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Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

499 points by dzdt 2mo ago

dolmen 2mo ago
> a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico Roswell. Blaming GPS jaming and the military? What about the aliens?
upofadown 2mo ago
A rehash of the paywalled Wired article: * https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-signal-medical-flight https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-...
- inemesitaffia 2mo ago
  It's not a rehash. It's an article, like wired but worse. That leaves you worse off for having read it.
jcalvinowens 2mo ago
The preliminary NTSB report: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/GenerateNewestReport/202990/pdf https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...
- fusslo 2mo ago
  > At 0000:26, the ARTCC controller advised the flight crew that the airplane was at 13,000 ft msl, 1,000 ft above their assigned altitude. The pilot responded that they were correcting their altitude and that the airplane had lost GPS capability. The pilot stated they would need a heading > About 0005 the ARTCC operations supervisor contacted [the military] to stop jamming and at 0007:34 ADS-B data recording returned to 2-3 second intervals. > The flight crew again reported they “[have] a visual on Ruidoso” at 0008:30 and that they could “go visual.” > About 0010, the ARTCC operations supervisor informed [the military] that the airplane was on a visual approach and that they could resume jamming. > The airplane impacted terrain about 250 ft southwest of the last recorded data point at an elevation of about 9,950 ft, and about 730 ft east and 230 ft below the Capitan Mountains Summit Radio Facility, located at an elevation of about 10,180 ft. The image of the map from the report really helps me understand the path. It seems like the aircraft began visual approach and didn't know where it was, or didn't know about the mountain.
  - gpm 2mo ago
    Note that after the pilots said that they could go visual the preliminary report documents the following > The ARTCC controller subsequently cleared the flight to SRR, cleared the flight for a visual approach, and informed them they could cancel IFR in the air above 9,000 ft msl or they could cancel their clearance via the flight service station after landing. The flight crew acknowledged the clearance and responded that they would cancel IFR “in just a couple of minutes.” There were no additional radio transmissions received from the flight crew. It's not at all clear to me that they did go visual. They communicated that they intended to cancel instrument clearance later and that suggests they were still using it...
    - bri3d 2mo ago
      That's not how this works, at all. Visual approach is a specific IFR procedure. It's basically designed to expedite and simplify the landing process in situations where the pilot can see the airport and traffic allows - instead of flying a detailed set of waypoints provided by an approach plate (via RNAV/GPS, ILS/VOR/DME, or vectors), the pilot and ATC both agree "hey, you can see the runway and/or traffic, you got this now" and the pilot lands. By asking for a visual approach and getting approved, then not subsequently asking for another approach, the PIC was flying visually. There's nothing more to it. There's no nuance or gotcha here, and nothing seems procedurally incorrect or even out of the ordinary. "Canceling" IFR just means concluding the flight plan and "closing the file;" which they were given the option to do in the air or on the ground, but it's not relevant to the approach they chose to fly. The root cause of this incident is clearly pilot error; the pilot specifically chose to fly a visual approach without adequate visual reference and descended into terrain. There are proximate causes too, which may or may not relate to the GPS jamming and for which more information is required. For example - did the pilot choose to request the visual approach because they didn't want to fly an RNAV approach in case GPS was inaccurate, or because they didn't want to burden ATC? or did they just choose the visual approach because they could see the airport and it's easier that way? Was this in line with any guidelines from their operator? We don't know that yet. And there's some chance that without GPS jamming, a secondary safety system (GPWS, moving map, etc.) may have saved the pilots from their decision. But these things are all secondary.
Arodex 2mo ago
I have absolutely no love for the US Army under its current Secretary of "war", but here the problem was with the air ambulance pilot(s). Sorry to blame people who died, who do important service for remote places under hard time constraints, but there has been fundamental errors on their side: https://bsky.app/profile/mikeblack114.bsky.social/post/3mruxzp4sjc2c https://bsky.app/profile/mikeblack114.bsky.social/post/3mrux...
- hagbard_c 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - basisword 2mo ago
    You care enough to comment about it and ask them not to do it again because of, not only your feelings, but others too.
    - hagbard_c 2mo ago
      I care about keeping the discourse free from these virtue-signalling disclaimers, not about whatever you think you need to signal about. I consider it irrelevant whether you like or dislike this or that politician in this context and would prefer not to have such likes or dislikes interspersed between statements of fact. Let the facts speak for themselves and let polarising statements about politics and politicians be limited to discussions which actually concern such politics and politicians. That used to be how we discussed back in the day and it can be how we discuss in the future.
  - curt15 2mo ago
    The quotes are appropriate because only Congress, not executive action, can change the official name.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Congress has, through inaction, approved this
rbanffy 2mo ago
https://archive.ph/CECav https://archive.ph/CECav
gosub100 2mo ago
Blancolirio (YouTube aviation reporter and commercial pilot) analysis: https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?is=n0w5_tLCxEkYGtt9 https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?is=n0w5_tLCxEkYGtt9
VoidWhisperer 2mo ago
The final information on the crash almost reads like they hit the very top of the mountain - according to NTSB, they were about 200-250 ft from the summit, so it is possible they did still have visual with the airport until right before the impact. Whether or not GPS could've helped with this, I'm not sure - it might've allowed them to see where they were relative to the mountain better, since it was the middle of the night and so they probably couldn't see the mountain very well..
- colechristensen 2mo ago
  Your GPS enabled flight computer will indeed yell at you VERY LOUDLY if you're about to hit a mountain. It will not allow you to get particularly close to terrain without noticing.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
    I'm wondering what they could have done differently here. The report said it was a 0% moonlight night, extremely dark. No exact position from GPS, and visuals on the landing strip. That mountain peak would have likely been invisible from the pilot's seat. What would have been the "skill issue" difference people keep mentioning? It's getting really frustrating how reckless the US military is with the skies. They keep putting people in danger. I can't help but think about the DCA crash due to the continuity of government drills. There's no reason they should have been flying dark for a drill that night.
    - sokoloff 2mo ago
      This is a judgment issue more than a skill issue. GPS NOTAM'd as unreliable on a dark, moonless night? Fly the ILS approach (or fly a visual approach along the track of the ILS approach backing up your visual with the radio signals). That will give you terrain and obstacle clearance all along the route using locally generated navigation signals that will be entirely unaffected by GPS jamming. https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2607/06922IL24.PDF https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2607/06922IL24.PDF
mrngld 2mo ago
When I used to fly in Florida in the 2005-2015ish timeframe, NOTAMs for GPS interference (it didn't say that exactly but that's what it meant) were an everyday occurrence along my path, it became boilerplate. I experienced it a few times. One moment the GPS thinks you're plodding along next to Ocala, next moment it thinks I've teleported a thousand miles away, and then it'd just quit. But that's what we train for. That's why aircraft and pilots have redundancy to work around any single possible point of failure and why you practice it until it becomes natural. Because of the NOTAM I'd already have a VOR tuned in, and once the GPS went inop I just fine tuned it to get a radial fix on the VOR. Also tried to never lose my bearings with my MK I Eyeballs either. No big deal. I feel bad for everyone that lost their lives here, but this is why competence is critical. There's a litany of errors the pilots made. And the article tries to pin a bit on the controller, but no, ultimate responsibility is on the pilot in command, FAR/AIM is clear on that. If these allegedly instrument rated pilots had been properly drilled by their CFI's and properly grilled during reviews and such this should've been an easy flight. Also, "just ask Kennedy". Wired bringing that into the conversation is perhaps relevant but not in the way I think they intended. JFK Jr lacked basic airmanship skills. His aircraft was 100% functional until the moment it impacted the ocean. Some professions simply can't be go-along-to-get-along social clubs. Safety culture centered on competence and performance is key.
- colechristensen 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - SecretDreams 2mo ago
    I agree with your perspective re: the tone of the OP. But they hold a perspective that we should also give credence towards. Your main point is the most valid - wait for the final report. But you should be saying the same to the article as written. Prelim report: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/GenerateNewestReport/202990/pdf https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G... Out of my scope to infer.
  - 1123581321 2mo ago
K0balt 2mo ago
