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.").
• 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.
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
There are sooo many GPS interference exercises NOTAMed! Here's an animation I made of GPS interference NOTAMS in effect on any given day in the U.S. from 2022 to 2023: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1722275349554487750
* Approximately 4000 aircraft experienced significant GPS interference
* 90% of which were commercial jets
* The military appears to have been jamming outside the posted NOTAM hours
2750 aircraft jammed during the window, 1250 jammed outside the window.
* Used to be called JAMFEST but "the Joint Spectrum Center became
uncomfortable with the idea of associating its RFAs with events with the
word 'jam' in their names."
The problem here is the assumption that if the US mil weren’t jamming GPS it wouldn’t be getting jammed. GPS is trivially easy to jam for any state actor, and it’s not “macho” to say that pilots always need to be able to safely conduct flights in its absence.
I think the GP assumption is that there is a bad actor intent on serious harm.
I'm not really sure where I side on this.
Ideally Defense would be able to conduct exercises without worrying about harming civilians. But that seems impossible to drive to 0.
I think the top level commenter comes across as a bit one sided. How often is due-diligence done by the pilots? Could the guidance provided be more well defined and reduce these incidences to several orders of magnitude less? Hopefully the military is not purposefully inflating incidences for nefarious purposes or instigating specific instances.
> 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.
We've also added blind spot warnings, but you're still responsible for doing a shoulder check before changing lanes. We have automatic emergency braking, but you need to stay back as well (if it does not work, or if conditions are slippery).
GNSS also tends to be used with glass cockpits, going back to the late 1990s (e.g., Garmin GNS 400/500), which not only did GPS but also VOR/DME. How transparent is getting a fix between the two and still getting good RNAV?
I wonder what the human factors consequences of having a GPS/chartplotter working almost all the time and then suddenly fail are. Well, I don't wonder that much, but it would be interesting to see the data. It seems a similarly jarring situation to having an AI chatbot that most of the time gets things right but then occasionally gets something wildly (albeit plausibly) wrong. Or self-driving car technology that occasionally (rarely) tries to drive into the median. It seems like it renders the user more complacent and less able or likely to respond to the failure safely and correctly.
So is it safer? If the answer is "yes, until it fails" that's pretty bad. Things fail, systems degrade, and we need to be able to adapt safely. If the transition between "everything working" and "degraded performance" causes a safety issue... that's kind of a systemic failure isn't it?
[edit] maybe it's a UX issue? What if interacting with the GPS had the same UX as the VOR? The failover would be a lot less disruptive. That's kind of where I always end up with chart plotters.. like, you need to be using the paper chart anyway if you want to be able to fail over safely and quickly... so does the chartplotter really add anything? Or does it take things away?
Lack of GPS isn’t a critical safety issue, it simply causes critical safety issues. It’s the pilot’s fault that they crashed but they wouldn’t have crashed if GPS wasn’t jammed. It’s overly macho to say that pilots train for this but I posted an animation showing how incredibly common this is on Twitter. I am not a pilot. I do not work for an aviation organization. I have a website.
It's not interesting: they were not in restricted airspace at any point during the flight. If they were, probably the NTSB, a YouTuber, or I would have mentioned it.
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.
Right. I said mountain to stress the importance of topography in the NM accident. The parent commenter may pat himself on the back for never flying into terrain during GPS outages in Florida, but there are factors in play in addition to his superior skills.
You're not wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean Uncle Sam should be dicking around with GPS jammers as a normal thing (at least not without acknowledging that doing so changes the risk profile of aviation to some extent).
Everyone seems to agree that if the GPS hadn't been inop everyone would still be alive. So to happily dismiss the deadly decisions the government made to place blame on the pilots is kind of disgraceful.
I guess GPS jamming was not routine for them. Had they been aware of any NOTAM regarding GPS interference, they'd be prepared, and, like you said, would have VOR setup prior to leaving the ground.
It's a truism that every accident is actually a chain of events, or at least it was 30+ years ago at Embry-Riddle. Lower stakes situations recognize this with the "5 whys" technique.
In general I agree with this. (Without respect to this particular crash.)
If GPS signal is sufficiently degraded or lost, TAWS is probably unavailable (highly dependent on what navigation system is on board). TAWS might have saved them. But needing TAWS implies loss of situational awareness.
This flight crashed in the mountains ~6 miles north of the ILS 24 approach course. At ~12 miles out on the approach course, the ILS course width is ~1 mile. A full needle deflection translates to 1/2 mile off the course. A flight is not established on the approach course with a full needle deflection. Course intercept with localizer or VOR is basic instrument work - GPS not required.
The flight requested ILS 24, later they indicated airport in sight, requested and received a clearance for a visual approach. That means pilots have full responsibility for terrain and obstruction clearance. The visual approach requirement is to maintain contact with with airport.
It seems to me they went off course, by a lot, for reasons I'm not clear on, and then descended prematurely into hostile terrain at night, which is likely why they lost visual contact with the airport. The terrain blocked their view and by the time they realized they were descending into hostile terrain they crashed.
If that's what happened, GPS signal loss is perhaps an instigating source of distraction and confusion but I do not see how it's a primary factor. If the signal becomes degraded, navigation should indicate it (auditory and visual) and that source is ignored entirely. Falling back to ground based navigation should be familiar, it doesn't need to be as precise as GPS, the instrument approach procedure has terrain clearance baked into it.
Best practice is to follow the instrument approach procedure to the final approach fix, then do the visual approach - especially at night which many have argued constitutes instrument flight conditions - mountains will be invisible. Pitch black on black.
Highly dependent on weather and the complexity of the approach. Clear skies and VFR? I would agree. Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho.
> At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.
> The pilots said that they wanted to fly an RNAV approach to Ruidoso. This being ruled out while GPS is jammed, the King Air pilots changed their request and asked to use an alternate form of landing system called Instrument Landing System, or ILS, that doesn’t require GPS reception. At 12:05 am, the controller assured the King Air that they would provide them with vectors to guide them “in a couple of minutes.” In the meantime, they kept flying north.
> In retrospect, tragedy might have been avoided if Albuquerque air traffic control had been able to pay closer attention to the young pilots in the King Air. But tonight they were busy. Three other aircraft also reported that they’d lost their GPS and needed help. One was struggling to get a bearing on a radio beacon.
> As they turned and descended toward Ruidoso’s lights, what the pilots couldn’t see was the 10,000-foot-high mass of the Capitan Mountains lying across their path. As they drew closer, the dark mass of rock appeared to rise up, swiping away the lights of the valley. This could have created "confusion and a loss of situational awareness,” Browne says. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble.”
Potentially low time pilots with degraded navigation aids at night (midnight) got behind the plane in an area with terrain, along with a high workload ATC not able to provide assistance more rapidly.
GPS is not, and never will be, reliable enough for IFR on its own.
Relying on a tower in instrument conditions because GPS failed is unacceptable, because every other GPS user is in the same boat.
If you’re flying IFR, you should have a working set of instruments and be using them. Why didn’t these pilots have their VORs tuned in for positioning?
> GPS is not, and never will be, reliable enough for IFR on its own.
WAAS GPS (~7.6M accuracy) is reliable enough for IFR on its own that many approaches have removed legacy RF ILS equipment for instrument approaches (RNAV LPV with synthetic glidescope from GNSS). I would agree this does not apply to the vast majority of general aviation (although certified receivers supporting this are well within the reach of GA at ~$6k), but facts and specifics are important, so enumerating that GPS and these trimmings make it designed to replace traditional IFR equipment under certain circumstances. WAAS is not a paid service, the additional precision is free if your receiver and autopilot supports it.
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2025/october/pi... ("Today most IFR pilots use GPS as a primary source of navigation, whether they’re flying a departure, airway, or arrival defined by VORs; or segments of approaches based on navaids or that require DME or ADF.") [My note: This is straight from the advocacy group for general aviation in the US, AOPA.]
> "The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) is an air navigation aid developed by the Federal Aviation Administration to augment the Global Positioning System (GPS), with the goal of improving its accuracy, integrity, and availability. Essentially, WAAS is intended to enable aircraft to rely on GPS for all phases of flight, including approaches with vertical guidance to any airport within its coverage area. It may be further enhanced with the local-area augmentation system (LAAS) also known by the preferred ICAO term ground-based augmentation system (GBAS) in critical areas."
> In 2007, WAAS vertical guidance was projected to be available nearly all the time (greater than 99%), and its coverage encompasses the full continental U.S., most of Alaska, northern Mexico, and southern Canada. At that time, the accuracy of WAAS would meet or exceed the requirements for Category 1 ILS approaches, namely, three-dimensional position information down to 200 feet (60 m) above touchdown zone elevation.
Category II or III ILS GPS approaches are supported when the subject airport has a local reference station reporting corrections ("LAAS"). With enough precision, the aircraft can land itself with GPS and local corrections ("Autoland"). A King Air running Garmin's SafeReturn recently performed this autonomously with GPS alone (to the best of my knowledge).
It's demonstrated fact that GPS is not 100% reliable, which would be required to meet the "on its own" requirement. See the article you're commenting under, and documentation about it from the FAA [1].
> Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho.
Then what are you supposed to do when your GPS craps out on approach in low visibility and heavy weather?
Obviously the answer is "fly the airplane". Which means you look at your artificial horizon, set trim and power for max climb, get to a safe altitude and figure it out.
If you're paying attention you already have your chart folded to the airport you're landing at, so it shouldn't be too hard to orient yourself and figure out what's next. Either you'll be making another attempt at this airport without GPS or you'll be going somewhere else.
There's never an excuse for failing to fly the airplane. That's basic airmanship. You need to be able to do it regardless of whether your GPS is working.
It's very easy to write this comment when you're not the one getting behind the plane in the middle of the night with multiple simultaneous challenges (speaking from experience; I can feel the anxiety writing this comment from similar "white knuckle" experience), and I agree, keep flying the plane. Systems fail, that is the point of investigating incidents to improve systems. Humans are always the weakest link. I agree that an experienced pilot should be able to safely land on an approach assuming a loss of GPS.
