New Mexico King Air Medical Flight Fatal, Four Dead, 5/16/2026

dans2992 said:
The military really needs to stop playing around constantly. Can’t they do this over the ocean or something?
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For certain weapons and tests, no, they can't.

When I was with LockMart, we did lots of missile testing at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), and we did some testing at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD) Point Mugu. Some tests can be done over the ocean, but many types of tests, particularly short-range tactical missiles, can't. WSMR is equipped with tracking and telemetry and camera systems that cannot be duplicated on an ocean range. Also, there are certain launch vehicles (trailers, tanks, etc.) and targets (moving trucks, buildings, roads, etc.) which cannot be duplicated on an ocean range.

It is sometimes required to test certain missiles in a GPS-denied environment. Some missiles use ground-based imagery for navigation when GPS is unavailable, and some cruise missiles fly courses using imaged waypoints. That type of navigation is nearly impossible on an ocean range.

Bottom line - military testing over land with GPS denial isn't going away.

The crew was warned of the potential loss of GPS. They had an opportunity at that point to prepare for the eventuality by changing course or altitude. Don't blame the military for this one.
 
Velocity173 said:
Just yesterday I did a scene (car crash) where we didn’t copy GPS coordinates. I just used pilotage. Most guys use GPS as a crutch. Little different for fixed wing IFR though. I’m sure they rely heavily on GPS for nav.
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In my neck of the woods the problem is there is no backup to GPS because of the condition of so many VORs. On a blue bird day I can go anywhere without typing anything into the GPS. That is a very small number of days however.
 
My home airport *KRBD* is currently dealing with the FAA deciding to decommission the VOR 17 approach... makes me think that this is such a bad idea. We've had GPS jamming a few times that I can recently remember - one affected all of our units down near 13 and a jet turned around and went to the ramp as a result - probably coming from the someone jamming along the highway. The threat to GPS is not zero.
 
I must be missing something from the posts.
If this crew of professional pilots, flying a capable plane equipped to navigate using non-GPS navaids, crashed due to GPS outage, help me understand how keeping the non-GPS navaids helps a PP who barely maintains currency/proficiency?
 
Rockymountain said:
The GPS system is fragile, easily jammed, spoofed, and can even be turned off. Seems like a bad time for the FAA to be decommissioning VOR's left and right. These modern planes (and their pilots) are becoming very GPS dependent.
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I don't think they're decommissioning VOR's by way of any grand plan, except to stop maintenance on most of them and let them fail, and building a plan around that. And that they don't care much as long as the air carriers can fly. Perhaps just my cynicism and minor history of working with a different federal agency in the past.
Half Fast said:
For certain weapons and tests, no, they can't.
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You know this stuff way better than I ever will, but I'd be willing to bet that they jam/disable GPS in an area way more than they need to for testing. Along the lines that for much of it, they could simply disable the GPS receiver in the system under test and see what it does. My singular data point is that my next door neighbor as a kid worked on first gen ALCM, and if I remember that system correctly, it didn't use GPS at all. It was 100% autonomous after launch, relying on radar image comparison to stored maps in the guidance system. Also IIRC, they worked pretty well in Gulf 1, and we should be able to do the same thing or better today. (For humor, the story I heard was that when that system was first announced as "operational" it was only in the sense that it would safely separate from the aircraft, and then fly about 600 yards before diving into the ground.)

As a society, though, I don't know how we go so quickly from the time when a technology doesn't exist at all to that technology being "essential". I'm not any different, though...one of my house buying criteria was availability of high speed Internet. Something that did not exist by current standards anywhere when I got out of college.
 
Half Fast said:
For certain weapons and tests, no, they can't.

When I was with LockMart, we did lots of missile testing at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), and we did some testing at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD) Point Mugu. Some tests can be done over the ocean, but many types of tests, particularly short-range tactical missiles, can't. WSMR is equipped with tracking and telemetry and camera systems that cannot be duplicated on an ocean range. Also, there are certain launch vehicles (trailers, tanks, etc.) and targets (moving trucks, buildings, roads, etc.) which cannot be duplicated on an ocean range.

It is sometimes required to test certain missiles in a GPS-denied environment. Some missiles use ground-based imagery for navigation when GPS is unavailable, and some cruise missiles fly courses using imaged waypoints. That type of navigation is nearly impossible on an ocean range.

Bottom line - military testing over land with GPS denial isn't going away.

