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.
It's still pretty useful to know where you are and not die hitting an invisible guy wire.
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.
> 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)
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?
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
[1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av...
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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...
Stalls, on the other hand are part of standard instruction. Recognizing the beginning of a stall early and preventing it will prevent the spin.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
This gave me a smile. I've never heard of pattern matching being described as aggressive.
(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)
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.
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.
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).
A crash is usually the end result of several previous bad decisions.
The only correct conclusion here is more investigation is necessary than what has been publicly published.
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?
When they accepted the visual approach, they took responsibility for navigation and terrain/obstacle clearance.
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.
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.
It's important to understand why things happen in order to prevent them, and to counter the narrative of the opinionated article. And if we should wait for the NTSB report, then so should the article.
I can point to at least one fatal crash that wouldn’t have happened if GPS was unavailable. Would it be reasonable to say that crash was caused by a lack of GPS jamming?
Something like GPS jamming isn't quite so bad. It's intuitively reasonable that reducing or degrading the information available to pilots will make things worse, and avoiding that is likely to improve safety. But it requires proper analysis to figure out the best thing to do, not a simplistic "this specific event wouldn't have happened if this specific fact had been different." That's what "cause" is about in a practical sense: not "what changes would have avoided this past event?" but "what changes improve our odds in the future?" And the first question isn't nearly enough to answer the second.
The preliminary NTSB report points toward “get gud”. If you request a visual approach and then fly into a mountain getting “gud” will be at top of the list.
For another I'd note that past investigations into accidents that at the surface were the pilot making a very bad decision have found a laundry list of underlying causes that need to be fixed. E.g. see Ontario Flight 1363 where the proximate cause was not de-icing a plane that clearly needed de-icing and the root causes after investigation were a whole lot of institutional issues.
And finally at a glance I note that the air traffic control tower appears to have approved this plane flying on instruments, a procedure only allowed when "local altimeter setting [is] received" - apparently referring to GPS. In doing so they had the military disable the jamming. The pilots appear to have communicated to the tower that they would be using that approval until further notice (notice that was anticipated in a couple of minutes). And that the tower apparently without informing the pilots appears to have approved restarting the GPS jamming... I'm not an expert but if I were asked to investigate this (a thing that non-experts are sometimes asked to do, e.g. with the aforementioned flight)... I suggest that this leads to obvious alternate theories of what went wrong such as instruments they had good cause to rely on silently misleading them.
The aircraft was completely legal to fly under IFR during the en route phase. There is no requirement for a local altimeter setting for that; center can provide an area altimeter setting (and does so on every handoff).
The lack of a local altimeter setting precluded the use of the instrument approaches (the way you transition from en route phase to landing). Both of the instrument approaches are "when local altimeter setting not received, procedure NA". That equally applies to the RNAV(GPS) and ILS approaches.
That doesn't make filing or flying a flight plan to that airport under IFR NA; it just means that you have to either cancel IFR or fly a visual approach (which, despite the name, is an IFR procedure). Both are legal and commonly done; you can even file an IFR flight plan to an airport that doesn't even have a published approach or to a point in space that isn't even an airport.
When the pilot asked for a visual approach, they were taking on the obligation for navigating to the airport and for terrain and obstacle clearance.
Smaller item: KSRR is a non-towered airport. All the relevant ATC contact was with Albuquerque Center, not with a local tower controller. (If there was a local tower controller, they would almost certainly have been able to provide a local altimeter setting, making the instrument approaches fully available.)
ILS-24: https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2607/06922IL24.PDF RNAV(GPS)-24: https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2607/06922R24.PDF
Are you suggesting however that "The flight crew acknowledged the clearance and responded that they would cancel IFR “in just a couple of minutes.”" meant the crew was informing the tower that they would transition to VFR? That seems... unlikely. I'm reading the paraphrasing here as towards declining to cancel the ILS approach they previously requested because it doesn't particularly make sense to me otherwise.
Which is really back to "this preliminary report doesn't, and doesn't even attempt to, assign blame or contain sufficient facts to do so".