(General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel, tracking at roughly 1.0 to 1.1 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours. Statistically, GA's per-hour fatality rate is about 14 times higher than driving a car, carrying a risk profile comparable to riding a motorcycle)
Edit: My hot take is more communication and training needs to go into "As the pilot, you should be prepared to lose GPS at any time at critical moments in the flight lifecycle." Are we letting folks fly in potentially adverse conditions leaning too heavily on GPS leading to potentially avoidable accidents? I don't know, the NTSB is likely better informed to say so or not. If I was a flight instructor, I'd probably include loss of GPS during instrument approach at night and/or in weather as an experience to cover.
> General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel
Since I've been paying attention from the peanut gallery, watching Blancolirio videos, etc. I would never fly on a small private plane. Seems like once a week there is a crash of a small GA craft somewhere, often with fatalities, due to loss of control (i.e. nothing wrong with the aircraft). Pilots seem to become overconfident or complacent, make bad decisions instead of "gettimg out the credit card and booking a hotel" as Juan likes to say -- if you can afford to fly your own plane you can afford a night at a hotel. They can't handle loss of visual flight conditions. They don't recognize when they need to ignore their inner ear and trust the instruments. They can't recover from stalls or upsets (and actual practice isn't required, because that too caused a lot of crashes). Worse, they often take family and friends with them.
There's a reason a lot of life insurance policies specifically carve out private aircraft operation or travel as an exception to coverage.
When I was training 20yr ago we practiced stalls, spin recovery, simulated random engine-out scenarios.. do they not do that anymore?
I was pretty confident barring some catastrophic mechanical failure I could probably get it on the ground or into the water (or trees) in one piece. The big question remains though: what now? If you're knocked unconscious (likely--lap belt, big flat instrument panel at face height) then two things can happen:
(1) if in the water, you drown before you can get out.
(2) if you're on land, the fuel tank right underneath that instrument panel or the ones up in the wings might torch you before you can get out.
It's probably about right to compare the risk profile to motorcycle riding.
I'm not a pilot but as I understand it, stall/spin recovery practice is not mandatory anymore for a PPL and not all pilots do it, because it requires an aircraft designed for acrobatics and in practice a number of pilots ended up getting killed trying it. So now they learn it by the book or maybe playing with a flight simulator but not in an actual aircraft.
Stall recovery is absolutely required to be instructed and demonstrated in the private pilot checkride. These are demonstrated to a full aerodynamic stall, not merely to stall warning.
Spin recovery is no longer required to be instructed (and was not previously required to be demonstrated during the practical test either [as many aircraft are placarded as "intentional spins prohibited"]).
Not a pilot either, but it's my understanding that accidental spins almost never happen at altitudes where they're recoverable. Preventing the spin is the only way to avoid most crashes involving spins.
Stalls, on the other hand are part of standard instruction. Recognizing the beginning of a stall early and preventing it will prevent the spin.
Weird things can happen with big downdrafts and wind shear, but those aren't terribly frequent and probably a spin is less critical to practice than stall recovery. But it's a very different experience to actually feel the forces and see the world spinning than you get in a sim. Also it's a lot of fun.
Mechanical failure and engine outs will always rely on muscle memory and training imho, but I strongly presume everything else is going to be "Push red button to survive, switching to autonomy."
(Garman SafeReturn is reliant on GPS though, so unsure how it would handle loss of GPS during autonomous operations, I presume silicon photonics for precision dead reckoning as a backup nav input are the future, or perhaps relying on jam-resistant GPS services and/or multiple GNSS providers simultaneously)
As I understand it, most GA crashes are not due to mechanical problems. Human things like loss of situational awareness, loss of control, controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), flying into bad weather, and improper fuel management are much more common.
The problem is things like regulation and litigation have pushed the price of those modern technologies up outside the reach of everyone who isn't filthy rich, meaning the average GA pilot is tooling around in a clapped-out rental C172 from the 80s.
There's nothing inherently unsafe or unreliable about old airplanes. Aircraft maintenance and inspections are very rigorous and evidence based as compared with almost any other mechanical systems you might interact with. I flew a 1949 Piper PA-16 Clipper with a fairly anemic 108hp Lycoming O-235 with auto gas STC. I'd say it was every bit as safe as any other light single engine airplane, so long as you pay close attention when the wheels are touching ground and mind your density altitude.
In some sense it felt safer than the 172 because I could fly a higher, tighter pattern. It was easier to lose a bunch of altitude on final by putting it sideways in an aggressive slip. The 172's small rudder didn't let it get as sideways, so it was a little more constrained. The 172 did have functioning instruments and dual radios, not just a handheld. It also had flaps. I think it was probably 10-15yr newer? Still a relatively "old" airframe. I probably had 5x or more as many hours in the Clipper so all that could just be biased towards familiarity.
Point being, old plane does not mean unsafe plane. It's not like you're riding around in some rusted out hooptie in the sky. There are rigorous mandatory inspections and maintenance schedules for every single component, which results in mechanical failures being really rare even in aircraft that are nearly 100 years old.
None of that obviates the need to know what you're doing, of course. The pilot in command needs to have control of the plane. I'm pretty skeptical of systems that kind of try to smooth over that sharp edge, I can understand the altruistic motivation behind it, but there's likely a side effect of reducing the perceived risk. That's a problem, because it makes people complacent. So in terms of overall safety, it might not be a win? You're trading on average higher complacency and lower situational awareness for maybe some better outcomes in rare situations? Probably not the best trade.
That stuff just seems awfully gimmicky to me. I'm glad it worked and saved some lives. I don't think I'd want that system in my plane, though. I just wouldn't be able to trust it.
But I also wouldn't want anything to do with the new glass cockpit stuff, way too easy to just lose all your instruments at once. I'll take properly maintained, independent mechanical or electromechanical systems over digital ones every time for things that actually need to work.
Digital systems always seem to accumulate tons of complexity ("features") rendering them extremely brittle. Until we can figure out how to stop doing that, I prefer to avoid depending too heavily on them for important stuff.
The Cirrus parachute system seems pretty simple and trustworthy, that approach feels more directionally correct. Not much more complex than an automotive airbag.
> It's probably about right to compare the risk profile to motorcycle riding.
I'd say it's probably not, many motorcycle riders deliberately choose a motorcycle because it's "fun", meaning they go around speeding on purpose, so the crash stats are very negatively skewed by those deliberately behaving recklessly, just how driving crash stats are skewed by people driving under the influence.
That's a bit of a different approach than to flying a plane, and yet GA is super dangerous. That's because unlike motorcycling, flying is inherently unsafe, there's no "just stop" option if you have an issue. The default is crashing. The only reason commercial aviation is so safe is the incredible effort that's been put into engineering safety systems at thousands of layers, from mechanical to human factors, but hardly any of that applies to GA.
So IMO, if you ride as responsibly as you fly, riding should be way safer.
There are classes of motorcycle accidents that are not a function of rider speeding or otherwise being careless. The one that took the life of a coworker is described as follows: the motorcycle is travelling on a country two-lane road, trees alongside, sunny day, and a vehicle comes from the other direction and turns left across the path of the motorcycle. At closing speed over 160 kph (80- 100 kph in opposite directions) the gap is closing at over 45 m/s and dappled lighting makes it hard to see the motorcycle even with a daytime headlight. Years after my friend's death I read a chapter in a book on forensic engineering which covered the situation in detail (not my coworker's death specifically, but this class of motorcycle accident as a recognized pattern).
This is extremely common in urban areas as well, at lower speed. Not necessarily less fatal. The thing that seems similar between flying and riding motorcycles is that even a "small" crash is likelier than you want to have extreme consequences. Airplanes and motorcycles are not made to crash. Cars are.
There's also the out-of-cockpit pressure from both the patient needing medical transport, and the employer who may retaliate against a pilot who refuses to fly. Apparently most of these pilots are trying to build 1500 hrs to be eligible to fly for the airlines, so they are feeling pressured from that angle too.
> Apparently most of these pilots are trying to build 1500 hrs to be eligible to fly for the airlines, so they are feeling pressured from that angle too.
Fixed wing, maybe, I'm not familiar, but around here, I know most of the pilots for the two HEMS agencies (I used to be a paramedic). HEMS is considered the most lucrative of the post-military pilot careers for rotary. You fly high end machines, in all sorts of scenarios, and see all manner of things.
And as it is, often times fixed-wing EMS doesn't actually fly that often. Long range transport that can't go ground (and providers and insurers will go to some lengths, depending on the patient - one employer of mine was contracted for a ground transport from Seattle to Las Vegas).
I've been in this situation too. But I was trained for it and had a mental checklist to follow. I never had a GPS, though. It seems from the details of the article, which you rightly highlighted, that the pilots were using their GPS as a crutch and had no ability to fall back on basic dead reckoning. It seems they didn't know where they were. That's pretty inexcusable, like embarrassing even.
I don't fly anymore, but I see similar behaviors developing on the water. People who use chartplotters for navigation don't have a very good understanding of what's going on around them. If you're just interactively following a computed lay line or a plotted course you don't really need to know what the currents are doing. You don't need to know what the hazards are. You're not actively engaged in navigating the boat.
They requested navigation assistance ATC could not promptly provide. I strongly agree the pilot in command could've done better, but if ATC was overloaded, they should've promptly communicated that to manage expectations that immediate help was not forthcoming. An aircraft covers a lot of ground "in a couple of minutes." (assuming ~120-200 knots)
> a. Radar equipped ATC facilities can provide radar assistance and navigation service (vectors) to VFR aircraft in difficulty when the pilot can talk with the controller, and the aircraft is within radar coverage. Pilots should clearly understand that authorization to proceed in accordance with such radar navigational assistance does not constitute authorization for the pilot to violate CFRs. In effect, assistance is provided on the basis that navigational guidance information is advisory in nature, and the responsibility for flying the aircraft safely remains with the pilot.
