Military GPS Jamming Preceded a Fatal Medevac Crash in New Mexico

Just before midnight on 13 May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air lifted off from Roswell, New Mexico, carrying two pilots and two nurses. It was going to Ruidoso, sixty miles west, to collect a patient and take them on to Albuquerque. The sky was clear and the air was warm. The trip should have taken half an hour.

It never arrived. The aircraft flew into the side of the Capitan Mountains at full speed, and everyone aboard was killed. About a hundred miles to the west, at the White Sands Missile Range, US military units had spent that evening deliberately switching off satellite navigation across an enormous stretch of the American Southwest.

The question investigators are working on — and the question worth working through carefully, because the answer is not the obvious one in either direction — is what one of those facts had to do with the other. The National Transportation Safety Board has published a preliminary report of factual findings and has been unusually firm in saying it has not yet determined a probable cause or any contributing factors.

The exercise that switches off the sky

Every year, an Air Force test squadron hosts an event called NAVFEST at White Sands, drawing electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of practice. They test equipment that disrupts GPS and equipment that copes with an adversary doing the same thing to them.

The reason this matters more each year is drones. Cheap uncrewed aircraft have become the way a smaller military levels the field against a larger one, and the cheapest way for a drone to find its target is to work out its own position from satellite signals. Block the signals and the drone is blind. So both sides of every modern conflict now practise blocking, and practise defeating blocking, in a loop that does not stop. That practice is a form of radio jamming: drowning a faint signal from space under a louder one from the ground.

Jamming does not respect a fence line. Before NAVFEST, the Federal Aviation Administration warned aircraft operators that GPS could be degraded up to 400 miles away between 12 and 18 May. In the past year the military appears to have issued notices for at least ten such exercises.

Eight minutes after takeoff, the magenta line went out

The King Air's captain, aged 30, had held a commercial licence for eighteen months and had been promoted from first officer the month before. His first officer, 23, had been in the job two months and had flown only cargo before that. Both had been assessed as competent to fly on instruments. They had been told at 11pm that they were going, which is normal: medical flights are arranged at short notice, into airfields the crew may not know, under pressure to go when conditions are marginal because someone is waiting. A law firm that litigates air crashes has noted that medevac's accident rate sits closer to combat flying than to ordinary civil aviation.

The night was nearly moonless over open country. With almost nothing visible outside, the crew asked Albuquerque Center for clearance to navigate purely by instruments, and got it. Eight minutes after takeoff, they told the controller they had lost GPS.

What they lost was more specific than a map. A modern cockpit draws a magenta line across a screen — where you are, where you are going — and an approach flown that way can be followed all the way down to the runway threshold in poor visibility. It is the single most useful thing in the aircraft, and it was gone.

The backup that everyone says is fine

The standard reply is that GPS is a convenience, not a necessity: aircraft have carried radio beacons and compasses for decades, pilots are trained on them, and this is precisely what redundancy is for. That is true as a statement about equipment and much weaker as a statement about people.

Navigating by ground beacons means building and continuously updating a three-dimensional picture of where you are relative to transmitters you cannot see, in your head, while flying. It is a skill that decays without practice, and since GPS became standard in the 2000s there has been little occasion to practise it. Someone who experienced satellite spoofing while flying made the point that the office version of this problem — where you calmly reason about your fallback options — bears no resemblance to the airborne version, where diagnosing the failure is itself extra work piled on top of flying the aircraft.

There is a second loss that is easy to miss. Practitioners who study interference point out that GPS feeds the terrain awareness and warning system, the equipment whose entire job is to shout at pilots that a mountain is coming. Jamming does not just remove the map. It removes the alarm.

The crew asked for a heading and were given one: west, then north. They asked to fly a satellite-guided approach; not available. They asked for an Instrument Landing System approach, the older ground-based system that talks a pilot down a radio beam without needing satellites. At 12.05am the controller told them vectors were coming in a couple of minutes. Those minutes are the hinge. Three other aircraft had also lost GPS and were also asking for help, one of them struggling to get a bearing off a beacon. A controller can only talk to one aircraft at a time. While the others were handled, the King Air kept flying north, and by 12.08am it was ten miles past where it should have turned.

Flying towards lights on a black night

From up there they could see the lights of Ruidoso's airport, 31 miles to the southwest. So they asked to abandon the instrument procedure and fly a visual approach — see the runway, fly to it — and were cleared to do so. It removed the waiting, the vectors, and all the mental arithmetic at once.

Between them and those lights stood 10,000 feet of the Capitan Mountains, unlit and invisible. As they descended, the rock rose across their windscreen and began wiping the town's lights out of view. They slowed the descent and even climbed slightly. It was not enough. A retired airline pilot's description of the correct response is unambiguous: climb, then circle in one place until you know where you are, rather than continuing forward blind. They continued forward.

None of the individual choices required GPS jamming to be fatal. What the jamming did was remove the layer of protection that made those choices survivable, and it did so to everyone in a 400-mile radius at once — a cost imposed on people who were not party to the exercise and could not decline it. Pilots have warned for years that deciding on their behalf how much of their equipment may be unreliable would eventually kill someone.

Since 2023, aircraft over the Middle East, the Black Sea and the Baltic have flown through waves of interference, and airlines have adapted. This is the first time in the United States that electronic warfare has been linked to a fatal civil crash. The testing is not going to stop — drones guarantee that. Aviation is not going to un-optimise itself around satellite navigation quickly either. Which leaves the question of how those two things are supposed to share the same sky without the bill being settled, occasionally, in people.

Reported from WIRED's account of the Ruidoso crash.