It's very common to cancel IFR in the air, especially for late night operations to non-towered airports. (At an airport with an operating tower, they will close your IFR flight when you land.) At a non-towered airport, you have to either call on the phone or use a radio relay to close your flight plan, which can be a pain, so in benign conditions it's very common to cancel IFR in the air where you have line of sight [meaning good comms] to the ARTCC radio transceiver and avoid the hassle of bad cell phone coverage and/or no radio contact possible on the ground. (There is no radio relay at Ruidoso; the nearest RCAG is at Roswell, 50+ nm away with terrain in between.)
ZAB ARTCC's transmission that "they could cancel IFR in the air above 9,000 ft msl" tells the crew "once you get below 9000 MSL, you probably won't be able to talk to us on the radio".
When the crew said "we'll cancel IFR in a couple minutes", that's also common. It means "we're going to stay IFR and fly the visual until we're a little closer and landing is reasonably assured."
Pilots unable to fly with all the bells and whistles and getting their ass handed to them when anything falls out of the ordinary: too many
You are not supposed to need all the “bells and whistles” to fly, a plane is a plane and a pilot is in left seat meaning to fly the plane. There are checklists and minimum equipment lists that state what is possible and how to handle failures and control.
You can not automate that, yet.
But did you know for 'General Aviation' (small planes flown for recreation and suchlike) there are around 300 deaths per year in the US?
Your main point is the most valid - wait for the final report. But you should be saying the same to the article as written.
Prelim report: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...
Out of my scope to infer.
This is a pilot-error accident. They flew a perfectly functioning airplane into rising terrain on a visual approach.
The pilot requested, and was cleared for, a visual approach. Among other things that that imposes upon on the pilot is an obligation to maintain visual contact with the airport (or the preceding aircraft to follow, not applicable here) and to maintain terrain and obstacle clearance.
The primary probable cause will be found to be something like "The pilot’s failure to maintain clearance from terrain while on visual approach." with additional notes of "Contributing to the accident were the dark moonless night, the NOTAM'd unreliability of GPS signal in the area which required the crew to revert to other navigation methods, and the pilot's decision to fly an unaided visual approach rather than flying the ILS instrument approach track."
The passengers were blameless, but the flight crew was not.
It's important to understand why things happen in order to prevent them.
> If any of yer ancestor's last words were "Hey, ya'll! Look at this!", then you jest might be a redneck.
- Jeff Foxworthy
Is it inappropriate to discuss why Mussolini got lynched?
Flying with GPS out is something a pilot should know how to do. Jamming isn't the only failure mode; much more mundane mechanical/electrical issues occur all the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
If it isn’t true, then the military is partially responsible for the crash of this aircraft.
VOR Candidate Retention List | Federal Aviation Administration https://www.faa.gov/ato/navigation-programs/vor-retention-li...
> 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...
Is climate change going to make it more difficult to see outside?
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.
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.
There is not only one alternative.
When presented with two impossible (per your telling) options for landing, you choose option C: don't.
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 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.
There's a saying among medevac pilots when it comes to making go/no-go decisions: don't turn one tragedy into five.
>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:
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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...
It was a visual approach at a moonless night at an airport in high terrain, this was pilot error unfortunately.
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.
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.
Pilots train to navigate without GPS. Or, rather, they should...
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.
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...
https://ground.news/article/lazni-signali-rusili-dronove-avi...
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...
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://q-ctrl.com/blog/q-ctrl-to-showcase-worlds-first-airw...
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.
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?
Air traffic control also failed here.
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.
Roswell.
Blaming GPS jaming and the military? What about the aliens?
https://bsky.app/profile/mikeblack114.bsky.social/post/3mrux...
How much does air pressure vary over a region, and how quickly does it change?
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.
medevac flight - there was probably some urgency.
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.
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.
In any case the news (and ntsb report) points that they are tied, not responsibility.
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.
> 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.
* https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-...
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...
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.pdfAnd 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...
Anyone else firing up a jammer is going to get triangulated and arrested very quickly.
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.
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?
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?