Potentially tangentially related to an overloaded and understaffed US ATC network, similar to the overloaded controller that led to the LaGuardia runway incursion on March 22, 2026.
I've taken to checking https://gpsjam.org/ as part of preflight and inflight when connectivity is available. Cannot always trust the NOTAMs in this regard if those jamming or degrading GPS don't communicate intent or actual, so one must rely on direct observation and reports. I recommend other aviators do the same, the cost is free.
(sites surfacing this information are obtaining it from actual automated observations from aircraft ADS-B broadcasts that contain GPS accuracy and positioning information, treating the entire commercial air traffic system as a GPS/GNSS observatory sensor network, which is very cool imho)
Systems fail for all kinds of reasons, if you're dependent on one SPOF without any backup, bad things will happen eventually. In aviation we're taught to think this way from the very beginning. Always have a spot picked out where you will attempt to land the airplane when (not if!) you lose your engine.
Even in the absence of GPS jamming, you can effectively lose GPS for all kinds of reasons in a plane--a connector failing somewhere on the back of your panel, a wire chafing through, etc. GPS is nice, but it's probably a lot less reliable in most light aircraft than the other options.
It's been 20yr since I've flown a plane, so maybe attitudes have changed, but my instructors always stressed the importance of always being able to fall back quickly and seamlessly to a paper chart, your watch, flight computer, and basic instruments. Because you will lose everything else at some point.
I don't think attitudes have changed on that. The last PM on my current project (in aircraft navigation) was a pilot, and he always stressed that a pilot in charge should have alternatives planned for destination and means of navigation.
WSMR does enough GPS jamming that I'm surprised these pilots didn't have more experience with, or at least expectation of, it happening.
Sure, if it's obvious it's happening, like GPS being completely knocked-out.
If it's a GPS spoofing nudge by a few dozen metres per minute, then it's not so obvious. Enough to make a OWA drone miss its target, while also not being easily noticed by pilots.
I'd say this can be generalized: threads on HN are goofy about all the kinds of things HN readers and hackers are unfamiliar with but think they have the common sense to reason about.
This week I witnessed a similarly illogical argument between someone who thought they could argue about AI in movies and someone who actually works in the movie industry and has years of experience. The hacker was lecturing the movie person about why they were wrong about the future of the movie industry, with zero experience to back it up other than "I dabble in AI and watched some movies".
There might be one person who's in the right place at the right time with the right understanding to second the nuanced professional take. There's a hundred idiots ready to agree with the simple BS that fits their priors all the time.
And of course, thanks to the vote based crap the peddlers of the latter will have their monkey brain trained to phrase their commentary to be appealing to the available pool of idiots. That's why you so often see crap surface level takes wrapped up with the sort of partisan language that gets the warmest response around here (and on every other platform too).
I never flew a plane just know enough that a visual approach means “visual” rules. Hitting a mountain at that point is hard to argue for blaming anyone else but the pilot error? Did I get it right?
> The flight crew again reported they “[have] a visual on Ruidoso” at 0008:30 and that they could “go visual.” 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.
So you’re pointing out that they requested VFR, got clearance for it but still were flying under IFR rules? Basically the transition to VFR hadn’t completed fully?
A "visual approach" is an instrument flight rules operation. The flight was still IFR and had requested/been cleared for a visual approach, but had not switched to VFR (which they'd do by cancelling IFR).
When they accepted the visual approach, they took responsibility for navigation and terrain/obstacle clearance.
Yes... though I'd include the subsequent quote "and responded that they would cancel IFR “in just a couple of minutes.”"
Also someone is correctly pointing out to me downthread that a visual approach is technically an IFR procedure under IFR not VFR flight rules (the latter basically meaning you aren't using instruments at all). I'm assuming IFR in the summary is referring to the non-visual approach (rnav or ILS) but the preliminary report is I suppose ambiguous as to that.
Perhaps I'm being a bit reductive, but threads on anything that you're more well versed in than the average person, are evidently almost always goofy. It's called the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect applies everywhere, but in my experience it is hyper-amplified on HN because of the fact that tech/software people (and I say this as someone who has been coding since the 1980s) are much more convinced than the average person that they are experts in complex topics that they don't have much actual experience on.
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.
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.
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?
It would not be safe at this airport, and the ILS procedure there explicitly forbids it. In the remarks at the top of the approach plate you'll see "When local altimeter setting not received, procedure NA." (NA = Not Authorized.) Here's the plate: https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2607/06922IL24.PDF
The reason you need an accurate altimeter for this ILS is that the obstacle clearance surface for the intermediate segment - the part where you're flying straight and level without a glideslope - lies atop the very mountains these pilots crashed into. Vertical guidance on the missed approach is also barometric, and there are mountains in that direction too.
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.
Not true. You also need an accurate altimeter to fly the intermediate segment, as well as the missed approach segment. There are mountains under the obstacle clearance surfaces on both segments. That is why this ILS procedure is explicitly not authorized when the local altimeter setting isn't available.
Any altimeter setting in the vicinity is going to be close enough in this scenario. It's still a visual approach, you can remain well above terrain until you're inside the GS service volume. I think it's an OK way to get yourself out of a crappy situation.
Yes, safe, and also way safer than doing a visual approach without any backup at night. Like the other commenter said, the local altimeter setting is only required for knowing when you arrive at Decision Altitude, which is not applicable for this visual approach.
I'm not sure of ATC's rules, but my assumption is that they would NOT clear me for an ILS approach in this circumstance. But that's moot, I would not ask for it because it's not authorized anyway. It would be a visual approach, we'd just happen to fly the ILS course and use the GS for vertical guidance.
ILS, yes (the G/S vector and angle is calibrated to account for terrain), LOC on the other hand (i.e. non-precision with no G/S information) would have probably ended up in the same situation as it requires pilots to manually manage rate of descent. Not all runways have ILS equipment on both sides of the runway, let alone on all runways available or one that is active. At some airports it's possible you only run a 30% chance or lower that you can actually use the ILS to land, because the one with the equipment may not be the active one (and which runway is active changes depending upon wind and weather)
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.
> 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.
This has not been the practical reality for many years for IFR flights (arguably not for VFR flight either but some of the good old boys will still argue that you should still be using a map and compass).
In Europe the minimum requirement has been B-RNAV and aircraft are controlled with reference to intersections which have no defined relationships with underlying VORs, and an expectation of being able to navigate direct to one from any arbitrary point in space. Airliners generally get away with this because they have DME-DME disciplined INS. Smaller aircraft, well the backup is vectors from ATC.
Yeah, I agree that GPS is too easy to jam and should ideally not be used exclusively but if you are flying anything from a newish C172 to a Cessna Citation (or any other non-long haul business jet) it is the reality.
Annoyingly all of these systems have VOR and DME equipment, it would be trivial to have a back up position to well within en-route navigation accuracy limits and certainly close enough to prevent this kind of accident. But regulation and certification requirements being what they are they are no one does it.
In an ideal world we'd have some kind of INS but the ring laser gyros and accelerometers required are stubbornly expensive.
Of course - though many of them have been decommissioned or are in the process. Though recent developments have probably reduced the enthusiasm for removing them so quickly.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the intersection that ATC are flying you towards are actually now defined as coordinates, not radials or distances from nearby VORs.
If an ATC tells you "direct OKSAW" they won't give you a VOR radial to intercept - you are expected to go straight there in a relatively straight line from your current position. There were boxes like the KNS80 that could do VOR-VOR navigation to do this kind of thing but it's not user friendly by modern standards.
Depends on the weather. A lot of approaches to airports are GPS only these days. If GPS doesn't work and you are not in VFR weather, you can't fly those approaches. In bad weather you'd be diverting to an airport that still has ILS.
Vectoring by the controller to a visual or ILS approach still works but they'd be juggling a lot of planes. And while lots of the bigger/older airports still have ILS, many VORs and DMEs are being retired and many smaller airports don't have ILS at all.
Denied access to GPS in a large area in bad weather would likely result in lots of flight cancellations and contingency plans getting put in motion to get anything still in the air landed safely. But controllers would get very busy and ILS runways very congested.
Here in Europe, there have been a few cases of GPS denied areas especially closer to Russia. Mostly pilots and controllers at e.g. Helsinki airport are able to deal with this.
But yeah, IFR is getting more dependent on gps approaches…
which is incredibly stupid because it becomes trivial to disrupt air navigation. It’s a bit better with newer chipsets that support GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou… but I’d venture that when the military is jamming I’d does them all. I can buy a jammer that will take out GPS over about a kilometer for less than $1k. They are used all over the place by criminals in many countries, because there often aren’t standardized addresses and if your drug house can’t be located on gps in the favella, you get a lot more warning before a raid. That same transmitter with a directional antenna could knock out a 10 degree sector for 30km.
VMC prevailed at the time of the accident, although it was a dark moonless night. The flight in question only needed to maintain an altitude above the mountains until a visual to the airport was established along with their distance from the runway.
My guess based on the flight path is they had a visual on the airport but were lost and didn’t know where they were. If the gps hadn’t come back on for a minute they probably would have been fine, but it came back on and they fixated on the shiny screen instead of using their navigation skills.
Unless you want trust your life to an instrument, you fly like it might not be trustworthy. Granted, there are many instruments in an airplane we trust our lives to, but they can mostly be cross-referenced against other inputs. The trouble with gps is that it enables procedures that make that essentially impossible, and the major failure mode is not one you can carry an extra for. In aviation, situational awareness is life.
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.
> Pilots were so used to "the plane won't make a mistake" that they were not aware
Of course there have also been crashes where pilots wrongly dismissed sensor data.
In the Kegworth air disaster [1] the pilots had sensor data telling them the left-hand engine was at fault - but a previous model of the plane had a reputation for unreliability in that sensor, and the pilots shut down the right-hand engine on the basis of other evidence.
So we don't want pilots blindly trusting broken sensors - but we also don't want them to dismiss working sensors as broken.