GPS is not essential to air navigation. It’s nice to have, and there are some approaches that legally require it to be operational in order to fly them (IFR procedures) but aviation has other systems in place to guide aircraft under conditions where visual flight navigation is impossible. In this case, IMHO, the pilots had become complacent and lax in their navigational rigor because of the fact that GPS makes a lot of the slightly less automated systems unnecessary, and people get used to that workflow. If the flight crew had been looking at their map and using it to inform them about the mountains in their path, fixing position by the VOR and DME, or even just a stopwatch and compass heading, they would have easily known they needed to be at a higher altitude. Not being precisely sure of their exact position, they should have at least been maintaining the minimum safe altitude for the area they knew they were in. But unfortunately, people get so used to looking at the shiny screen giving them effortless situational awareness that they forget all of the rules and habits that kept pilots alive for the last century before glass cockpits were a thing, and they forget that mountains are the tigers of the air, always waiting to catch pilots unaware. This is a useful cautionary tale not only for pilots, but increasingly for humans in general as we become accustomed to a new kind of instrument that allows us to offload a great deal of our cognitive focus to a tool that may sometimes fail.
- scrlk 2mo ago
  To add to this, there's a good lecture called Children of the Magenta Line that discusses automation dependency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
  - teddyh 2mo ago
    Better version: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIusD6Z-3cU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIusD6Z-3cU>
- lbriner 2mo ago
  This was the partial cause of Air France 447. Pilots were so used to "the plane won't make a mistake" that they were not aware/not trained properly about things that are nothing to do with the FMS like frozen pitot tubes and also that the autopilot has a number of "modes" which mean you need to go back to basics like altitude, attitude and air speed.
fryanyway_swe 2mo ago
We have a competency crisis that will only get worse and worse. I myself am guilty of it. Modern life is too comfortable, there is no need to fight through and put in the hours to be an expert when you can do 50% and get 90% of the paychecke. Pilots train to navigate without GPS. Or, rather, they should...
- jeffbee 2mo ago
  There's always a competency shortage in this kind of aviation because the crew are inexperienced people trying to get a higher rating and a better job. The big transport aircraft are so easy to fly now, they should probably switch the rules. They can let some kid fly second seat in a 737, but only crack veterans should be allowed to touch a King Air in the dark.
  - streetfighter64 2mo ago
    In Europe the problem is already pretty solved because you can get a MPL and fly right seat in a passenger jet in 245 flight hours, just by going through an airline cadet program or something like that. If I'm not mistaken the US still has the 1500 hour requirement that was illogical even when it was first introduced. It was introduced as a response to a crash by poorly trained pilots, but both pilots in that crash had over 2000 hours each, so the lesson should clearly have been that a raw number of hours is a very poor indicator of competence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_transport_pilot_licence#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_transport_pilot_licenc...
  - meatmanek 2mo ago
    > They can let some kid fly second seat in a 737, but only crack veterans should be allowed to touch a King Air in the dark. This is similar to the conclusion from one of the blancolirio videos about this crash[1]: > The operation that dispatched this flight should have never dispatched this flight in the first place to begin with. There are simply too many variables working against you to accept this flight. And in my opinion, this is another classic situation where we're losing a lot of young pilots just trying to build up flying time to that magic 1500 hours to get on to a better job and a better future with the airlines. In my opinion, we should have never implemented the 1500 hour rule. These kids would have been much better off if they had been hired by the airlines at 500 hours and been trained and kept in a safer, more controlled environment in the right seat of the airline that they're going to work for for the rest of their career while they build up their time there to get to 1500 hours, where they can then get their ATP rating and then upgrade to the left seat; instead of sending all of our young pilots out there to do all kinds of risky flying operations in an effort to build up the magical 1500 hours as required by a knee-jerk reaction by Congress to assuage the family members of the Colgan Air crash victims. Get rid of the 1500-hour rule. 1. https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?t=977 https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?t=977
Ekaros 2mo ago
Makes one think about "flying cars". How well designed they will be for losing such system? How reliable any systems would be in such eventuality. For both safety of the craft and anyone near them or on ground... Especially if there is other things going on like weather conditions. Say both heavy fog and rain.
- inemesitaffia 2mo ago
  There are alternate navigation systems from SpaceX, OneWeb etc in the pipeline.
lettergram 2mo ago
After reading the story, it seems like lack of training. I think training should assume GPS goes out (which it does), in this case they didn’t pull up when they saw “lights going out” as a mountain became between them and the airfield. Air traffic control also failed here.
- lbriner 2mo ago
  Air traffic control have a very specific remit and it isn't as comprehensive as people assume. You can have "no service", "radar service" and "full service" and what they will advise you about is limited, usually, to spacing or procedural errors like "you should be less than 220 knots". A controller who has the capacity to spot something that seems off like a wrong heading or altitude might ask the plane if they are OK, but unless they are deviating from a flight plan in controlled airspace, they are more likely to assume VFR and pilot knows best.
seatac76 2mo ago
The loss is tragic but I’m sorry GPS jamming was not a factor here. There was a NOTAM indicating it’s going on, the pilots should have been aware and it appears when they reached out with a request the jamming was stopped. It was a visual approach at a moonless night at an airport in high terrain, this was pilot error unfortunately.
- sokoloff 2mo ago
  I'll bet that the NTSB will list GPS jamming as a contributing factor. I agree with you that it's not the primary cause of the accident.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Luckily, aviation investigations haven't concluded with "pilot error" for over half a century, or else there would be a lot more accidents as we never fixed any of the actual causes and just blamed the dead pilots.
  - wat10000 2mo ago
    Sure they do. Go search recent NTSB reports and you'll see it. Normally it's described a bit more elaborately, e.g. "The pilot’s failure to maintain a proper glidepath during landing which resulted in a landing short of the runway." But there are plenty of modern reports that do nothing but blame the pilot. Certainly it's a lot less common than it used to be. There's a bigger push to find underlying causes that can be fixed, and not just say "the pilot forgot to perform a crucial step out of the several dozen crucial pre-flight items they were supposed to have committed to memory, sucks to be them" or whatever. But sometimes it really is "the pilot did a dumb and shouldn't have," especially for smaller planes with less experienced pilots.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      And why did the pilot fail to maintain a proper glide path? If he was drunk, then sure, pilot error. If he was insufficiently trained, why did he think that he had a sufficient level of training for this flight? If he had too much get-there-itis, is there anything in the training that could help prevent that? Seems there is surely potential training changes relating to GPS dependence.
bdavbdav 2mo ago
It feels like if you know how far away the strip is (sounds like they did), and can get a bearing on it, they should be all set… with no GPS they should presumably have had even stronger eyes on the charts. Back when i used to sail, taking bearings with a sighting compass on two points on land / two buoys always gave you a fairly accurate position. Not sure if there is a sighting compass equivalent with elevation angle too on planes?
brainlessdev 2mo ago
The animation at the top is worryingly misleading. The airplane that crashed was a Beechcraft twin turboprop, and the plane maneuvered a couple of times before crashing. It had 4 people inside it. The animation uses what looks like an airliner, and shows the jamming as a sort of bubble that directly sends the airplane into a crash. I found it disturbing when I looked at it, it does not represent the story well, and I think that's irresponsible.
- croisillon 2mo ago
  thanks for your comment, i went to open TFA :)
emilburzo 2mo ago
I actually experienced GPS spoofing while paragliding near Ukraine, luckily in the daytime. I don't even want to imagine it at night on a rescue mission. Condolences to the occupants. It's quite easy to say "no big deal" while calm in an office, but it's really different when you're busy flying and then there's the extra workload of trying to understand what's happening, attempting to fix it, and so on. Imagine "debug bug in production while driving a car" for a rough comparison, although I guess planes are probably better equipped for loss of GPS? https://blog.emilburzo.com/2026/06/gps-spoofing-teleported-me-to-peru-while-flying/ https://blog.emilburzo.com/2026/06/gps-spoofing-teleported-m...
iberator 2mo ago
[flagged]
billwear 2mo ago
I guess there’s no way to constrain these jamming signals to some reasonable perimeter? 400 miles of overspill seems like sloppy engineering.
- sokoloff 2mo ago
  The satellite GPS signals are incredibly weak. Individual GPS signals typically arrive at the antenna below the receiver’s thermal noise floor and the system relies on processing gain in the receiver to generate a fix.
- entrope 2mo ago
  Depends on the source and what you're trying to exercise. M-Code and spot beams are supposed to provide something like 20 dB of jamming resistance, and if your jammer is not right next to the target then the jamming could be a factor a long way off. (For reference, a target 40 miles from a jammer would see ~20 dB more interference than a target 400 miles away. White Sands Missile Range is 3200 square miles, but much longer north-south than east-west.)
