New Mexico medevac crash tied to military GPS jamming, a first for US civil aviation

On the night of May 13, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, bound for Ruidoso to pick up a patient and carry them to Albuquerque. Conditions were unremarkable: a clear sky, 69-degree weather, and a 60-mile route that normally takes half an hour at most. Aboard were two pilots — captain Keelan Clark, 30, and first officer Ali Kawsara, 23 — and two nurses.

The jamming exercise

A hundred miles to the west, the Air Force's 746th Test Squadron, part of the 704th Test Group, was running NAVFEST at the White Sands Missile Range — an annual two-week electronic warfare exercise in which units test technology for disrupting GPS and for operating against an adversary's disruption. Before the event, the FAA warned operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18. Wired reports that the military has issued notices for at least ten such exercises in the past year.

How the flight went wrong

Eight minutes after takeoff, the crew told Albuquerque Center they had lost GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked for a heading; they tried an RNAV approach, then requested an ILS approach, which does not require GPS. But the controller was busy — three other aircraft had also reported losing GPS. By 12:08 am the King Air had overshot the landing pattern by 10 miles. GPS had since returned, and the pilots asked for and received clearance to “go visual” toward the lights of Ruidoso's airport, 31 miles to the southwest. Lying across their path was the 10,000-foot mass of the Capitan Mountains. The crew slowed the descent and climbed slightly, but flew straight into the rising slope at full speed. All four people aboard died instantly.

The first case of its kind

It was the first time GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. The NTSB's preliminary report is out; its head of media relations, Eric Weiss, said investigators have yet to determine a probable cause or contributing factors. Experts told Wired that medevac flying already carries an accident rate closer to combat flying than to civil aviation, and that routine GPS interference — over the Middle East, the Black Sea and the Baltic, and increasingly in US airspace — strips away a layer of protection crews have come to rely on. Todd Humphreys, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says air travel remains very safe but may be stuck “for the next five years or more in a mild-and-increasing risk situation.” In July, a 737 freighter operated by Pakistan's K2 Airways crashed near Karachi after its crew reported a navigation system issue on a route through heavily jammed airspace; no cause has been announced.