They didn't know their air speed (because of the pitot tubes being frozen). I think the report says that there was a path to safety if they had kept focused but it wasn't as easy as just flying the plane via 'the basics'.
It was, and one of the pilots was doing the right thing and would have saved the plane no problem if they had been the only one flying the plane. The problem was that the other pilot insisted on doing exactly the wrong thing, didn’t say what he was doing, and the plane didn’t give nearly enough indication that it was receiving contradictory inputs from the two sets of controls.
If it’s true that other navigation systems are as safe and capable as GPS, then GPS navigation should be randomly disabled in every aircraft occasionally to ensure that pilots remain fluent in using them.
If it isn’t true, then the military is partially responsible for the crash of this aircraft.
No, pilots should ensure they're current at navigating without GPS because it can fail, just like pilots practice engine failure procedures and every other emergency / non-normal procedure. That doesn't mean it should be "randomly disabled" for the same reason that you don't test software in production or randomly turn off the engine of the plane. Obviously.
We don't know how it failed. Maybe it displayed their lat/long perfectly but at the wrong altitude. We think of failure as obvious, but it is often nearly impossible to tell unless you are looking for it.
Altitude is the least accurate dimension for GPS, and it's also the one dimension that's provided with great accuracy by a really simple mechanical gauge present in every aircraft. There should never be a situation where an incorrect altitude figure from GPS causes a problem.
Don't worry, our government is doing their level best to make GPS the only option for air navigation. After all, we all know that technology NEVER fails, and the sooner we can turn off all those big bad old ground radars and navigation aids, the sooner we can sell all that real estate and use the money for things that the American public desperately needs, like more corporate bailouts and bathroom security cameras.
> The VOR MON program is designed to enable aircraft, having lost GPS service, to revert to conventional navigation procedures. This will allow users to continue through the outage area using VOR station-to-station navigation or to proceed to a MON airport where an Instrument Landing System (ILS), Localizer (LOC) or VOR approach procedure can be flown without the necessity of GPS, Distance Measuring Equipment (DME), Automatic Direction Finder (ADF), or surveillance. Any airport with a suitable instrument approach may be used for landing, but the VOR MON assures that at least one airport will be within 100 Nautical Miles (NM).
Everyone knows what the police need to catch more criminals is a comprehensive network of underseat security cameras. I’m sure they would never misuse that kind of access.
The weather already does that on a regular basis... though they are doing their best to make the weather, on average (i.e. what you might call a climate), worse.
The value here is pretty simple, the frequency at which windows are rendered useless due to weather.
Yes, the change we are undergoing and that the current administration seems to be doing their best to accelerate includes an increase in heavy precipitation across north america.
More destructive weather events are good for expensive pieces of infrastructure? Higher temperatures are good for things that struggle to cool themselves? I don't see it.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
This whole thing has me thinking of that midair a while back, the helicopter avoided the wrong aircraft and flew right into the they were supposed to be avoiding.
What if they actually never had a visual on the runway? It was a long ways away and they were off course--what if they had a visual on what they thought was the runway but was something else entirely?
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?
>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:
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, what? Pilot error is absolutely a factor in contemporary accidents. It's the most common one, in fact, because we've rooted out almost all the other risks.
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.
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...
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
Per other comments the ILS approach was not available due to the local weather service being NOTAM'd as unavailable, couldn't set local altitude. The judgment call was effectively whether to take the flight at all, as there was effectively no instrument approach available and the visual conditions precluded VFR.
The ILS approach being not legally usable as an approach due to a missing local altimeter setting does not make it unusable to back up a visual approach [or VFR arrival].
I would 100% (and have) take center's altimeter setting and fly the track of an ILS or localizer rather than "whelp, nothing can be done..." This was VMC; you don't need a local altimeter setting to be safe using the radio navaids; you would need it to legally fly the approach as an ILS approach.
The "skill issue" is that they chose to press on instead of returning to base. Yes, the jamming was a factor, but making a decision to fly a visual into field surrounded by mountains at night is a bad call.
>I'm wondering what they could have done differently here.
It appears there were too many sources of confusion. GPS jamming, moonless night, busy ATC, not planning on VFR before takeoff, 20 minute short flight, instrument approach disabled, young pilots, mountains, and perhaps others.
Flight safety is about removing entropy and there were several steps which could have been taken, including not flying at all because of forced VFR on a moonless night near mountains.
GPS + a topo map yelling at you for being too close to the ground is extremely simple, a very basic feature.
Dead reckoning (keeping track of position over time without an external source of truth) and radar altimeters are high level features that some avionics do have, but these are expensive and not expected to always be present.
Inertial navigation systems you'd find on missiles are precise enough that if you leave one running on a table in the upper floor of the building you can track the rise and fall of the building as it heats up and grows because of thermal expansion throughout the day (in other words, they are extremely precise).
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"
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
I have thousands of hours as pilot in command and have worked as a professional pilot.
Unlit terrain is invisible at night. The moon was new. They did not see, and could not have seen, the mountains.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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 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.
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:
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.
The automated weather service was also out. This made it difficult or impossible to use the ILS because they can't set the local altimeter. This was a swiss cheese chain of events. It was a moonless dark night so the mountains weren't visible.
What is the normal fallback for local weather service failure? Divert to an airport with working service? Proceed, using the "nearest working" information?
How much does air pressure vary over a region, and how quickly does it change?
I think it would be "fly vfr" but the main issue there is the wind direction, not the altimeter setting. In daytime you can read the wind sock while airborne but not possible at night.
Would they take off if they knew GPS would be jammed midway through the flight?
Had they known they wouldn't be able to rely on GPS, all that back and forth with ATC would not be needed, and they'd already have a plan B and a plan C for navigating.
It's unfortunately all slices of swiss cheese aligned perfectly, but I'd still blame the military for poking extra holes on the GPS slice.
Maybe. Urgency should not trump safety. A delay in transport is not worse than a dead patient, dead medics and flight crew, and loss of an aircraft.
And I am happy to be corrected but as I understand it, in the rural west more medical transport than you might think is by air. Distances are large, and population is sparse. You can cover more area with the same number of medics using a few airplanes instead of ground ambulances. So not all air ambulance service is critically urgent, unlike what we are used to in more populated areas.
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.
SRR is serviced by two instrument approaches, the ILS or LOC RWY 24 and the RNAV (GPS)
RWY 24. Both instrument approach plate notes section contain the following statement: “When
local altimeter setting not received, procedure NA (Not Authorized).”
IFR approach was not possible, the flight plan was unrealistic.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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-interfer...:
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-thre...:
Also 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.pdfThere are sooo many GPS interference exercises NOTAMed! Here's an animation I made of GPS interference NOTAMS in effect on any given day in the U.S. from 2022 to 2023: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1722275349554487750
And they affect thousands of aircraft--Here's a thread where I analyze an earlier exercise at White Sands, called NAVFEST: https://bsky.app/profile/lemonodor.bsky.social/post/3ml7afb2...
The problem here is the assumption that if the US mil weren’t jamming GPS it wouldn’t be getting jammed. GPS is trivially easy to jam for any state actor, and it’s not “macho” to say that pilots always need to be able to safely conduct flights in its absence.
The US military over US territory are the only ones who can jam GPS at the scale being talked about.
Anyone else firing up a jammer is going to get triangulated and arrested very quickly.
I think the GP assumption is that there is a bad actor intent on serious harm.
I'm not really sure where I side on this.
Ideally Defense would be able to conduct exercises without worrying about harming civilians. But that seems impossible to drive to 0.
I think the top level commenter comes across as a bit one sided. How often is due-diligence done by the pilots? Could the guidance provided be more well defined and reduce these incidences to several orders of magnitude less? Hopefully the military is not purposefully inflating incidences for nefarious purposes or instigating specific instances.
Another thing to add to all this is FAA has been steadily removing from service non-GPS navigation aids.
Right? "The government" as a whole can't have it both ways. Eliminate older navigation systems because GPS is everywhere, AND run around jamming GPS.
> 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.
We've also added blind spot warnings, but you're still responsible for doing a shoulder check before changing lanes. We have automatic emergency braking, but you need to stay back as well (if it does not work, or if conditions are slippery).
GNSS also tends to be used with glass cockpits, going back to the late 1990s (e.g., Garmin GNS 400/500), which not only did GPS but also VOR/DME. How transparent is getting a fix between the two and still getting good RNAV?
I wonder what the human factors consequences of having a GPS/chartplotter working almost all the time and then suddenly fail are. Well, I don't wonder that much, but it would be interesting to see the data. It seems a similarly jarring situation to having an AI chatbot that most of the time gets things right but then occasionally gets something wildly (albeit plausibly) wrong. Or self-driving car technology that occasionally (rarely) tries to drive into the median. It seems like it renders the user more complacent and less able or likely to respond to the failure safely and correctly.
So is it safer? If the answer is "yes, until it fails" that's pretty bad. Things fail, systems degrade, and we need to be able to adapt safely. If the transition between "everything working" and "degraded performance" causes a safety issue... that's kind of a systemic failure isn't it?
[edit] maybe it's a UX issue? What if interacting with the GPS had the same UX as the VOR? The failover would be a lot less disruptive. That's kind of where I always end up with chart plotters.. like, you need to be using the paper chart anyway if you want to be able to fail over safely and quickly... so does the chartplotter really add anything? Or does it take things away?
I love this post because of how clear it is.
Lack of GPS isn’t a critical safety issue, it simply causes critical safety issues. It’s the pilot’s fault that they crashed but they wouldn’t have crashed if GPS wasn’t jammed. It’s overly macho to say that pilots train for this but I posted an animation showing how incredibly common this is on Twitter. I am not a pilot. I do not work for an aviation organization. I have a website.
Interesting how neither you nor the article affirm or deny if they plane was flying in restricted airspace either before or during the crash.
It's not interesting: they were not in restricted airspace at any point during the flight. If they were, probably the NTSB, a YouTuber, or I would have mentioned it.