harshreality 2mo ago
Missing from the article is that, once the pilots reported to ATC that GPS was inoperable, ATC was going to have them circle to the right and guide them along the ILS approach, which would've avoided the worst of the mountains. ATC also asked the military to stop GPS jamming, which they did for a brief while... and the pilots probably noticed GPS start working again... except... Instead, the pilots saw the airport visually and requested a visual approach. ATC cleared them, and told the military they could resume GPS jamming, meaning any terrain awareness warning system the pilots might have had or been relying on would no longer work. The visual approach involved a left turn and descending directly over the mountains. blancolirio's video about this (second one, after the prelim investigation report): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM He focuses on the fact that both instrument approaches were impossible under the conditions; gps jamming made RNAV impossible, and an inoperable weather broadcasting system at the destination made ILS impossible. The alternative, visual approach in mountainous terrain on a moonless night, is clearly unwise for inexperienced pilots. One thing he doesn't mention, though, is that ATC could have waited until the plane was on the ground to tell the military they could resume GPS jamming, knowing this was a medevac flight lacking the usual planning and level of caution of typical pilots.
- otekengineering 2mo ago
  > ATC could have waited until the plane was on the ground to tell the military they could resume GPS jamming He hinted at this when he mentioned that ATC was dealing with other flights complaining about loss of GPS and coordinating with white sands. ATC crew were probably just out of their depth and trying their best, same as the flight crew. I wonder what the experience level of the ATC crew was and how much pressure they were getting from white sands to keep the jamming up.
- trelane 2mo ago
  > The alternative, visual approach in mountainous terrain on a moonless night, is clearly unwise for inexperienced pilots. There is not only one alternative. When presented with two impossible (per your telling) options for landing, you choose option C: don't.
inoffensivename 2mo ago
Airline captain here... A visual approach to an airport in mountainous terrain on a moonless night is very risky. In our operation, departing to an airport with missing weather reports would not be permitted, so in a Part 121 scheduled service this flight may not have been able to dispatch legally. Airliners have DME/DME triangulation which allows them to achieve area navigation (RNAV) without GPS. The interference would have precluded a GPS approach but may have left the GPWS ("Terrain! Terrain!") alerts unaffected. In this case the ILS was not available, but only because the local altimeter setting was not available. In this case I could accept a visual approach, but use the ILS to provide lateral and vertical guidance towards the runway. There are many things I have learned about flying from years at the airlines that I would have had to learn the hard way at a Part 135 or Part 91 operation. One of those things would have been when to say "no". Take the airplane to a mountainous airport with missing weather reports at night with NOTAM'd GPS interference? No. Do a visual approach on a moonless night with no GPS for terrain awareness? No. Fly the ILS even if it's NOTAM'd out.
- bombcar 2mo ago
  It was hammered into me that moonless nights could be as or MORE dangerous to me than flying into weather - at least when you fly into a cloud you KNOW you're fucked.
- scott00 2mo ago
  Would using the ILS without the local altimeter actually be a safe way to land the plane? (Ignoring whether or not ATC is allowed to give you clearance for that.) Is the requirement of a local altimeter just overly cautious?
  - sokoloff 2mo ago
    It would be safe. The ILS projects a localizer signal (left/right deviation compared to runway alignment) and glideslope signal (up/down deviation versus the intended flight path, usually about 3°). The only thing you need a precision altimeter setting for is to determine the safe decision altitude (point at which you need to see the runway environment to continue, else initiate a missed approach) and a fairly theoretical chance to intercept a false glideslope lobe. With the clear weather, knowing the decision altitude with precision was not important and the false glideslope is easy to identify by comparing outside view and descent rate needed to stay on the glideslope.
ck2 2mo ago
could spread-spectrum GPS solve this or would military just jam all frequencies how about ANS (aka R2-D2) the 1960s version of GPS that used stars instead of stars, preload all the known positions of LEO constellations can they put this on a single chip 60 years later? * https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-why-r2-d2-the-sr-71-astroinertial-navigation-system-was-essential-for-blackbird-mission/ https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-why-r2-d2-the-sr-71-as...
- upofadown 2mo ago
  GPS is direct sequence spread spectrum. You might be thinking of frequency hopping, jamming that is harder, but you are only working against super weak signals from satellites. It would still be quite possible.
bitlevel 2mo ago
The sooner Quantum Navigation (and its ilk) become the norm, the sooner GPS can take a backseat. https://q-ctrl.com/blog/q-ctrl-to-showcase-worlds-first-airworthiness-qualified-quantum-navigation-gps-backup-at-the-farnborough-international-airshow https://q-ctrl.com/blog/q-ctrl-to-showcase-worlds-first-airw...
Paaul01 2mo ago
[flagged]
zelias 2mo ago
Remember Moab!
rob74 2mo ago
Unfortunately I can't access the article, but this video by Juan Browne (IMHO one of the most knowledgeable and no-nonsense aviation YouTubers) also provides a very good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM What I found shocking is that there are so few road ambulances in that region that medevac flights are routinely ordered for transporting patients to keep ambulances available in case there is a road accident (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM&t=95s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM&t=95s). Seems like a huge waste of resources to me...
- 2PqboPPmKegvanx 2mo ago
  Neither here nor there but that whole upper NE corner of the state only has a handful of hospitals - in part because there just aren't that many people who live there. NMLEG map of counties and population | https://www.nmlegis.gov/publications/handbook/counties.pdf https://www.nmlegis.gov/publications/handbook/counties.pdf wiki 2020 census map | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/New_Mexico_population_density_2020.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/New_Mexi...
- Ostrogoth 2mo ago
  I’ve spent a lot of time exploring that area of NM, and it’s incredibly rugged or desolate terrain, with low population levels that are very dispersed. Mostly ranches and wilderness. There is a reason why the military does exercises there.
bogzz 2mo ago
The ridiculously criminal government of the Banana Republic of Serbia last year used this technique to prevent drones from being able to take video of a 300,000+ person protest in Belgrade. They spoofed the GPS signal to make the drones think they were flying near the Nikola Tesla Airport nearby so that they would autonomously land. https://ground.news/article/lazni-signali-rusili-dronove-avionima-defendant-pogresne-lokacije-ko-ometa-gps-nad-srbijom_2c76bb https://ground.news/article/lazni-signali-rusili-dronove-avi...
- roysting 2mo ago
  [dead]
bell-cot 2mo ago
Critical bits of the article: This is an extremely rare cause of fatalities (in the US), and the fatal flight was very high risk without the GPS blocking. > It's worth taking a closer look at what happened last May. While the Ruidoso crash was the first fatal accident in the US known to be linked to electronic warfare, there’s no reason to think it will be the last. > Even absent GPS jamming, medevac is one of the most dangerous categories of civil aviation. (Kreindler, a law firm specializing in air crash litigation, says that medevac flights have an accident rate more similar to combat flying than to civil aviation.) Flights are often organized on short notice, and they fly into airstrips that might be unfamiliar to the flight crew, and because human lives are at stake, there is an incentive to fly when weather conditions are marginal. > Some of those factors were at play on the night of May 13. At 11 pm, the crew was notified that they had to fly to Ruidoso to pick up a patient and bring them to Albuquerque. The pilots were captain Keelan Clark, aged 30, and first officer Ali Kawsara, aged 23. Clark had gotten his commercial pilot’s license just a year and a half before; he’d been promoted from first officer to captain the previous month. Kawsara had just two months on the job. He’d only worked cargo jobs before this one.
shevy-java 2mo ago
Well, only solution really is to not depend on other countries here. Mexico is large enough to use their own satellites and if they want to do it not alone they can possibly on-board Brazil, Canada and so forth. It is tragic that the USA is so ruthless here that civilians suffer, but at the end of the day the question is how much dependent one wants to be on an increasingly selfish and aggressive USA. Canada understood the problem domain even though it is hard to change (most Canadians live close to the US border, just look at the population density, that deadlocks trade already to a huge inter-dependency); Mexiko has not yet thought this through.
- jolmg 2mo ago
  This story doesn't involve Mexico at all. New Mexico is a US state.
deleted 2mo ago
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Magicrafter13 2mo ago
If the sky was clear, as the article states, then lack of GPS is not a good enough excuse for a trained pilot to crash into a mountain, unless the cockpit has no windows. It's not fun to lose GPS, but, a trained pilot ought to have been able to handle this situation fine. All instruments can fail, but weather notwithstanding, no instruments are required to land a plane back down on a runway (implied in my statement is that, if you lose all your instruments, you should still try to land rather than continue your flight). At the end of the day, if you aren't proficient in VFR, then your IFR proficiency doesn't mean much. Hopefully this pushes the relevant flight schools to do more training, because this crash appears highly avoidable - and while the pilots take some amount of blame since they are behind the controls, there are also people who failed them by not giving them sufficient training.
