alt Hacker NewsCivilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
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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.
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.
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.
The preliminary NTSB report: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...
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.
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
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.
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...
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..
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
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). Seems like a huge waste of resources to me...
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-m...
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-avi...
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-airw...
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?
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.
> 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?
I guess there’s no way to constrain these jamming signals to some reasonable perimeter? 400 miles of overspill seems like sloppy engineering.
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.
Remember Moab!
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.
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/3mrux...
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.
A rehash of the paywalled Wired article:
* https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-...
Blancolirio (YouTube aviation reporter and commercial pilot) analysis:
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-as...
Kids fly with GPS, MEDICIORE with VFR, experts with NDB and dead reckoning
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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.