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.
The highest mountain summit in Florida is 105 meters above sea level.
In Florida a) they don't take kindly to that kind of units and b) you should be more worried about the many 1500-2000' antennas than the "mountains".
It's still pretty useful to know where you are and not die hitting an invisible guy wire.
Did you misspell hill? It’s not like some sand mountain jets up 300 feet all of the sudden.
Right. I said mountain to stress the importance of topography in the NM accident. The parent commenter may pat himself on the back for never flying into terrain during GPS outages in Florida, but there are factors in play in addition to his superior skills.
And even that is basically Alabama.
You're not wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean Uncle Sam should be dicking around with GPS jammers as a normal thing (at least not without acknowledging that doing so changes the risk profile of aviation to some extent).
" acknowledging that doing so changes the risk profile of aviation to some extent" Isn't that what the NOTAM is?
Clearly the NOTAMs aren't doing the job, as this isn't the only instance of issues. It's just the only instance of a crash with fatalities.
This wasn’t downtown Cleveland.
Everyone seems to agree that if the GPS hadn't been inop everyone would still be alive. So to happily dismiss the deadly decisions the government made to place blame on the pilots is kind of disgraceful.
I guess GPS jamming was not routine for them. Had they been aware of any NOTAM regarding GPS interference, they'd be prepared, and, like you said, would have VOR setup prior to leaving the ground.
If you are a pilot and can't handle GPS dropping out, or the failure of any other single navigation aid, you should not be flying.
Well in this case there were multiple failures... Should they have been identified earlier? Yes.
It's a truism that every accident is actually a chain of events, or at least it was 30+ years ago at Embry-Riddle. Lower stakes situations recognize this with the "5 whys" technique.
In general I agree with this. (Without respect to this particular crash.)
If GPS signal is sufficiently degraded or lost, TAWS is probably unavailable (highly dependent on what navigation system is on board). TAWS might have saved them. But needing TAWS implies loss of situational awareness.
This flight crashed in the mountains ~6 miles north of the ILS 24 approach course. At ~12 miles out on the approach course, the ILS course width is ~1 mile. A full needle deflection translates to 1/2 mile off the course. A flight is not established on the approach course with a full needle deflection. Course intercept with localizer or VOR is basic instrument work - GPS not required.
The flight requested ILS 24, later they indicated airport in sight, requested and received a clearance for a visual approach. That means pilots have full responsibility for terrain and obstruction clearance. The visual approach requirement is to maintain contact with with airport.
It seems to me they went off course, by a lot, for reasons I'm not clear on, and then descended prematurely into hostile terrain at night, which is likely why they lost visual contact with the airport. The terrain blocked their view and by the time they realized they were descending into hostile terrain they crashed.
If that's what happened, GPS signal loss is perhaps an instigating source of distraction and confusion but I do not see how it's a primary factor. If the signal becomes degraded, navigation should indicate it (auditory and visual) and that source is ignored entirely. Falling back to ground based navigation should be familiar, it doesn't need to be as precise as GPS, the instrument approach procedure has terrain clearance baked into it.
Best practice is to follow the instrument approach procedure to the final approach fix, then do the visual approach - especially at night which many have argued constitutes instrument flight conditions - mountains will be invisible. Pitch black on black.
Highly dependent on weather and the complexity of the approach. Clear skies and VFR? I would agree. Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho.
> At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.
> The pilots said that they wanted to fly an RNAV approach to Ruidoso. This being ruled out while GPS is jammed, the King Air pilots changed their request and asked to use an alternate form of landing system called Instrument Landing System, or ILS, that doesn’t require GPS reception. At 12:05 am, the controller assured the King Air that they would provide them with vectors to guide them “in a couple of minutes.” In the meantime, they kept flying north.
> In retrospect, tragedy might have been avoided if Albuquerque air traffic control had been able to pay closer attention to the young pilots in the King Air. But tonight they were busy. Three other aircraft also reported that they’d lost their GPS and needed help. One was struggling to get a bearing on a radio beacon.
> As they turned and descended toward Ruidoso’s lights, what the pilots couldn’t see was the 10,000-foot-high mass of the Capitan Mountains lying across their path. As they drew closer, the dark mass of rock appeared to rise up, swiping away the lights of the valley. This could have created "confusion and a loss of situational awareness,” Browne says. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble.”
Potentially low time pilots with degraded navigation aids at night (midnight) got behind the plane in an area with terrain, along with a high workload ATC not able to provide assistance more rapidly.
(disclaimer: have a private license)
GPS is not, and never will be, reliable enough for IFR on its own.
Relying on a tower in instrument conditions because GPS failed is unacceptable, because every other GPS user is in the same boat.
If you’re flying IFR, you should have a working set of instruments and be using them. Why didn’t these pilots have their VORs tuned in for positioning?
> GPS is not, and never will be, reliable enough for IFR on its own.
WAAS GPS (~7.6M accuracy) is reliable enough for IFR on its own that many approaches have removed legacy RF ILS equipment for instrument approaches (RNAV LPV with synthetic glidescope from GNSS). I would agree this does not apply to the vast majority of general aviation (although certified receivers supporting this are well within the reach of GA at ~$6k), but facts and specifics are important, so enumerating that GPS and these trimmings make it designed to replace traditional IFR equipment under certain circumstances. WAAS is not a paid service, the additional precision is free if your receiver and autopilot supports it.
Further reading:
https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2025/october/pi... ("Today most IFR pilots use GPS as a primary source of navigation, whether they’re flying a departure, airway, or arrival defined by VORs; or segments of approaches based on navaids or that require DME or ADF.") [My note: This is straight from the advocacy group for general aviation in the US, AOPA.]
https://www.flyingmag.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-...
https://boltflight.com/loc-vs-ils-vs-gps-approach-understand...
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System
> "The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) is an air navigation aid developed by the Federal Aviation Administration to augment the Global Positioning System (GPS), with the goal of improving its accuracy, integrity, and availability. Essentially, WAAS is intended to enable aircraft to rely on GPS for all phases of flight, including approaches with vertical guidance to any airport within its coverage area. It may be further enhanced with the local-area augmentation system (LAAS) also known by the preferred ICAO term ground-based augmentation system (GBAS) in critical areas."
> In 2007, WAAS vertical guidance was projected to be available nearly all the time (greater than 99%), and its coverage encompasses the full continental U.S., most of Alaska, northern Mexico, and southern Canada. At that time, the accuracy of WAAS would meet or exceed the requirements for Category 1 ILS approaches, namely, three-dimensional position information down to 200 feet (60 m) above touchdown zone elevation.
Category II or III ILS GPS approaches are supported when the subject airport has a local reference station reporting corrections ("LAAS"). With enough precision, the aircraft can land itself with GPS and local corrections ("Autoland"). A King Air running Garmin's SafeReturn recently performed this autonomously with GPS alone (to the best of my knowledge).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-area_augmentation_system
https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/non_federal/g...
Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346214 - December 2025 (185 comments)
Event ATC recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Nl3LOZNjc
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ruFmgTpqA
It's demonstrated fact that GPS is not 100% reliable, which would be required to meet the "on its own" requirement. See the article you're commenting under, and documentation about it from the FAA [1].
[1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av...
100% reliable is not a requirement per FAA regs cited. Legacy navigation equipment fails too.
Then I think you should re-read the original comment, with this revelation in mind.
> Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho.
Then what are you supposed to do when your GPS craps out on approach in low visibility and heavy weather?
Obviously the answer is "fly the airplane". Which means you look at your artificial horizon, set trim and power for max climb, get to a safe altitude and figure it out.
If you're paying attention you already have your chart folded to the airport you're landing at, so it shouldn't be too hard to orient yourself and figure out what's next. Either you'll be making another attempt at this airport without GPS or you'll be going somewhere else.
There's never an excuse for failing to fly the airplane. That's basic airmanship. You need to be able to do it regardless of whether your GPS is working.
It's very easy to write this comment when you're not the one getting behind the plane in the middle of the night with multiple simultaneous challenges (speaking from experience; I can feel the anxiety writing this comment from similar "white knuckle" experience), and I agree, keep flying the plane. Systems fail, that is the point of investigating incidents to improve systems. Humans are always the weakest link. I agree that an experienced pilot should be able to safely land on an approach assuming a loss of GPS.
(General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel, tracking at roughly 1.0 to 1.1 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours. Statistically, GA's per-hour fatality rate is about 14 times higher than driving a car, carrying a risk profile comparable to riding a motorcycle)
Edit: My hot take is more communication and training needs to go into "As the pilot, you should be prepared to lose GPS at any time at critical moments in the flight lifecycle." Are we letting folks fly in potentially adverse conditions leaning too heavily on GPS leading to potentially avoidable accidents? I don't know, the NTSB is likely better informed to say so or not. If I was a flight instructor, I'd probably include loss of GPS during instrument approach at night and/or in weather as an experience to cover.
> General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel
Since I've been paying attention from the peanut gallery, watching Blancolirio videos, etc. I would never fly on a small private plane. Seems like once a week there is a crash of a small GA craft somewhere, often with fatalities, due to loss of control (i.e. nothing wrong with the aircraft). Pilots seem to become overconfident or complacent, make bad decisions instead of "gettimg out the credit card and booking a hotel" as Juan likes to say -- if you can afford to fly your own plane you can afford a night at a hotel. They can't handle loss of visual flight conditions. They don't recognize when they need to ignore their inner ear and trust the instruments. They can't recover from stalls or upsets (and actual practice isn't required, because that too caused a lot of crashes). Worse, they often take family and friends with them.
There's a reason a lot of life insurance policies specifically carve out private aircraft operation or travel as an exception to coverage.
When I was training 20yr ago we practiced stalls, spin recovery, simulated random engine-out scenarios.. do they not do that anymore?
