauling one of the tools that helps keep European aircraft on course when satellite signals fail. GMV's Portuguese operation will modernise DEMETER, a software platform used by Eurocontrol — the intergovernmental body that coordinates air-traffic management across more than 40 European states — under a contract that runs to 2030, the company confirmed this week.
DEMETER assesses the performance of what engineers call DME/DME positioning, a way for aircraft to fix their location using signals from ground-based Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) stations rather than from satellites alone. In effect, it maps out where those ground beacons can provide a reliable back-up to satellite navigation, and helps airspace planners, procedure designers and flight inspectors design routes that stay usable even when the satellite layer is degraded. GMV, which originally built the tool for Eurocontrol, says it is now used by more than 65 organisations worldwide, from air-navigation service providers to universities and research centres.
The work is not a cosmetic refresh. Under the agreement — awarded to GMV's Portuguese entity, GMVIS Skysoft — the tool will be migrated to the cloud, making it faster to update and easier to scale, and then maintained and developed over the next five years. The move matters because ground-based navigation has taken on new importance: interference with satellite signals, through jamming and spoofing, has risen sharply since the start of the war in Ukraine, prompting European aviation authorities to reinforce systems that can fall back on terrestrial beacons when the space-based ones cannot be trusted.
“This project is not limited to migrating a consolidated tool to the cloud; it is about preparing a critical navigation-planning capability for the challenges of the future,” said João Sequeira, director of secure e-solutions at GMV in Portugal (diretor de secure e-solutions da GMV em Portugal). At a time when satellite interference is a growing operational concern, he added, tools like DEMETER are “essential to help the aeronautical community design resilient navigation infrastructures and maintain safe, efficient and continuous operations.”
GMV is a technology group founded in Spain in 1984 that now spans a dozen countries and around 4,000 staff, working in space, aeronautics, defence, cybersecurity and mobility. Its Portuguese arm has operated since 2005, is headquartered in Lisbon and employs more than 130 people, most of them engineers specialised in high-criticality systems for aircraft and satellites. It is from that Lisbon base that the company develops and now maintains the Eurocontrol tool.
For Portugal, the deal is a quiet marker of where its engineering talent sits in the European aerospace supply chain. Rather than a headline factory or a new campus, it is a five-year mandate to keep a piece of shared European safety infrastructure current — the kind of specialised, behind-the-scenes contract that rarely makes the news but that a continent's air traffic depends on. It also extends a run of aerospace and space-sector work anchored in Portugal, following earlier projects such as a satellite-and-AI pilot in Cascais that drew on the same GMV team.
