MCLEAN, Va. - The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is seeking industry solutions to detect, characterize, and locate radio-frequency (RF) interference that could affect aviation communications, navigation, surveillance, and other spectrum-dependent systems.
The FAA will hold an Industry Engagement Day Oct. 13, followed by vendor one-on-one sessions Oct. 14-15, for its Aviation Spectrum Interference Detection Solution initiative. The agency says it is seeking industry input because of increasing spectrum utilization, spectrum requests and auctions, and proliferation of RF technologies.
The timing comes as a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report identifies real-time spectrum monitoring and detection as a capability gap at the FAA. GAO reported 21 Sept. that the FAA has identified spectrum-related threats including spoofing and jamming, but does not have a defined real-time monitoring and detection capability for all such threats. GAO said the lack of comprehensive monitoring could limit the FAA's ability to identify, prioritize, and respond to evolving spectrum-related threats.
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Proactive protection
The FAA's RFI seeks technologies that can proactively monitor the aviation RF environment and, to the greatest extent practicable, detect, identify, characterize, geolocate and alert on RF interference, jamming, spoofing and other anomalous conditions.
Desired capabilities include signal detection and classification, emitter characterization, geolocation, waveform and protocol analysis, trend analysis and identification of potential interference sources and contributing factors. The FAA also wants systems that can correlate information from multiple sensors, platforms, and geographic locations.
The agency envisions retaining historical RF data in a searchable repository to support querying, visualization, export, and reporting. The system also should support post-event analysis by correlating RF conditions with aircraft operations and other relevant operational data.
The capability is intended to cover the National Airspace System (NAS), including airport surface, terminal and enroute environments, as well as domestic and oceanic operations in the continental United States and outside the continental United States. The FAA is interested in both ground-based and airborne systems and wants solutions that can scale across distributed sensor networks with centralized data aggregation, analysis, and visualization.
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The FAA is also asking industry to identify the maturity of available solutions, from design and development through operational and commercially deployable systems. Respondents are to identify whether they would participate as technology developers, systems integrators, service providers, or system operators. The agency is also seeking industry input on potential acquisition approaches, including purchasing the capability as a service.
The Industry Engagement Day will include an initial unclassified session available in person or online, followed by a Secret-level session restricted to appropriately cleared participants attending in person. Vendor one-on-one sessions may be unclassified or Secret-level. The event will be held at The MITRE Corp. in McLean, Va.
Companies seeking to participate must register by 25 Sept. 2026. Registration can be performed at https://na.eventscloud.com/888200. More information is available at https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/68b0a7a7372c43cbb0aa39be5b06c19b/view.