I was pretty confident barring some catastrophic mechanical failure I could probably get it on the ground or into the water (or trees) in one piece. The big question remains though: what now? If you're knocked unconscious (likely--lap belt, big flat instrument panel at face height) then two things can happen:
(1) if in the water, you drown before you can get out.
(2) if you're on land, the fuel tank right underneath that instrument panel or the ones up in the wings might torch you before you can get out.
It's probably about right to compare the risk profile to motorcycle riding.
I'm not a pilot but as I understand it, stall/spin recovery practice is not mandatory anymore for a PPL and not all pilots do it, because it requires an aircraft designed for acrobatics and in practice a number of pilots ended up getting killed trying it. So now they learn it by the book or maybe playing with a flight simulator but not in an actual aircraft.
Stall recovery is absolutely required to be instructed and demonstrated in the private pilot checkride. These are demonstrated to a full aerodynamic stall, not merely to stall warning.
Spin recovery is no longer required to be instructed (and was not previously required to be demonstrated during the practical test either [as many aircraft are placarded as "intentional spins prohibited"]).
CFR for the instruction requirements: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
Airman Certification (Practical Test) Standards: https://www.faa.gov/training_testing/testing/acs/private_air...
Not a pilot either, but it's my understanding that accidental spins almost never happen at altitudes where they're recoverable. Preventing the spin is the only way to avoid most crashes involving spins.
Stalls, on the other hand are part of standard instruction. Recognizing the beginning of a stall early and preventing it will prevent the spin.
Weird things can happen with big downdrafts and wind shear, but those aren't terribly frequent and probably a spin is less critical to practice than stall recovery. But it's a very different experience to actually feel the forces and see the world spinning than you get in a sim. Also it's a lot of fun.
Mechanical failure and engine outs will always rely on muscle memory and training imho, but I strongly presume everything else is going to be "Push red button to survive, switching to autonomy."
Garmin Is Automating In-Flight Emergencies (Autoland, Smart Glide, ESP) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996106 - July 2026 (0 comments)
The accountability problem exposed by the first Garmin Autoland deployment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793561 - January 2026 (0 comments)
Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346214 - December 2025 (185 comments)
(Garman SafeReturn is reliant on GPS though, so unsure how it would handle loss of GPS during autonomous operations, I presume silicon photonics for precision dead reckoning as a backup nav input are the future, or perhaps relying on jam-resistant GPS services and/or multiple GNSS providers simultaneously)
As I understand it, most GA crashes are not due to mechanical problems. Human things like loss of situational awareness, loss of control, controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), flying into bad weather, and improper fuel management are much more common.
The problem is things like regulation and litigation have pushed the price of those modern technologies up outside the reach of everyone who isn't filthy rich, meaning the average GA pilot is tooling around in a clapped-out rental C172 from the 80s.
There's nothing inherently unsafe or unreliable about old airplanes. Aircraft maintenance and inspections are very rigorous and evidence based as compared with almost any other mechanical systems you might interact with. I flew a 1949 Piper PA-16 Clipper with a fairly anemic 108hp Lycoming O-235 with auto gas STC. I'd say it was every bit as safe as any other light single engine airplane, so long as you pay close attention when the wheels are touching ground and mind your density altitude.
In some sense it felt safer than the 172 because I could fly a higher, tighter pattern. It was easier to lose a bunch of altitude on final by putting it sideways in an aggressive slip. The 172's small rudder didn't let it get as sideways, so it was a little more constrained. The 172 did have functioning instruments and dual radios, not just a handheld. It also had flaps. I think it was probably 10-15yr newer? Still a relatively "old" airframe. I probably had 5x or more as many hours in the Clipper so all that could just be biased towards familiarity.
Point being, old plane does not mean unsafe plane. It's not like you're riding around in some rusted out hooptie in the sky. There are rigorous mandatory inspections and maintenance schedules for every single component, which results in mechanical failures being really rare even in aircraft that are nearly 100 years old.
None of that obviates the need to know what you're doing, of course. The pilot in command needs to have control of the plane. I'm pretty skeptical of systems that kind of try to smooth over that sharp edge, I can understand the altruistic motivation behind it, but there's likely a side effect of reducing the perceived risk. That's a problem, because it makes people complacent. So in terms of overall safety, it might not be a win? You're trading on average higher complacency and lower situational awareness for maybe some better outcomes in rare situations? Probably not the best trade.
That stuff just seems awfully gimmicky to me. I'm glad it worked and saved some lives. I don't think I'd want that system in my plane, though. I just wouldn't be able to trust it.
But I also wouldn't want anything to do with the new glass cockpit stuff, way too easy to just lose all your instruments at once. I'll take properly maintained, independent mechanical or electromechanical systems over digital ones every time for things that actually need to work.
Digital systems always seem to accumulate tons of complexity ("features") rendering them extremely brittle. Until we can figure out how to stop doing that, I prefer to avoid depending too heavily on them for important stuff.
The Cirrus parachute system seems pretty simple and trustworthy, that approach feels more directionally correct. Not much more complex than an automotive airbag.
> It's probably about right to compare the risk profile to motorcycle riding.
I'd say it's probably not, many motorcycle riders deliberately choose a motorcycle because it's "fun", meaning they go around speeding on purpose, so the crash stats are very negatively skewed by those deliberately behaving recklessly, just how driving crash stats are skewed by people driving under the influence.
That's a bit of a different approach than to flying a plane, and yet GA is super dangerous. That's because unlike motorcycling, flying is inherently unsafe, there's no "just stop" option if you have an issue. The default is crashing. The only reason commercial aviation is so safe is the incredible effort that's been put into engineering safety systems at thousands of layers, from mechanical to human factors, but hardly any of that applies to GA.
So IMO, if you ride as responsibly as you fly, riding should be way safer.
There are classes of motorcycle accidents that are not a function of rider speeding or otherwise being careless. The one that took the life of a coworker is described as follows: the motorcycle is travelling on a country two-lane road, trees alongside, sunny day, and a vehicle comes from the other direction and turns left across the path of the motorcycle. At closing speed over 160 kph (80- 100 kph in opposite directions) the gap is closing at over 45 m/s and dappled lighting makes it hard to see the motorcycle even with a daytime headlight. Years after my friend's death I read a chapter in a book on forensic engineering which covered the situation in detail (not my coworker's death specifically, but this class of motorcycle accident as a recognized pattern).
This is extremely common in urban areas as well, at lower speed. Not necessarily less fatal. The thing that seems similar between flying and riding motorcycles is that even a "small" crash is likelier than you want to have extreme consequences. Airplanes and motorcycles are not made to crash. Cars are.
There's also the out-of-cockpit pressure from both the patient needing medical transport, and the employer who may retaliate against a pilot who refuses to fly. Apparently most of these pilots are trying to build 1500 hrs to be eligible to fly for the airlines, so they are feeling pressured from that angle too.
> Apparently most of these pilots are trying to build 1500 hrs to be eligible to fly for the airlines, so they are feeling pressured from that angle too.
Fixed wing, maybe, I'm not familiar, but around here, I know most of the pilots for the two HEMS agencies (I used to be a paramedic). HEMS is considered the most lucrative of the post-military pilot careers for rotary. You fly high end machines, in all sorts of scenarios, and see all manner of things.
And as it is, often times fixed-wing EMS doesn't actually fly that often. Long range transport that can't go ground (and providers and insurers will go to some lengths, depending on the patient - one employer of mine was contracted for a ground transport from Seattle to Las Vegas).
I've been in this situation too. But I was trained for it and had a mental checklist to follow. I never had a GPS, though. It seems from the details of the article, which you rightly highlighted, that the pilots were using their GPS as a crutch and had no ability to fall back on basic dead reckoning. It seems they didn't know where they were. That's pretty inexcusable, like embarrassing even.
I don't fly anymore, but I see similar behaviors developing on the water. People who use chartplotters for navigation don't have a very good understanding of what's going on around them. If you're just interactively following a computed lay line or a plotted course you don't really need to know what the currents are doing. You don't need to know what the hazards are. You're not actively engaged in navigating the boat.
They deferred navigation to ATC instead of using their own capabilities such as VOR.
They requested navigation assistance ATC could not promptly provide. I strongly agree the pilot in command could've done better, but if ATC was overloaded, they should've promptly communicated that to manage expectations that immediate help was not forthcoming. An aircraft covers a lot of ground "in a couple of minutes." (assuming ~120-200 knots)
https://www.airresearch.com/Pilots/AIM-08/Chap6/aim0602.html
> a. Radar equipped ATC facilities can provide radar assistance and navigation service (vectors) to VFR aircraft in difficulty when the pilot can talk with the controller, and the aircraft is within radar coverage. Pilots should clearly understand that authorization to proceed in accordance with such radar navigational assistance does not constitute authorization for the pilot to violate CFRs. In effect, assistance is provided on the basis that navigational guidance information is advisory in nature, and the responsibility for flying the aircraft safely remains with the pilot.
Potentially tangentially related to an overloaded and understaffed US ATC network, similar to the overloaded controller that led to the LaGuardia runway incursion on March 22, 2026.
https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/crj-collid... ("What’s the bet that the controller had been overworked and the cab was understaffed? Seems to be an incredibly common thread lately.")
American aviation is near collapse? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47494469 - March 2026 (106 comments)
LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503965 - March 2026 (310 comments)
Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47486386 - March 2026 (667 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47494936 (my comment with citations on this thesis)
(my flavor of autism includes aggressive pattern matching)
>(my flavor of autism includes aggressive pattern matching)
This gave me a smile. I've never heard of pattern matching being described as aggressive.
Checking NOTAMs is important.
Russia seldom publishes NOTAMs for offensive GPS interference
But when anyone causes gps to be degraded, a NOTAM is rapidly released.
I've taken to checking https://gpsjam.org/ as part of preflight and inflight when connectivity is available. Cannot always trust the NOTAMs in this regard if those jamming or degrading GPS don't communicate intent or actual, so one must rely on direct observation and reports. I recommend other aviators do the same, the cost is free.