- aftbit 2mo ago
  I thought this at first, but then read farther and realized the flight started at 11pm on a moonless night. An unlit mountain is hard to see at night.
  - Magicrafter13 2mo ago
    That's valid. I wouldn't call that a clear sky, personally, but I suppose it can still be considered one.
    - wat10000 2mo ago
      This is a real issue, where conditions that are legally considered sufficiently clear for visual flying aren't necessarily safe for it. A famous example is JFK Jr. He was flying over water on a hazy night with poor illumination without an instrument rating. This was considered clear and was perfectly legal, but he got disoriented and crashed into the ocean. It's hammered into pilots that safe and legal are two different things, and you must evaluate whether the conditions are something that you can actually handle safely, not merely whether you're legal to fly in them.
- _moof 2mo ago
bootlicker69 2mo ago
[flagged]
jjwiseman 2mo ago
I run GPSJAM.org, have been studying and tracking the effects of GPS interference on aviation for the past 5 years, and I was a source for this article. I'm not a pilot and I don't work for any aviation agency. I'm very curious to see what the final NTSB report says, but their preliminary report along with commentary from other analysts seems to show that this was a crew that made bad choices and died because of it. It also seems to show that GPS interference was a contributing factor to the accident, and that they'd likely be alive if the U.S. military hadn't been jamming GPS. I think pilots need to be prepared to fly without GNSS, and also it might be a bad idea for the military to regularly deny GPS to thousands of civilian aircraft with tens or hundreds of thousands of passengers. Lack of GPS isn't a critical safety issue, but it is a safety issue. GPS interference removes options, hurts situational awareness, disables or degrades other safety equipment (like TAWS, the Terrain Awareness and Warning System that is specifically designed to warn pilots that they're about to hit a mountain), and adds to crew and ATC workload and distraction. Saying that this situation is what pilots train for and they should have just used VORs and ILS reveals an overly macho, unsophisticated understanding of aviation safety. We've added GPS, ADS-B, TCAS, GPWS, TAWS, etc. because they make flight safer. The airline industry and governments are concerned about GPS interference because of the aviation safety issues--if you're not concerned, you're thinking about the problem in a very narrow way ("I would never have trouble if my GPS died."). In fact they think it's an urgent problem. 2024: "Aviation sector seeks urgent solutions for GPS interference" https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aviation-sector-seeks-urgent-solutions-gps-interference-2024-01-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aviation-... From a 2023 presentation by Eurocontrol at the UN International Committee on GNSS/Interference Detection and Mitigation https://rntfnd.org/wp-content/uploads/Aviation-GNSS-interference-UN-ICG-WGS-IDM-ECTL-GNSS-RFI-SEP23.pdf https://rntfnd.org/wp-content/uploads/Aviation-GNSS-interfer...: • GPS Problem reports dominate over all other type of safety reports • Redundant systems are the only reason why aviation has been able to maintain normal operations despite GNSS RFI! • GNSS integrated into many systems; exact RFI impact difficult to predict, manufacturers had to issue aircraft specific guidance → Complexity and workload increase Aviation Safety Impact • Aviation Safety is built on two main principles: • Trust your instruments • Follow standard operating procedure • GNSS RFI causes pilots to have to question both principles! • Chief Operations Officer of one major airline: Navigation is not my problem. My problem is “normalization of deviance”! • Incidents have occurred simply due to pilot distraction because of having to deal with too many system alerts The U.S. military jamming GPS of civilian aircraft is a situation where there have been several close calls before this incident and experts have been saying for years that if the military keeps doing this, even with NOTAMs, people will get hurt and then that prediction tragically came true. From 2021, "FAA Files Reveal a Surprising Threat to Airline Safety: The U.S. Military GPS Tests" https://spectrum.ieee.org/faa-files-reveal-a-surprising-threat-to-airline-safety-the-us-militarys-gps-tests https://spectrum.ieee.org/faa-files-reveal-a-surprising-thre...: Early one morning last May, a commercial airliner was approaching El Paso International Airport, in West Texas, when a warning popped up in the cockpit: “GPS Position Lost.” The pilot contacted the airline’s operations center and received a report that the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range, in South Central New Mexico, was disrupting the GPS signal. “We knew then that it was not an aircraft GPS fault,” the pilot wrote later. The pilot missed an approach on one runway due to high winds, then came around to try again. “We were forced to Runway 04 with a predawn landing with no access to [an instrument landing] with vertical guidance,” the pilot wrote. “Runway 04…has a high CFIT threat due to the climbing terrain in the local area.” Also This is far from the most worrying ASRS report involving GPS jamming. In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute intervention of an air traffic controller. “Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their equipment are working as intended, but are in fact leading them into the side of the mountain,” wrote the controller. “Had [we] not noticed, that flight crew and the passengers would be dead. I have no doubt.” Here's what an air traffic controller with 18 years of experience wrote about WSMR GPS interference in 2024: "Someone will get hurt ignoring the pilot reports or deciding for pilots how much equipment can fail or be unreliable before they 'agree' or decide to stop GPS jamming." https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/docs/rpsts/ctlr.pdf https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/docs/rpsts/ctlr.pdf
ge96 2mo ago
Can anybody explain what the visual is, what are the dots moving/getting blown around by something
git-nebulous 2mo ago
The civilian uses for GPS are obvious and as a pilot I'm more than pleased to make use of it. But... the military is jamming a military product that happens to have civilian uses. It's not flying the plane. That's like saying "heavy rain crashes car"
hnburnsy 2mo ago
From the NTSB today... >NTSB Statement: The NTSB is actively investigating the crash of a Beechcraft King Air operating as a medevac flight near Ruidoso, New Mexico on May 14. The NTSB has not yet determined the probable cause or any contributing factors to the accident. NTSB investigators collect, validate and analyze all available evidence before reaching any conclusions. We encourage members of the media covering accidents under NTSB investigation to contact the agency with questions about the process or status of an investigation to help ensure accurate reporting. Read the preliminary report, which contains factual information gathered during the on-scene portion of the investigation, on our website: https://web.ntsb.gov/investigations/?ntsbnumber=WPR26FA186 https://web.ntsb.gov/investigations/?ntsbnumber=WPR26FA186
collabs 2mo ago
I don't know how to phrase it in military lingo but based on what I've read here on this thread, the military must stop these tests. 1. Use self contained "unit tests" or "dry runs" if you will for day to day scheduled or training purposes 2. Do precise (far fewer) "end to end" tests only where justified like for new hardware certification, never for shits and giggles
- inemesitaffia 2mo ago
  These tests are likely older than you and occur on a scheduled regular basis. As the report pointed out, you can even have the tests stop if you can't fly without GPS (i.e you're unqualified to fly or your backup instruments have failed) by talking to ATC regardless.
_moof 2mo ago
Lack of GPS was one factor here, but poor judgment was the real killer. Flying a visual approach at night into a field surrounded by unlit mountains is suicidal. There's a saying among medevac pilots when it comes to making go/no-go decisions: don't turn one tragedy into five.
dotfrag 2mo ago
I came here just to say I hate sites like Wired. Seriously... if you're going to post an article, don't make people pay someone to read it. It's just stupid...
aucisson_masque 2mo ago
What I did read is that a young inexperienced pilot was way too reliant on technology. Issue was on pilot training and the company that put 2 inexperienced pilot together.
- Ostrogoth 2mo ago
  I tend to agree. After reading the events that lead to the crash, there does seem to be a lack of experience and critical thinking. Crash location is 33.60682, -105.35674, approximately 10 miles approach from northeast to runway 33.466583, -105.521560. They allegedly had visual on runway lights before jamming resumed. Seems like they were likely unfamiliar with the terrain, and descended too low on approach, crashing into the mountain ridge line. Obviously that’s compounded by the gps jamming, but shouldn’t they have known the relative location of the aircraft based on speed and altitude?
linzhangrun 2mo ago
Regardless, a single GPS failure shouldn't cause a plane crash. Civil aviation is known for its redundancy.
burnt-resistor 2mo ago
The Phenom EMB-300 has/had a Dutch roll problem with loss of GPS, but there were some software updates that somewhat addressed it. https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Notice/GENOT_7110_711_EMB-300.pdf https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Notice/GENOT_7110_... https://www.faasafety.gov/files/notices/2016/Jun/CHLK_16-08_GPS_Flight_Advisory.pdf https://www.faasafety.gov/files/notices/2016/Jun/CHLK_16-08_...
kdmoyers 2mo ago
I wonder if the military could simulate a gps failure for their own purposes without actually breaking it for everyone? Like a gizmo in each military plane that simulates gps failure for that plane only. I understand this would be complicated, especially for large exercises, but would have several advantages.
jewsdid9eleven 2mo ago
[dead]