The crew was warned of the potential loss of GPS. They had an opportunity at that point to prepare for the eventuality by changing course or altitude. Don't blame the military for this one.
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Perhaps some tech details that maybe shouldn’t find it’s way into social media even though we’re retired,
 
MountainDude said:
I must be missing something from the posts.
If this crew of professional pilots, flying a capable plane equipped to navigate using non-GPS navaids, crashed due to GPS outage, help me understand how keeping the non-GPS navaids helps a PP who barely maintains currency/proficiency?
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I don’t know what the exact situation was in this specific case, but it GPS was working; and you start an approach down a valley with no other navaids being received, you’re going to be in a world of hurt when the military decides they’re going to screw around with GPS yet again.
 
Albany Tom said:
I don't think they're decommissioning VOR's by way of any grand plan, except to stop maintenance on most of them and let them fail, and building a plan around that. And that they don't care much as long as the air carriers can fly. Perhaps just my cynicism and minor history of working with a different federal agency in the past.
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Rockymountain said:
The GPS system is fragile, easily jammed, spoofed, and can even be turned off. Seems like a bad time for the FAA to be decommissioning VOR's left and right. These modern planes (and their pilots) are becoming very GPS dependent.
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There is a plan. It's called MON and it's been out for 10 years.
 
Albany Tom said:
I'd be willing to bet that they jam/disable GPS in an area way more than they need to for testing. Along the lines that for much of it, they could simply disable the GPS receiver in the system under test and see what it does.
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dans2992 said:
Turning off the GPS chip in the missile seems like a much better way to test it…
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Except that only tests one failure mode, and probably doesn't accurately represent real-life field conditions the missile system might be exposed to. There can be a huge difference between "GPS receiver completely fails" vs. "GPS receiver goes 12 seconds without a valid solution, then starts getting solutions again" or "GPS gets 1 erroneous solution out of every 3" or "GPS solution doesn't agree with what the inertial nav is reporting / visual sensors are seeing" or 1,000 other variations on that theme. The guidance and flight control software can be tested in the lab, and I'm sure there's a huge amount of that testing performed...but eventually, for at least some of those situations you're going to want to Fire Zee Missiles! and see what they really do in actual flight, and you probably don't want that to happen for the first time when you need them to work in combat.

This discussion reminds me of a podcast I was listening to yesterday about the possible origins of "Murphy's Law". While they had some good rationale for why the commonly-held explanation might be apocryphal, what I found more interesting is that that potentially-apocryphal story says that the initial intent of "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong" was not intended to be a pessimistic response to random failures in life, but rather a deliberate guiding principle to keep in mind when trying to address all possible failure modes in a design. The intention was to try to conceive of every way a system could fail (and acknowledging that if it was possible to fail that way, then if left in operation long enough at some point it eventually would), and then consciously work to find mitigations to each of those failure modes. This is a methodology that I see in use daily where I work, though I have never heard anyone try to connect it back to Murphy's Law.
 
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dmspilot said:
There is a plan. It's called MON and it's been out for 10 years.
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Oh I know they've had a plan published for years. It's the causation that I don't believe. I believe the plan is the solution to the lack of planning of maintenance of VOR's, not a vision of the future. Maybe my natural cynicism, but over the years I've seen a lot of failures and problems labeled as features by the marketing department.

Quotes from their own documents from more than 10 years ago: "VORs must give way to a safer, more reliable, and efficient means of air navigation" "A backup capability for lower end GA IFR aircraft in the event of a widespread GPS outage" "An operational contingency, and not the robust network of current VORs". Sure. Or..."This network is falling apart, it's expensive to fix, so let's get ahead of this disaster and write a plan to make it look like we're not ******." Fill in the blank on whatever descriptors you like. It's a plan like my next door neighbor had, to detox by switching from gin to beer. Excellent.

Jim_R said:
Except that only tests one failure mode, and probably doesn't accurately represent real-life field conditions the missile system might be exposed to. There can be a huge difference between "GPS receiver completely fails" vs. "GPS receiver goes 12 seconds without a valid solution, then starts getting solutions again" or "GPS gets 1 erroneous solution out of every 3" or "GPS solution doesn't agree with what the inertial nav is reporting / visual sensors are seeing" or 1,000 other variations on that theme. The guidance and flight control software can be tested in the lab, and I'm sure there's a huge amount of that testing performed...but eventually, for at least some of those situations you're going to want to Fire Zee Missiles! and see what they really do in actual flight, and you probably don't want that to happen for the first time when you need them to work in combat.
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Turning off GPS doesn't test a failure mode at all, to me. It tests the functionality of the systems without GPS. The mistake, in my view, aligns with your accurate premise that you can't test all the failure modes - because they're not failure modes, they're jamming and spoofing modes. If we try to test all of those, we're really - in my view - doing two things: 1 - kinda kidding ourselves that those are the only methods and 2 - letting anyone in the area with signal monitoring gear know exactly what we test against.