(sites surfacing this information are obtaining it from actual automated observations from aircraft ADS-B broadcasts that contain GPS accuracy and positioning information, treating the entire commercial air traffic system as a GPS/GNSS observatory sensor network, which is very cool imho)
Systems fail for all kinds of reasons, if you're dependent on one SPOF without any backup, bad things will happen eventually. In aviation we're taught to think this way from the very beginning. Always have a spot picked out where you will attempt to land the airplane when (not if!) you lose your engine.
Even in the absence of GPS jamming, you can effectively lose GPS for all kinds of reasons in a plane--a connector failing somewhere on the back of your panel, a wire chafing through, etc. GPS is nice, but it's probably a lot less reliable in most light aircraft than the other options.
It's been 20yr since I've flown a plane, so maybe attitudes have changed, but my instructors always stressed the importance of always being able to fall back quickly and seamlessly to a paper chart, your watch, flight computer, and basic instruments. Because you will lose everything else at some point.
I don't think attitudes have changed on that. The last PM on my current project (in aircraft navigation) was a pilot, and he always stressed that a pilot in charge should have alternatives planned for destination and means of navigation.
WSMR does enough GPS jamming that I'm surprised these pilots didn't have more experience with, or at least expectation of, it happening.
> No big deal.
Sure, if it's obvious it's happening, like GPS being completely knocked-out.
If it's a GPS spoofing nudge by a few dozen metres per minute, then it's not so obvious. Enough to make a OWA drone miss its target, while also not being easily noticed by pilots.
What do you think Florida terrain is like in comparison to New Mexico?
Some of the replies you're getting are ridiculous lol. Anyways thanks for your insight.
HN threads on aviation are always a bit goofy to anyone who's actually flown a plane, yeah.
Very much goofy, especially when people here try to extrapolate ground stop / AOG / IROPS. True armchair warrior without any competence.
I'd say this can be generalized: threads on HN are goofy about all the kinds of things HN readers and hackers are unfamiliar with but think they have the common sense to reason about.
This week I witnessed a similarly illogical argument between someone who thought they could argue about AI in movies and someone who actually works in the movie industry and has years of experience. The hacker was lecturing the movie person about why they were wrong about the future of the movie industry, with zero experience to back it up other than "I dabble in AI and watched some movies".
It's a numbers game.
There might be one person who's in the right place at the right time with the right understanding to second the nuanced professional take. There's a hundred idiots ready to agree with the simple BS that fits their priors all the time.
And of course, thanks to the vote based crap the peddlers of the latter will have their monkey brain trained to phrase their commentary to be appealing to the available pool of idiots. That's why you so often see crap surface level takes wrapped up with the sort of partisan language that gets the warmest response around here (and on every other platform too).
Dunning-Kruger lives!
This is true of just about any subject. 90% of the comments are noise.
I never flew a plane just know enough that a visual approach means “visual” rules. Hitting a mountain at that point is hard to argue for blaming anyone else but the pilot error? Did I get it right?
Night flying, mountain terrain, little moonlight. Pilots focused on distant landing point and hit intervening ground on descent.
A crash is usually the end result of several previous bad decisions.
No, you didn't, because they apparently had instrument clearance from the tower at the time they crashed into the mountain.
The only correct conclusion here is more investigation is necessary than what has been publicly published.
I read this in the preliminary report
https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...
> The flight crew again reported they “[have] a visual on Ruidoso” at 0008:30 and that they could “go visual.” 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.
So you’re pointing out that they requested VFR, got clearance for it but still were flying under IFR rules? Basically the transition to VFR hadn’t completed fully?
A "visual approach" is an instrument flight rules operation. The flight was still IFR and had requested/been cleared for a visual approach, but had not switched to VFR (which they'd do by cancelling IFR).
When they accepted the visual approach, they took responsibility for navigation and terrain/obstacle clearance.
Yes... though I'd include the subsequent quote "and responded that they would cancel IFR “in just a couple of minutes.”"
Also someone is correctly pointing out to me downthread that a visual approach is technically an IFR procedure under IFR not VFR flight rules (the latter basically meaning you aren't using instruments at all). I'm assuming IFR in the summary is referring to the non-visual approach (rnav or ILS) but the preliminary report is I suppose ambiguous as to that.
Yes
HN threads are goofy for anyone with domain expertise in the domain being discussed, except for web development.
No, it's just as bad for web development.
Well... that's a sobering thought.
Perhaps I'm being a bit reductive, but threads on anything that you're more well versed in than the average person, are evidently almost always goofy. It's called the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect.
> It's called the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect applies everywhere, but in my experience it is hyper-amplified on HN because of the fact that tech/software people (and I say this as someone who has been coding since the 1980s) are much more convinced than the average person that they are experts in complex topics that they don't have much actual experience on.
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.
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.
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?
It would not be safe at this airport, and the ILS procedure there explicitly forbids it. In the remarks at the top of the approach plate you'll see "When local altimeter setting not received, procedure NA." (NA = Not Authorized.) Here's the plate: https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2607/06922IL24.PDF
The reason you need an accurate altimeter for this ILS is that the obstacle clearance surface for the intermediate segment - the part where you're flying straight and level without a glideslope - lies atop the very mountains these pilots crashed into. Vertical guidance on the missed approach is also barometric, and there are mountains in that direction too.
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.
Not true. You also need an accurate altimeter to fly the intermediate segment, as well as the missed approach segment. There are mountains under the obstacle clearance surfaces on both segments. That is why this ILS procedure is explicitly not authorized when the local altimeter setting isn't available.
Any altimeter setting in the vicinity is going to be close enough in this scenario. It's still a visual approach, you can remain well above terrain until you're inside the GS service volume. I think it's an OK way to get yourself out of a crappy situation.
Yes, safe, and also way safer than doing a visual approach without any backup at night. Like the other commenter said, the local altimeter setting is only required for knowing when you arrive at Decision Altitude, which is not applicable for this visual approach.
I'm not sure of ATC's rules, but my assumption is that they would NOT clear me for an ILS approach in this circumstance. But that's moot, I would not ask for it because it's not authorized anyway. It would be a visual approach, we'd just happen to fly the ILS course and use the GS for vertical guidance.
ILS, yes (the G/S vector and angle is calibrated to account for terrain), LOC on the other hand (i.e. non-precision with no G/S information) would have probably ended up in the same situation as it requires pilots to manually manage rate of descent. Not all runways have ILS equipment on both sides of the runway, let alone on all runways available or one that is active. At some airports it's possible you only run a 30% chance or lower that you can actually use the ILS to land, because the one with the equipment may not be the active one (and which runway is active changes depending upon wind and weather)
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.
> 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.
This has not been the practical reality for many years for IFR flights (arguably not for VFR flight either but some of the good old boys will still argue that you should still be using a map and compass).
In Europe the minimum requirement has been B-RNAV and aircraft are controlled with reference to intersections which have no defined relationships with underlying VORs, and an expectation of being able to navigate direct to one from any arbitrary point in space. Airliners generally get away with this because they have DME-DME disciplined INS. Smaller aircraft, well the backup is vectors from ATC.
This approach is wrong though, as we’re now seeing.
GPS is comically easy to jam or spoof and assuming it will work all the time is just a silly, dangerous assumption.
We just happened to live through a brief period where you could believe that
Yeah, I agree that GPS is too easy to jam and should ideally not be used exclusively but if you are flying anything from a newish C172 to a Cessna Citation (or any other non-long haul business jet) it is the reality.
Annoyingly all of these systems have VOR and DME equipment, it would be trivial to have a back up position to well within en-route navigation accuracy limits and certainly close enough to prevent this kind of accident. But regulation and certification requirements being what they are they are no one does it.
In an ideal world we'd have some kind of INS but the ring laser gyros and accelerometers required are stubbornly expensive.
In this case the call was coming from inside the house. Another win for uncle Sam.
Does Europe not have VORs?
Of course - though many of them have been decommissioned or are in the process. Though recent developments have probably reduced the enthusiasm for removing them so quickly.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the intersection that ATC are flying you towards are actually now defined as coordinates, not radials or distances from nearby VORs.
If an ATC tells you "direct OKSAW" they won't give you a VOR radial to intercept - you are expected to go straight there in a relatively straight line from your current position. There were boxes like the KNS80 that could do VOR-VOR navigation to do this kind of thing but it's not user friendly by modern standards.
When you file your flight plan, there is a box for "equipment". Put "O" there and they will not do that to you anymore. "DO" if you have DME.
Depends on the weather. A lot of approaches to airports are GPS only these days. If GPS doesn't work and you are not in VFR weather, you can't fly those approaches. In bad weather you'd be diverting to an airport that still has ILS.
Vectoring by the controller to a visual or ILS approach still works but they'd be juggling a lot of planes. And while lots of the bigger/older airports still have ILS, many VORs and DMEs are being retired and many smaller airports don't have ILS at all.
Denied access to GPS in a large area in bad weather would likely result in lots of flight cancellations and contingency plans getting put in motion to get anything still in the air landed safely. But controllers would get very busy and ILS runways very congested.
Here in Europe, there have been a few cases of GPS denied areas especially closer to Russia. Mostly pilots and controllers at e.g. Helsinki airport are able to deal with this.
lol the very first paragraph of my comment.
But yeah, IFR is getting more dependent on gps approaches…
which is incredibly stupid because it becomes trivial to disrupt air navigation. It’s a bit better with newer chipsets that support GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou… but I’d venture that when the military is jamming I’d does them all. I can buy a jammer that will take out GPS over about a kilometer for less than $1k. They are used all over the place by criminals in many countries, because there often aren’t standardized addresses and if your drug house can’t be located on gps in the favella, you get a lot more warning before a raid. That same transmitter with a directional antenna could knock out a 10 degree sector for 30km.
VMC prevailed at the time of the accident, although it was a dark moonless night. The flight in question only needed to maintain an altitude above the mountains until a visual to the airport was established along with their distance from the runway.
