[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"$fBCQBEsBdG_FYRNszmOVM2rVZ1OpiBNxYFeyTmCdMqac":3},{"article":4,"iocs":54},{"id":5,"title":6,"slug":7,"summary":8,"ai_summary":9,"brief":10,"full_text":11,"url":12,"image_url":13,"published_at":14,"ingested_at":15,"relevance_score":16,"entities":17,"category_id":31,"category":32,"article_tags":36},"3e75c015-02ed-46b9-84f4-9bb3e0cdf9a4","A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame?","a-civilian-plane-crashed-in-new-mexico-was-the-military-s-tech-to-blame-a5109b","Drone warfare is making the skies more dangerous, even for airplanes far from the battlefield.","A US military GPS jamming exercise in New Mexico disrupted navigation systems, leading to a fatal crash of a civilian medevac plane. The pilots, forced to rely on older navigation methods due to the jamming, became disoriented and crashed into a mountain, resulting in no survivors. This incident highlights the increasing risks posed by electronic warfare and drone operations to civilian aviation, even far from conflict zones.","GPS jamming exercise by US military linked to fatal civilian medevac plane crash in New Mexico.","CommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyThis past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69 degrees; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most.But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.The accident marked the first time that GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. But it was just one of a string of recent disruptions across the world. The skies are more contested than ever, whether it’s civilian drones wandering out of the approved zone or US agencies getting their signals crossed, as happened earlier this year when New Mexico and Texas scared the public by temporarily closing their airspace. (It turned out that US Customs and Border Patrol were using anti-drone lasers in that area.) The GPS jamming exercise that led to this latest crash is not a singular event. In the past year, the US military appeared to have sent out notices for at least 10 such exercises. “As drone warfare and electronic warfare expand, airlines are increasingly encountering navigation disruptions hundreds of miles beyond the actual conflict zone,” says Eliran Almog, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Cyviation.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.Both men had demonstrated proficiency flying in low-visibility conditions using what’s called instrument flight rules, or IFR. There are two basic ways to navigate in bad weather. Modern cockpits are equipped with GPS-enabled equipment that shows where the plane is on a computer screen and portrays a magenta-colored line that shows pilots where they need to go. This is called RNAV flying; an “RNAV approach” brings planes all the way to the threshold of a runway for landing in low-visibility conditions.This method of flying is much easier than the previous iteration. Before GPS became widely available in the 2000s, airliners navigated using a combination of magnetic compasses, ground-based radio beacons, and inertial systems derived from old-fashioned gyroscopes. Flying by radio beacons requires pilots to form a 3D mental map of their location relative to the beacons. They have to practice until they become so efficient that they can stay calm under pressure, lest they panic, lose their situational awareness, and spiral out of control. “Just ask Kennedy,” says Kenneth Krentsa, a retired airline pilot, referring to JFK Jr.’s 1999 nighttime crash.Clark and Kawsara took off at eight minutes to midnight and initially headed due west, toward Ruidoso. The weather was clear, but because the night was nearly moonless and the area is rural, the only visual references available were the lights of scattered settlements. “It’s a black hole out there,” says Juan Browne, an airline pilot who hosts a crash-investigation podcast.Unable to orient themselves without visual cues, the pilots called up Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center—Albuquerque Center, for short—and requested permission to fly instruments-only to Ruidoso. The request was approved.Under normal circumstances, the flight that followed would have been uneventful. The pilots would have followed the magenta line, and the GPS navigation equipment would have lined them up for a smooth landing.But 100 miles to the west, an Air Force Unit called the 746th Test Squadron of the 704th Test Group was holding its annual NAVFEST event at the White Sands Missile Range. The event draws together electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of exercises, in which units test different technologies for disrupting GPS and dealing with adversaries’ disruption.Courtesy of AirNavRadar.com The event is held at White Sands because it’s among the most remote and sparsely settled areas of the continental United States. (Not coincidentally, the first atomic bomb was detonated there.) But in the run-up to NAVFEST, the Federal Aviation Administration warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18.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.While ATC helped other planes, the King Air continued north. By 12:08 am, they had overshot the landing pattern by 10 miles.At this point the pilots had three options. They could stick to the current plan and wait for the busy controller to give them the next vector toward the landing. Or, now that GPS was working again, they could ask to switch to the RNAV approach and fly it themselves. Or they could ditch the instrument approach altogether and fly what’s called a visual approach. You see a runway, and you fly to it.As the King Air flew north, they were high enough to see the lights of Ruidoso's airport 31 miles to the southwest. To the pilots in the cockpit of the King Air, a visual approach must have seemed a tantalizing prospect. Why hang around waiting for ATC to give them vectors, why go through the mental acrobatics of trying to figure out where they were relative to the ILS beacon? All they had to do was fly toward the lights that they could clearly see through their windshield.The King Air called Albuquerque Center and asked to “go visual.” The request was granted.As they turned and descended toward Ruid","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.wired.com\u002Fstory\u002Fa-civilian-plane-crashed-in-new-mexico-was-the-militarys-tech-to-blame\u002F","https:\u002F\u002Fmedia.wired.com\u002Fphotos\u002F6a6aa9b4122307fc34b52d0a\u002Fmaster\u002Fpass\u002F072926_gps-jamming-roswell-flight.gif","2026-07-30T10:00:00+00:00","2026-07-30T12:00:21.436878+00:00",8,[18,21,24,26,28],{"name":19,"type":20},"Beechcraft King Air","product",{"name":22,"type":23},"GPS jamming","technology",{"name":25,"type":23},"electronic warfare",{"name":27,"type":23},"drone warfare",{"name":29,"type":30},"US Customs and Border Patrol","vendor","6cbdd207-aaa1-4176-9534-e156b125e917",{"id":31,"icon":33,"name":34,"slug":35},null,"Nation-state","nation-state",[37,39,44,49],{"category":38},{"id":31,"icon":33,"name":34,"slug":35},{"category":40},{"id":41,"icon":33,"name":42,"slug":43},"c5c77cdb-f7d7-4990-9436-c81dcbff1163","Policy","policy",{"category":45},{"id":46,"icon":33,"name":47,"slug":48},"d6f63bb8-0801-486a-be7f-171400700454","IoT\u002FOT","iot-ot",{"category":50},{"id":51,"icon":33,"name":52,"slug":53},"e7b231c8-5f79-4465-8d38-1ef13aea5a14","Threat Intelligence","threat-intelligence",[55],{"type":56,"value":57,"context":58},"mitre_attack","T0803","GPS jamming exercise"]