499 points by dzdt 2mo ago

> a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico Roswell. Blaming GPS jaming and the military? What about the aliens?

upofadown 2mo ago

A rehash of the paywalled Wired article: * https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-signal-medical-flight https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-...

inemesitaffia 2mo ago
It's not a rehash. It's an article, like wired but worse. That leaves you worse off for having read it.

jcalvinowens 2mo ago

The preliminary NTSB report: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/GenerateNewestReport/202990/pdf https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...

fusslo 2mo ago
> At 0000:26, the ARTCC controller advised the flight crew that the airplane was at 13,000 ft msl, 1,000 ft above their assigned altitude. The pilot responded that they were correcting their altitude and that the airplane had lost GPS capability. The pilot stated they would need a heading > About 0005 the ARTCC operations supervisor contacted [the military] to stop jamming and at 0007:34 ADS-B data recording returned to 2-3 second intervals. > The flight crew again reported they “[have] a visual on Ruidoso” at 0008:30 and that they could “go visual.” > About 0010, the ARTCC operations supervisor informed [the military] that the airplane was on a visual approach and that they could resume jamming. > The airplane impacted terrain about 250 ft southwest of the last recorded data point at an elevation of about 9,950 ft, and about 730 ft east and 230 ft below the Capitan Mountains Summit Radio Facility, located at an elevation of about 10,180 ft. The image of the map from the report really helps me understand the path. It seems like the aircraft began visual approach and didn't know where it was, or didn't know about the mountain.
- gpm 2mo ago
  Note that after the pilots said that they could go visual the preliminary report documents the following > The ARTCC controller subsequently cleared the flight to SRR, cleared the flight for a visual approach, and informed them they could cancel IFR in the air above 9,000 ft msl or they could cancel their clearance via the flight service station after landing. The flight crew acknowledged the clearance and responded that they would cancel IFR “in just a couple of minutes.” There were no additional radio transmissions received from the flight crew. It's not at all clear to me that they did go visual. They communicated that they intended to cancel instrument clearance later and that suggests they were still using it...
  - bri3d 2mo ago
    That's not how this works, at all. Visual approach is a specific IFR procedure. It's basically designed to expedite and simplify the landing process in situations where the pilot can see the airport and traffic allows - instead of flying a detailed set of waypoints provided by an approach plate (via RNAV/GPS, ILS/VOR/DME, or vectors), the pilot and ATC both agree "hey, you can see the runway and/or traffic, you got this now" and the pilot lands. By asking for a visual approach and getting approved, then not subsequently asking for another approach, the PIC was flying visually. There's nothing more to it. There's no nuance or gotcha here, and nothing seems procedurally incorrect or even out of the ordinary. "Canceling" IFR just means concluding the flight plan and "closing the file;" which they were given the option to do in the air or on the ground, but it's not relevant to the approach they chose to fly. The root cause of this incident is clearly pilot error; the pilot specifically chose to fly a visual approach without adequate visual reference and descended into terrain. There are proximate causes too, which may or may not relate to the GPS jamming and for which more information is required. For example - did the pilot choose to request the visual approach because they didn't want to fly an RNAV approach in case GPS was inaccurate, or because they didn't want to burden ATC? or did they just choose the visual approach because they could see the airport and it's easier that way? Was this in line with any guidelines from their operator? We don't know that yet. And there's some chance that without GPS jamming, a secondary safety system (GPWS, moving map, etc.) may have saved the pilots from their decision. But these things are all secondary.

Arodex 2mo ago

I have absolutely no love for the US Army under its current Secretary of "war", but here the problem was with the air ambulance pilot(s). Sorry to blame people who died, who do important service for remote places under hard time constraints, but there has been fundamental errors on their side: https://bsky.app/profile/mikeblack114.bsky.social/post/3mruxzp4sjc2c https://bsky.app/profile/mikeblack114.bsky.social/post/3mrux...

hagbard_c 2mo ago
[flagged]
- basisword 2mo ago
  You care enough to comment about it and ask them not to do it again because of, not only your feelings, but others too.
  - hagbard_c 2mo ago
    I care about keeping the discourse free from these virtue-signalling disclaimers, not about whatever you think you need to signal about. I consider it irrelevant whether you like or dislike this or that politician in this context and would prefer not to have such likes or dislikes interspersed between statements of fact. Let the facts speak for themselves and let polarising statements about politics and politicians be limited to discussions which actually concern such politics and politicians. That used to be how we discussed back in the day and it can be how we discuss in the future.
- curt15 2mo ago
  The quotes are appropriate because only Congress, not executive action, can change the official name.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Congress has, through inaction, approved this

rbanffy 2mo ago

https://archive.ph/CECav https://archive.ph/CECav

gosub100 2mo ago

Blancolirio (YouTube aviation reporter and commercial pilot) analysis: https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?is=n0w5_tLCxEkYGtt9 https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?is=n0w5_tLCxEkYGtt9

VoidWhisperer 2mo ago

The final information on the crash almost reads like they hit the very top of the mountain - according to NTSB, they were about 200-250 ft from the summit, so it is possible they did still have visual with the airport until right before the impact. Whether or not GPS could've helped with this, I'm not sure - it might've allowed them to see where they were relative to the mountain better, since it was the middle of the night and so they probably couldn't see the mountain very well..

colechristensen 2mo ago
Your GPS enabled flight computer will indeed yell at you VERY LOUDLY if you're about to hit a mountain. It will not allow you to get particularly close to terrain without noticing.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
  I'm wondering what they could have done differently here. The report said it was a 0% moonlight night, extremely dark. No exact position from GPS, and visuals on the landing strip. That mountain peak would have likely been invisible from the pilot's seat. What would have been the "skill issue" difference people keep mentioning? It's getting really frustrating how reckless the US military is with the skies. They keep putting people in danger. I can't help but think about the DCA crash due to the continuity of government drills. There's no reason they should have been flying dark for a drill that night.
  - sokoloff 2mo ago
    This is a judgment issue more than a skill issue. GPS NOTAM'd as unreliable on a dark, moonless night? Fly the ILS approach (or fly a visual approach along the track of the ILS approach backing up your visual with the radio signals). That will give you terrain and obstacle clearance all along the route using locally generated navigation signals that will be entirely unaffected by GPS jamming. https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2607/06922IL24.PDF https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2607/06922IL24.PDF

mrngld 2mo ago

When I used to fly in Florida in the 2005-2015ish timeframe, NOTAMs for GPS interference (it didn't say that exactly but that's what it meant) were an everyday occurrence along my path, it became boilerplate. I experienced it a few times. One moment the GPS thinks you're plodding along next to Ocala, next moment it thinks I've teleported a thousand miles away, and then it'd just quit. But that's what we train for. That's why aircraft and pilots have redundancy to work around any single possible point of failure and why you practice it until it becomes natural. Because of the NOTAM I'd already have a VOR tuned in, and once the GPS went inop I just fine tuned it to get a radial fix on the VOR. Also tried to never lose my bearings with my MK I Eyeballs either. No big deal. I feel bad for everyone that lost their lives here, but this is why competence is critical. There's a litany of errors the pilots made. And the article tries to pin a bit on the controller, but no, ultimate responsibility is on the pilot in command, FAR/AIM is clear on that. If these allegedly instrument rated pilots had been properly drilled by their CFI's and properly grilled during reviews and such this should've been an easy flight. Also, "just ask Kennedy". Wired bringing that into the conversation is perhaps relevant but not in the way I think they intended. JFK Jr lacked basic airmanship skills. His aircraft was 100% functional until the moment it impacted the ocean. Some professions simply can't be go-along-to-get-along social clubs. Safety culture centered on competence and performance is key.

colechristensen 2mo ago
[flagged]
- SecretDreams 2mo ago
  I agree with your perspective re: the tone of the OP. But they hold a perspective that we should also give credence towards. Your main point is the most valid - wait for the final report. But you should be saying the same to the article as written. Prelim report: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/GenerateNewestReport/202990/pdf https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G... Out of my scope to infer.
- 1123581321 2mo ago