My guess based on the flight path is they had a visual on the airport but were lost and didn’t know where they were. If the gps hadn’t come back on for a minute they probably would have been fine, but it came back on and they fixated on the shiny screen instead of using their navigation skills.
Unless you want trust your life to an instrument, you fly like it might not be trustworthy. Granted, there are many instruments in an airplane we trust our lives to, but they can mostly be cross-referenced against other inputs. The trouble with gps is that it enables procedures that make that essentially impossible, and the major failure mode is not one you can carry an extra for. In aviation, situational awareness is life.
I believe that their are no multi-GNSS receivers certified for aviation, so Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou are out.
Sure, but every pilot has an iPad, basically, and an iPad with foreflight might have saved their lives. You even get synthetic vision.
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.
> Pilots were so used to "the plane won't make a mistake" that they were not aware
Of course there have also been crashes where pilots wrongly dismissed sensor data.
In the Kegworth air disaster [1] the pilots had sensor data telling them the left-hand engine was at fault - but a previous model of the plane had a reputation for unreliability in that sensor, and the pilots shut down the right-hand engine on the basis of other evidence.
So we don't want pilots blindly trusting broken sensors - but we also don't want them to dismiss working sensors as broken.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane/accid...
They didn't know their air speed (because of the pitot tubes being frozen). I think the report says that there was a path to safety if they had kept focused but it wasn't as easy as just flying the plane via 'the basics'.
It was, and one of the pilots was doing the right thing and would have saved the plane no problem if they had been the only one flying the plane. The problem was that the other pilot insisted on doing exactly the wrong thing, didn’t say what he was doing, and the plane didn’t give nearly enough indication that it was receiving contradictory inputs from the two sets of controls.
I don't know what the definitions of "basic" is, but even PPL students are trained to recognize the effects of a frozen pitot tube.
If it’s true that other navigation systems are as safe and capable as GPS, then GPS navigation should be randomly disabled in every aircraft occasionally to ensure that pilots remain fluent in using them.
If it isn’t true, then the military is partially responsible for the crash of this aircraft.
No, pilots should ensure they're current at navigating without GPS because it can fail, just like pilots practice engine failure procedures and every other emergency / non-normal procedure. That doesn't mean it should be "randomly disabled" for the same reason that you don't test software in production or randomly turn off the engine of the plane. Obviously.
We don't know how it failed. Maybe it displayed their lat/long perfectly but at the wrong altitude. We think of failure as obvious, but it is often nearly impossible to tell unless you are looking for it.
Altitude is the least accurate dimension for GPS, and it's also the one dimension that's provided with great accuracy by a really simple mechanical gauge present in every aircraft. There should never be a situation where an incorrect altitude figure from GPS causes a problem.
GPS is a 3D measurement.
Errors can be along any axis, random, infrequent, drifting, and nonobvious.
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
Better version: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIusD6Z-3cU>
Don't worry, our government is doing their level best to make GPS the only option for air navigation. After all, we all know that technology NEVER fails, and the sooner we can turn off all those big bad old ground radars and navigation aids, the sooner we can sell all that real estate and use the money for things that the American public desperately needs, like more corporate bailouts and bathroom security cameras.
That's not accurate. Navigationally critical VORs are continuing to be maintained, they're just turning off the podunk redundant ones.
VOR Candidate Retention List | Federal Aviation Administration https://www.faa.gov/ato/navigation-programs/vor-retention-li...
See specifically the "MON" concept:
> The VOR MON program is designed to enable aircraft, having lost GPS service, to revert to conventional navigation procedures. This will allow users to continue through the outage area using VOR station-to-station navigation or to proceed to a MON airport where an Instrument Landing System (ILS), Localizer (LOC) or VOR approach procedure can be flown without the necessity of GPS, Distance Measuring Equipment (DME), Automatic Direction Finder (ADF), or surveillance. Any airport with a suitable instrument approach may be used for landing, but the VOR MON assures that at least one airport will be within 100 Nautical Miles (NM).
* https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...
2011:
* https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2011/12/15/2011-31...
Everyone knows what the police need to catch more criminals is a comprehensive network of underseat security cameras. I’m sure they would never misuse that kind of access.
They’re going to eliminate windows?
The weather already does that on a regular basis... though they are doing their best to make the weather, on average (i.e. what you might call a climate), worse.
Worse is a value judgement and, in context, the value would be "ability to fly by sight".
Is climate change going to make it more difficult to see outside?
The value here is pretty simple, the frequency at which windows are rendered useless due to weather.
Yes, the change we are undergoing and that the current administration seems to be doing their best to accelerate includes an increase in heavy precipitation across north america.
That's good news for the data centers.
More destructive weather events are good for expensive pieces of infrastructure? Higher temperatures are good for things that struggle to cool themselves? I don't see it.
I thought they were shutting down VORs to save money and relying more and more on RNAV (i.e. GPS) approaches.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
thanks for your comment, i went to open TFA :)
The preliminary NTSB report: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...
> 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.
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...
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.
This whole thing has me thinking of that midair a while back, the helicopter avoided the wrong aircraft and flew right into the they were supposed to be avoiding.
What if they actually never had a visual on the runway? It was a long ways away and they were off course--what if they had a visual on what they thought was the runway but was something else entirely?
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...
https://archive.ph/CECav
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
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...
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.
> 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
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_licenc...
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.
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.
German Wings 9525 was labelled pilot "error" tbf
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.
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.
No reason is given. That quote is the entirety of the "Probable Cause and Findings" from the report in question.
I'm sorry, what? Pilot error is absolutely a factor in contemporary accidents. It's the most common one, in fact, because we've rooted out almost all the other risks.
And why did the pilot make the error?
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.
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...
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...
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
wiki 2020 census map | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/New_Mexi...
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..
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.
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.
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
Per other comments the ILS approach was not available due to the local weather service being NOTAM'd as unavailable, couldn't set local altitude. The judgment call was effectively whether to take the flight at all, as there was effectively no instrument approach available and the visual conditions precluded VFR.
The ILS approach being not legally usable as an approach due to a missing local altimeter setting does not make it unusable to back up a visual approach [or VFR arrival].
I would 100% (and have) take center's altimeter setting and fly the track of an ILS or localizer rather than "whelp, nothing can be done..." This was VMC; you don't need a local altimeter setting to be safe using the radio navaids; you would need it to legally fly the approach as an ILS approach.
The "skill issue" is that they chose to press on instead of returning to base. Yes, the jamming was a factor, but making a decision to fly a visual into field surrounded by mountains at night is a bad call.
>I'm wondering what they could have done differently here.
It appears there were too many sources of confusion. GPS jamming, moonless night, busy ATC, not planning on VFR before takeoff, 20 minute short flight, instrument approach disabled, young pilots, mountains, and perhaps others.
Flight safety is about removing entropy and there were several steps which could have been taken, including not flying at all because of forced VFR on a moonless night near mountains.
"TOO LOW – TERRAIN" vwoop vwoop
You say GPS-enabled. What about a GPS-jammed flight computer? Can that do it too?
GPS + a topo map yelling at you for being too close to the ground is extremely simple, a very basic feature.
Dead reckoning (keeping track of position over time without an external source of truth) and radar altimeters are high level features that some avionics do have, but these are expensive and not expected to always be present.
Inertial navigation systems you'd find on missiles are precise enough that if you leave one running on a table in the upper floor of the building you can track the rise and fall of the building as it heats up and grows because of thermal expansion throughout the day (in other words, they are extremely precise).
So it depends.
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"
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
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
I have thousands of hours as pilot in command and have worked as a professional pilot.
Unlit terrain is invisible at night. The moon was new. They did not see, and could not have seen, the mountains.
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.
That's valid. I wouldn't call that a clear sky, personally, but I suppose it can still be considered one.
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.
Can anybody explain what the visual is, what are the dots moving/getting blown around by something
I guess there’s no way to constrain these jamming signals to some reasonable perimeter? 400 miles of overspill seems like sloppy engineering.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
Remember Moab!
> 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 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...
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.
The automated weather service was also out. This made it difficult or impossible to use the ILS because they can't set the local altimeter. This was a swiss cheese chain of events. It was a moonless dark night so the mountains weren't visible.
What is the normal fallback for local weather service failure? Divert to an airport with working service? Proceed, using the "nearest working" information?
How much does air pressure vary over a region, and how quickly does it change?
I think it would be "fly vfr" but the main issue there is the wind direction, not the altimeter setting. In daytime you can read the wind sock while airborne but not possible at night.
Would they take off if they knew GPS would be jammed midway through the flight?
Had they known they wouldn't be able to rely on GPS, all that back and forth with ATC would not be needed, and they'd already have a plan B and a plan C for navigating.
It's unfortunately all slices of swiss cheese aligned perfectly, but I'd still blame the military for poking extra holes on the GPS slice.
> Would they take off if
medevac flight - there was probably some urgency.
Maybe. Urgency should not trump safety. A delay in transport is not worse than a dead patient, dead medics and flight crew, and loss of an aircraft.
And I am happy to be corrected but as I understand it, in the rural west more medical transport than you might think is by air. Distances are large, and population is sparse. You can cover more area with the same number of medics using a few airplanes instead of ground ambulances. So not all air ambulance service is critically urgent, unlike what we are used to in more populated areas.
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.
They are not in a disagreement. From the report:
SRR is serviced by two instrument approaches, the ILS or LOC RWY 24 and the RNAV (GPS) RWY 24. Both instrument approach plate notes section contain the following statement: “When local altimeter setting not received, procedure NA (Not Authorized).”
IFR approach was not possible, the flight plan was unrealistic.
Trust in governmental institutions is at an all time low.
Questions must be asked about how and why we got here rather appeal to submission.
A rehash of the paywalled Wired article:
* https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-...
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.
Blancolirio (YouTube aviation reporter and commercial pilot) analysis:
https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?is=n0w5_tLCxEkYGtt9
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...
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.
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.
This story doesn't involve Mexico at all. New Mexico is a US state.