I find it a bit shocking they'd be caught by surprise by a planned GPS outage. The exercise happened as intended, and all aircraft in the affected areas should have received warnings BEFORE they even took off. These are not drug smugglers - they filed a flight plan before leaving the ground.

https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM This was discussed during the initial reporting. While the GPS jamming is an important technical issue, the broader lesson may be pilot preparedness for degraded-navigation scenarios. This accident also highlights the ongoing debate over whether accumulating flight hours is adequately complemented by realistic defensive training for GPS-denied and other abnormal operations.

One technical point that initially puzzled me was why Spidertrax appeared to retain GPS coordinates while the FMS did not.

My understanding is that certified FMS GPS receivers use Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM) and other integrity checks. During GPS jamming, the increased noise and degraded signal quality can cause the receiver to determine that it can no longer guarantee a reliable navigation solution, resulting in a NAV FAIL or RAIM warning.

A tracking device such as Spidertrax, on the other hand being a glorified telematics grade positioning device, is designed for best-effort position reporting rather than certified navigation, so it may continue outputting an estimated position using noisy GNSS data and motion filtering, even when that solution is no longer suitable for primary aircraft navigation.

I too take random's words on socials over the NTSB. /s

In any case the news (and ntsb report) points that they are tied, not responsibility.

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