K0balt 2mo ago

GPS is not essential to air navigation. It’s nice to have, and there are some approaches that legally require it to be operational in order to fly them (IFR procedures) but aviation has other systems in place to guide aircraft under conditions where visual flight navigation is impossible. In this case, IMHO, the pilots had become complacent and lax in their navigational rigor because of the fact that GPS makes a lot of the slightly less automated systems unnecessary, and people get used to that workflow. If the flight crew had been looking at their map and using it to inform them about the mountains in their path, fixing position by the VOR and DME, or even just a stopwatch and compass heading, they would have easily known they needed to be at a higher altitude. Not being precisely sure of their exact position, they should have at least been maintaining the minimum safe altitude for the area they knew they were in. But unfortunately, people get so used to looking at the shiny screen giving them effortless situational awareness that they forget all of the rules and habits that kept pilots alive for the last century before glass cockpits were a thing, and they forget that mountains are the tigers of the air, always waiting to catch pilots unaware. This is a useful cautionary tale not only for pilots, but increasingly for humans in general as we become accustomed to a new kind of instrument that allows us to offload a great deal of our cognitive focus to a tool that may sometimes fail.

scrlk 2mo ago
To add to this, there's a good lecture called Children of the Magenta Line that discusses automation dependency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
- teddyh 2mo ago
  Better version: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIusD6Z-3cU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIusD6Z-3cU>
lbriner 2mo ago
This was the partial cause of Air France 447. Pilots were so used to "the plane won't make a mistake" that they were not aware/not trained properly about things that are nothing to do with the FMS like frozen pitot tubes and also that the autopilot has a number of "modes" which mean you need to go back to basics like altitude, attitude and air speed.

fryanyway_swe 2mo ago

We have a competency crisis that will only get worse and worse. I myself am guilty of it. Modern life is too comfortable, there is no need to fight through and put in the hours to be an expert when you can do 50% and get 90% of the paychecke. Pilots train to navigate without GPS. Or, rather, they should...

jeffbee 2mo ago
There's always a competency shortage in this kind of aviation because the crew are inexperienced people trying to get a higher rating and a better job. The big transport aircraft are so easy to fly now, they should probably switch the rules. They can let some kid fly second seat in a 737, but only crack veterans should be allowed to touch a King Air in the dark.
- streetfighter64 2mo ago
  In Europe the problem is already pretty solved because you can get a MPL and fly right seat in a passenger jet in 245 flight hours, just by going through an airline cadet program or something like that. If I'm not mistaken the US still has the 1500 hour requirement that was illogical even when it was first introduced. It was introduced as a response to a crash by poorly trained pilots, but both pilots in that crash had over 2000 hours each, so the lesson should clearly have been that a raw number of hours is a very poor indicator of competence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_transport_pilot_licence#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_transport_pilot_licenc...
- meatmanek 2mo ago
  > They can let some kid fly second seat in a 737, but only crack veterans should be allowed to touch a King Air in the dark. This is similar to the conclusion from one of the blancolirio videos about this crash[1]: > The operation that dispatched this flight should have never dispatched this flight in the first place to begin with. There are simply too many variables working against you to accept this flight. And in my opinion, this is another classic situation where we're losing a lot of young pilots just trying to build up flying time to that magic 1500 hours to get on to a better job and a better future with the airlines. In my opinion, we should have never implemented the 1500 hour rule. These kids would have been much better off if they had been hired by the airlines at 500 hours and been trained and kept in a safer, more controlled environment in the right seat of the airline that they're going to work for for the rest of their career while they build up their time there to get to 1500 hours, where they can then get their ATP rating and then upgrade to the left seat; instead of sending all of our young pilots out there to do all kinds of risky flying operations in an effort to build up the magical 1500 hours as required by a knee-jerk reaction by Congress to assuage the family members of the Colgan Air crash victims. Get rid of the 1500-hour rule. 1. https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?t=977 https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?t=977

Ekaros 2mo ago

Makes one think about "flying cars". How well designed they will be for losing such system? How reliable any systems would be in such eventuality. For both safety of the craft and anyone near them or on ground... Especially if there is other things going on like weather conditions. Say both heavy fog and rain.

inemesitaffia 2mo ago
There are alternate navigation systems from SpaceX, OneWeb etc in the pipeline.

lettergram 2mo ago

After reading the story, it seems like lack of training. I think training should assume GPS goes out (which it does), in this case they didn’t pull up when they saw “lights going out” as a mountain became between them and the airfield. Air traffic control also failed here.

lbriner 2mo ago
Air traffic control have a very specific remit and it isn't as comprehensive as people assume. You can have "no service", "radar service" and "full service" and what they will advise you about is limited, usually, to spacing or procedural errors like "you should be less than 220 knots". A controller who has the capacity to spot something that seems off like a wrong heading or altitude might ask the plane if they are OK, but unless they are deviating from a flight plan in controlled airspace, they are more likely to assume VFR and pilot knows best.

seatac76 2mo ago

The loss is tragic but I’m sorry GPS jamming was not a factor here. There was a NOTAM indicating it’s going on, the pilots should have been aware and it appears when they reached out with a request the jamming was stopped. It was a visual approach at a moonless night at an airport in high terrain, this was pilot error unfortunately.

sokoloff 2mo ago
I'll bet that the NTSB will list GPS jamming as a contributing factor. I agree with you that it's not the primary cause of the accident.
inigyou 2mo ago
Luckily, aviation investigations haven't concluded with "pilot error" for over half a century, or else there would be a lot more accidents as we never fixed any of the actual causes and just blamed the dead pilots.
- wat10000 2mo ago
  Sure they do. Go search recent NTSB reports and you'll see it. Normally it's described a bit more elaborately, e.g. "The pilot’s failure to maintain a proper glidepath during landing which resulted in a landing short of the runway." But there are plenty of modern reports that do nothing but blame the pilot. Certainly it's a lot less common than it used to be. There's a bigger push to find underlying causes that can be fixed, and not just say "the pilot forgot to perform a crucial step out of the several dozen crucial pre-flight items they were supposed to have committed to memory, sucks to be them" or whatever. But sometimes it really is "the pilot did a dumb and shouldn't have," especially for smaller planes with less experienced pilots.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    And why did the pilot fail to maintain a proper glide path? If he was drunk, then sure, pilot error. If he was insufficiently trained, why did he think that he had a sufficient level of training for this flight? If he had too much get-there-itis, is there anything in the training that could help prevent that? Seems there is surely potential training changes relating to GPS dependence.

bdavbdav 2mo ago

It feels like if you know how far away the strip is (sounds like they did), and can get a bearing on it, they should be all set… with no GPS they should presumably have had even stronger eyes on the charts. Back when i used to sail, taking bearings with a sighting compass on two points on land / two buoys always gave you a fairly accurate position. Not sure if there is a sighting compass equivalent with elevation angle too on planes?

brainlessdev 2mo ago

The animation at the top is worryingly misleading. The airplane that crashed was a Beechcraft twin turboprop, and the plane maneuvered a couple of times before crashing. It had 4 people inside it. The animation uses what looks like an airliner, and shows the jamming as a sort of bubble that directly sends the airplane into a crash. I found it disturbing when I looked at it, it does not represent the story well, and I think that's irresponsible.

croisillon 2mo ago
thanks for your comment, i went to open TFA :)

emilburzo 2mo ago

I actually experienced GPS spoofing while paragliding near Ukraine, luckily in the daytime. I don't even want to imagine it at night on a rescue mission. Condolences to the occupants. It's quite easy to say "no big deal" while calm in an office, but it's really different when you're busy flying and then there's the extra workload of trying to understand what's happening, attempting to fix it, and so on. Imagine "debug bug in production while driving a car" for a rough comparison, although I guess planes are probably better equipped for loss of GPS? https://blog.emilburzo.com/2026/06/gps-spoofing-teleported-me-to-peru-while-flying/ https://blog.emilburzo.com/2026/06/gps-spoofing-teleported-m...

iberator 2mo ago

[flagged]

billwear 2mo ago

I guess there’s no way to constrain these jamming signals to some reasonable perimeter? 400 miles of overspill seems like sloppy engineering.

sokoloff 2mo ago
The satellite GPS signals are incredibly weak. Individual GPS signals typically arrive at the antenna below the receiver’s thermal noise floor and the system relies on processing gain in the receiver to generate a fix.
entrope 2mo ago
Depends on the source and what you're trying to exercise. M-Code and spot beams are supposed to provide something like 20 dB of jamming resistance, and if your jammer is not right next to the target then the jamming could be a factor a long way off. (For reference, a target 40 miles from a jammer would see ~20 dB more interference than a target 400 miles away. White Sands Missile Range is 3200 square miles, but much longer north-south than east-west.)

harshreality 2mo ago

Missing from the article is that, once the pilots reported to ATC that GPS was inoperable, ATC was going to have them circle to the right and guide them along the ILS approach, which would've avoided the worst of the mountains. ATC also asked the military to stop GPS jamming, which they did for a brief while... and the pilots probably noticed GPS start working again... except... Instead, the pilots saw the airport visually and requested a visual approach. ATC cleared them, and told the military they could resume GPS jamming, meaning any terrain awareness warning system the pilots might have had or been relying on would no longer work. The visual approach involved a left turn and descending directly over the mountains. blancolirio's video about this (second one, after the prelim investigation report): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM He focuses on the fact that both instrument approaches were impossible under the conditions; gps jamming made RNAV impossible, and an inoperable weather broadcasting system at the destination made ILS impossible. The alternative, visual approach in mountainous terrain on a moonless night, is clearly unwise for inexperienced pilots. One thing he doesn't mention, though, is that ATC could have waited until the plane was on the ground to tell the military they could resume GPS jamming, knowing this was a medevac flight lacking the usual planning and level of caution of typical pilots.

otekengineering 2mo ago
> ATC could have waited until the plane was on the ground to tell the military they could resume GPS jamming He hinted at this when he mentioned that ATC was dealing with other flights complaining about loss of GPS and coordinating with white sands. ATC crew were probably just out of their depth and trying their best, same as the flight crew. I wonder what the experience level of the ATC crew was and how much pressure they were getting from white sands to keep the jamming up.
trelane 2mo ago
> The alternative, visual approach in mountainous terrain on a moonless night, is clearly unwise for inexperienced pilots. There is not only one alternative. When presented with two impossible (per your telling) options for landing, you choose option C: don't.

inoffensivename 2mo ago

Airline captain here... A visual approach to an airport in mountainous terrain on a moonless night is very risky. In our operation, departing to an airport with missing weather reports would not be permitted, so in a Part 121 scheduled service this flight may not have been able to dispatch legally. Airliners have DME/DME triangulation which allows them to achieve area navigation (RNAV) without GPS. The interference would have precluded a GPS approach but may have left the GPWS ("Terrain! Terrain!") alerts unaffected. In this case the ILS was not available, but only because the local altimeter setting was not available. In this case I could accept a visual approach, but use the ILS to provide lateral and vertical guidance towards the runway. There are many things I have learned about flying from years at the airlines that I would have had to learn the hard way at a Part 135 or Part 91 operation. One of those things would have been when to say "no". Take the airplane to a mountainous airport with missing weather reports at night with NOTAM'd GPS interference? No. Do a visual approach on a moonless night with no GPS for terrain awareness? No. Fly the ILS even if it's NOTAM'd out.

bombcar 2mo ago
It was hammered into me that moonless nights could be as or MORE dangerous to me than flying into weather - at least when you fly into a cloud you KNOW you're fucked.
scott00 2mo ago
Would using the ILS without the local altimeter actually be a safe way to land the plane? (Ignoring whether or not ATC is allowed to give you clearance for that.) Is the requirement of a local altimeter just overly cautious?
- sokoloff 2mo ago
  It would be safe. The ILS projects a localizer signal (left/right deviation compared to runway alignment) and glideslope signal (up/down deviation versus the intended flight path, usually about 3°). The only thing you need a precision altimeter setting for is to determine the safe decision altitude (point at which you need to see the runway environment to continue, else initiate a missed approach) and a fairly theoretical chance to intercept a false glideslope lobe. With the clear weather, knowing the decision altitude with precision was not important and the false glideslope is easy to identify by comparing outside view and descent rate needed to stay on the glideslope.

ck2 2mo ago

could spread-spectrum GPS solve this or would military just jam all frequencies how about ANS (aka R2-D2) the 1960s version of GPS that used stars instead of stars, preload all the known positions of LEO constellations can they put this on a single chip 60 years later? * https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-why-r2-d2-the-sr-71-astroinertial-navigation-system-was-essential-for-blackbird-mission/ https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-why-r2-d2-the-sr-71-as...

upofadown 2mo ago
GPS is direct sequence spread spectrum. You might be thinking of frequency hopping, jamming that is harder, but you are only working against super weak signals from satellites. It would still be quite possible.

bitlevel 2mo ago

The sooner Quantum Navigation (and its ilk) become the norm, the sooner GPS can take a backseat. https://q-ctrl.com/blog/q-ctrl-to-showcase-worlds-first-airworthiness-qualified-quantum-navigation-gps-backup-at-the-farnborough-international-airshow https://q-ctrl.com/blog/q-ctrl-to-showcase-worlds-first-airw...

Paaul01 2mo ago

[flagged]

zelias 2mo ago

Remember Moab!

rob74 2mo ago

Unfortunately I can't access the article, but this video by Juan Browne (IMHO one of the most knowledgeable and no-nonsense aviation YouTubers) also provides a very good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM What I found shocking is that there are so few road ambulances in that region that medevac flights are routinely ordered for transporting patients to keep ambulances available in case there is a road accident (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM&t=95s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM&t=95s). Seems like a huge waste of resources to me...

2PqboPPmKegvanx 2mo ago
Neither here nor there but that whole upper NE corner of the state only has a handful of hospitals - in part because there just aren't that many people who live there. NMLEG map of counties and population | https://www.nmlegis.gov/publications/handbook/counties.pdf https://www.nmlegis.gov/publications/handbook/counties.pdf wiki 2020 census map | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/New_Mexico_population_density_2020.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/New_Mexi...
Ostrogoth 2mo ago
I’ve spent a lot of time exploring that area of NM, and it’s incredibly rugged or desolate terrain, with low population levels that are very dispersed. Mostly ranches and wilderness. There is a reason why the military does exercises there.

bogzz 2mo ago

The ridiculously criminal government of the Banana Republic of Serbia last year used this technique to prevent drones from being able to take video of a 300,000+ person protest in Belgrade. They spoofed the GPS signal to make the drones think they were flying near the Nikola Tesla Airport nearby so that they would autonomously land. https://ground.news/article/lazni-signali-rusili-dronove-avionima-defendant-pogresne-lokacije-ko-ometa-gps-nad-srbijom_2c76bb https://ground.news/article/lazni-signali-rusili-dronove-avi...

roysting 2mo ago
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bell-cot 2mo ago

Critical bits of the article: This is an extremely rare cause of fatalities (in the US), and the fatal flight was very high risk without the GPS blocking. > It's worth taking a closer look at what happened last May. While the Ruidoso crash was the first fatal accident in the US known to be linked to electronic warfare, there’s no reason to think it will be the last. > Even absent GPS jamming, medevac is one of the most dangerous categories of civil aviation. (Kreindler, a law firm specializing in air crash litigation, says that medevac flights have an accident rate more similar to combat flying than to civil aviation.) Flights are often organized on short notice, and they fly into airstrips that might be unfamiliar to the flight crew, and because human lives are at stake, there is an incentive to fly when weather conditions are marginal. > Some of those factors were at play on the night of May 13. At 11 pm, the crew was notified that they had to fly to Ruidoso to pick up a patient and bring them to Albuquerque. The pilots were captain Keelan Clark, aged 30, and first officer Ali Kawsara, aged 23. Clark had gotten his commercial pilot’s license just a year and a half before; he’d been promoted from first officer to captain the previous month. Kawsara had just two months on the job. He’d only worked cargo jobs before this one.

shevy-java 2mo ago

Well, only solution really is to not depend on other countries here. Mexico is large enough to use their own satellites and if they want to do it not alone they can possibly on-board Brazil, Canada and so forth. It is tragic that the USA is so ruthless here that civilians suffer, but at the end of the day the question is how much dependent one wants to be on an increasingly selfish and aggressive USA. Canada understood the problem domain even though it is hard to change (most Canadians live close to the US border, just look at the population density, that deadlocks trade already to a huge inter-dependency); Mexiko has not yet thought this through.

jolmg 2mo ago
This story doesn't involve Mexico at all. New Mexico is a US state.

deleted 2mo ago

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Magicrafter13 2mo ago

If the sky was clear, as the article states, then lack of GPS is not a good enough excuse for a trained pilot to crash into a mountain, unless the cockpit has no windows. It's not fun to lose GPS, but, a trained pilot ought to have been able to handle this situation fine. All instruments can fail, but weather notwithstanding, no instruments are required to land a plane back down on a runway (implied in my statement is that, if you lose all your instruments, you should still try to land rather than continue your flight). At the end of the day, if you aren't proficient in VFR, then your IFR proficiency doesn't mean much. Hopefully this pushes the relevant flight schools to do more training, because this crash appears highly avoidable - and while the pilots take some amount of blame since they are behind the controls, there are also people who failed them by not giving them sufficient training.

aftbit 2mo ago
I thought this at first, but then read farther and realized the flight started at 11pm on a moonless night. An unlit mountain is hard to see at night.
- Magicrafter13 2mo ago
  That's valid. I wouldn't call that a clear sky, personally, but I suppose it can still be considered one.
  - wat10000 2mo ago
    This is a real issue, where conditions that are legally considered sufficiently clear for visual flying aren't necessarily safe for it. A famous example is JFK Jr. He was flying over water on a hazy night with poor illumination without an instrument rating. This was considered clear and was perfectly legal, but he got disoriented and crashed into the ocean. It's hammered into pilots that safe and legal are two different things, and you must evaluate whether the conditions are something that you can actually handle safely, not merely whether you're legal to fly in them.
_moof 2mo ago

bootlicker69 2mo ago

[flagged]

jjwiseman 2mo ago

I run GPSJAM.org, have been studying and tracking the effects of GPS interference on aviation for the past 5 years, and I was a source for this article. I'm not a pilot and I don't work for any aviation agency. I'm very curious to see what the final NTSB report says, but their preliminary report along with commentary from other analysts seems to show that this was a crew that made bad choices and died because of it. It also seems to show that GPS interference was a contributing factor to the accident, and that they'd likely be alive if the U.S. military hadn't been jamming GPS. I think pilots need to be prepared to fly without GNSS, and also it might be a bad idea for the military to regularly deny GPS to thousands of civilian aircraft with tens or hundreds of thousands of passengers. Lack of GPS isn't a critical safety issue, but it is a safety issue. GPS interference removes options, hurts situational awareness, disables or degrades other safety equipment (like TAWS, the Terrain Awareness and Warning System that is specifically designed to warn pilots that they're about to hit a mountain), and adds to crew and ATC workload and distraction. Saying that this situation is what pilots train for and they should have just used VORs and ILS reveals an overly macho, unsophisticated understanding of aviation safety. We've added GPS, ADS-B, TCAS, GPWS, TAWS, etc. because they make flight safer. The airline industry and governments are concerned about GPS interference because of the aviation safety issues--if you're not concerned, you're thinking about the problem in a very narrow way ("I would never have trouble if my GPS died."). In fact they think it's an urgent problem. 2024: "Aviation sector seeks urgent solutions for GPS interference" https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aviation-sector-seeks-urgent-solutions-gps-interference-2024-01-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aviation-... From a 2023 presentation by Eurocontrol at the UN International Committee on GNSS/Interference Detection and Mitigation https://rntfnd.org/wp-content/uploads/Aviation-GNSS-interference-UN-ICG-WGS-IDM-ECTL-GNSS-RFI-SEP23.pdf https://rntfnd.org/wp-content/uploads/Aviation-GNSS-interfer...: • GPS Problem reports dominate over all other type of safety reports • Redundant systems are the only reason why aviation has been able to maintain normal operations despite GNSS RFI! • GNSS integrated into many systems; exact RFI impact difficult to predict, manufacturers had to issue aircraft specific guidance → Complexity and workload increase Aviation Safety Impact • Aviation Safety is built on two main principles: • Trust your instruments • Follow standard operating procedure • GNSS RFI causes pilots to have to question both principles! • Chief Operations Officer of one major airline: Navigation is not my problem. My problem is “normalization of deviance”! • Incidents have occurred simply due to pilot distraction because of having to deal with too many system alerts The U.S. military jamming GPS of civilian aircraft is a situation where there have been several close calls before this incident and experts have been saying for years that if the military keeps doing this, even with NOTAMs, people will get hurt and then that prediction tragically came true. From 2021, "FAA Files Reveal a Surprising Threat to Airline Safety: The U.S. Military GPS Tests" https://spectrum.ieee.org/faa-files-reveal-a-surprising-threat-to-airline-safety-the-us-militarys-gps-tests https://spectrum.ieee.org/faa-files-reveal-a-surprising-thre...: Early one morning last May, a commercial airliner was approaching El Paso International Airport, in West Texas, when a warning popped up in the cockpit: “GPS Position Lost.” The pilot contacted the airline’s operations center and received a report that the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range, in South Central New Mexico, was disrupting the GPS signal. “We knew then that it was not an aircraft GPS fault,” the pilot wrote later. The pilot missed an approach on one runway due to high winds, then came around to try again. “We were forced to Runway 04 with a predawn landing with no access to [an instrument landing] with vertical guidance,” the pilot wrote. “Runway 04…has a high CFIT threat due to the climbing terrain in the local area.” Also This is far from the most worrying ASRS report involving GPS jamming. In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute intervention of an air traffic controller. “Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their equipment are working as intended, but are in fact leading them into the side of the mountain,” wrote the controller. “Had [we] not noticed, that flight crew and the passengers would be dead. I have no doubt.” Here's what an air traffic controller with 18 years of experience wrote about WSMR GPS interference in 2024: "Someone will get hurt ignoring the pilot reports or deciding for pilots how much equipment can fail or be unreliable before they 'agree' or decide to stop GPS jamming." https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/docs/rpsts/ctlr.pdf https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/docs/rpsts/ctlr.pdf

ge96 2mo ago

Can anybody explain what the visual is, what are the dots moving/getting blown around by something

git-nebulous 2mo ago

The civilian uses for GPS are obvious and as a pilot I'm more than pleased to make use of it. But... the military is jamming a military product that happens to have civilian uses. It's not flying the plane. That's like saying "heavy rain crashes car"

hnburnsy 2mo ago

From the NTSB today... >NTSB Statement: The NTSB is actively investigating the crash of a Beechcraft King Air operating as a medevac flight near Ruidoso, New Mexico on May 14. The NTSB has not yet determined the probable cause or any contributing factors to the accident. NTSB investigators collect, validate and analyze all available evidence before reaching any conclusions. We encourage members of the media covering accidents under NTSB investigation to contact the agency with questions about the process or status of an investigation to help ensure accurate reporting. Read the preliminary report, which contains factual information gathered during the on-scene portion of the investigation, on our website: https://web.ntsb.gov/investigations/?ntsbnumber=WPR26FA186 https://web.ntsb.gov/investigations/?ntsbnumber=WPR26FA186

collabs 2mo ago

I don't know how to phrase it in military lingo but based on what I've read here on this thread, the military must stop these tests. 1. Use self contained "unit tests" or "dry runs" if you will for day to day scheduled or training purposes 2. Do precise (far fewer) "end to end" tests only where justified like for new hardware certification, never for shits and giggles

inemesitaffia 2mo ago
These tests are likely older than you and occur on a scheduled regular basis. As the report pointed out, you can even have the tests stop if you can't fly without GPS (i.e you're unqualified to fly or your backup instruments have failed) by talking to ATC regardless.

_moof 2mo ago

Lack of GPS was one factor here, but poor judgment was the real killer. Flying a visual approach at night into a field surrounded by unlit mountains is suicidal. There's a saying among medevac pilots when it comes to making go/no-go decisions: don't turn one tragedy into five.

dotfrag 2mo ago

I came here just to say I hate sites like Wired. Seriously... if you're going to post an article, don't make people pay someone to read it. It's just stupid...

aucisson_masque 2mo ago

What I did read is that a young inexperienced pilot was way too reliant on technology. Issue was on pilot training and the company that put 2 inexperienced pilot together.

Ostrogoth 2mo ago
I tend to agree. After reading the events that lead to the crash, there does seem to be a lack of experience and critical thinking. Crash location is 33.60682, -105.35674, approximately 10 miles approach from northeast to runway 33.466583, -105.521560. They allegedly had visual on runway lights before jamming resumed. Seems like they were likely unfamiliar with the terrain, and descended too low on approach, crashing into the mountain ridge line. Obviously that’s compounded by the gps jamming, but shouldn’t they have known the relative location of the aircraft based on speed and altitude?

linzhangrun 2mo ago

Regardless, a single GPS failure shouldn't cause a plane crash. Civil aviation is known for its redundancy.

burnt-resistor 2mo ago

The Phenom EMB-300 has/had a Dutch roll problem with loss of GPS, but there were some software updates that somewhat addressed it. https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Notice/GENOT_7110_711_EMB-300.pdf https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Notice/GENOT_7110_... https://www.faasafety.gov/files/notices/2016/Jun/CHLK_16-08_GPS_Flight_Advisory.pdf https://www.faasafety.gov/files/notices/2016/Jun/CHLK_16-08_...

kdmoyers 2mo ago

I wonder if the military could simulate a gps failure for their own purposes without actually breaking it for everyone? Like a gizmo in each military plane that simulates gps failure for that plane only. I understand this would be complicated, especially for large exercises, but would have several advantages.

jewsdid9eleven 2mo ago

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