Radio stuff is just a hobby for me, so I don't know all the details. But I do know how to design a system that is tolerant of GPS jamming - you don't put a GPS antenna on it.
 
dans2992 said:
I flew through NM a couple weeks ago, at night, me and a bunch of other aircraft on frequency “lost GPS”.

The military really needs to stop playing around constantly. Can’t they do this over the ocean or something?

With today’s modern avionics, you lose quite a bit of function when GPS goes.
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These interference notams just aren’t for new weapons testing though. Almost every large scale military exercise (NTC, JRTC, etc) these days incorporates GPS denial in the training plan. Can’t do that stuff over the ocean.
 
When you have 2 Nav's and 2 GPS's, ATC, who plans to use a clock and a compass? Plus with some of the darkest land in the US minus Reno and Vegas, how do you even dead reckon? Now with a bad GPS, I would have climbed higher than the tallest mountains in the area which in those sectors is 12,300 feet. And then figure out a way to get to a suitable VFR alternate. But for all we know they were climbing, but just ran out of altitude before they ran out of mountain.
 
Rockymountain said:
When you have 2 Nav's and 2 GPS's, ATC, who plans to use a clock and a compass?
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Perhaps someone in this position should consider it.
Rockymountain said:
For the most part you only have a compass, VORs, and may not even have DME since GPS serves as DME in most modern aircraft. So all approaches needing DME are no longer available, all GPS approaches are no longer available so you’re kind of stuck with VOR or ILS approaches that have radar available. These are few and far between in the mountains. Many airports in mountain areas out west are non-radar due to terrain. Can be very lonely. Very dark, limited nav options. Sounds like they were inbound. No TAWS, no NAV. So you climb and hope you don’t climb into a mountain. Without TAWS not gonna hear terrain pull up terrain pull up.
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Anyone have more info on this crash as to recordings or whatever ?
 
bonefishpete said:
Bring back LORAN. Loved my Northstar M1.
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Had room remaining on the panel so I kept the ADF. Figured someday if/when the GPS goes down it could come in handy. Large cities have strong commercial AM stations with back up generators... just home right in.
 
Racerx said:
I've never understood how people can operate like this regularly. Sister's boyfriend is C90 atc and he seemingly never keeps the same schedule.
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i'm the same way, never really had a strong pref for day/night/mornings/evenings shrug.
 
Rockymountain said:
The GPS system is fragile, easily jammed, spoofed, and can even be turned off. Seems like a bad time for the FAA to be decommissioning VOR's left and right. These modern planes (and their pilots) are becoming very GPS dependent.
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bonefishpete said:
Bring back LORAN. Loved my Northstar M1.
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We need to do this. We’re the wealthiest large nation on the planet. Inexcusable that we’re not building the infrastructure which would improve our lives IMG_3447.png
 
NTSB Preliminary Report for N249CP

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. 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. The airplane then began a left turn southwest toward SRR. The Capitan Mountains, extending to 10,201 ft, were located about 14 miles northeast of SRR between the airplane and the airport.

The NOTAMs informed pilots that the SRR automated weather observation system (AWOS) was out of service and that military GPS jamming was scheduled at the time of the accident flight that encompassed the area and altitudes of the accident flight.

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).”
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It looks like the ILS was not possible (AWOS was out) and GPS was out, so they could not legally fly the approach.
Is that correct?
 
MountainDude said:
so they could not legally fly the approach.
Is that correct?
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Unless they used their Emergency Authority... But that brings up the question, as far as the Approach goes, was it an emergency and did they HAVE to land there?

And I haven't watched or read any of the speculations on the crash, but eventually I would like to hear what they officially theorized about them having the airport in sight and being cleared for the visual, but then not making it. Once you're on the Visual, who cares if the military is jamming the GPS.
 
M20K said:
Once you're on the Visual, who cares if the military is jamming the GPS.
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Sure, we get that. But it mattered here insofar as they were basing their impatient choice, that of going present position via left turn over the mountains, on having got the GPS reception back. Presumably to make use of GPS terrain alerting to stagger step down. Unfortunately, they weren't counting on White Sands proceeding to immediately turn the music back on, once ABQ called them back to inform White Sands that all/last ABQ customer traffic was now "on visual".

That isn't meant to imply the GPS signal is causal here. The causal was their impatience in not wanting to take the more circuituous right turning vectors that ABQ was gonna set them up for, to swing them back to the flatter/safer ILS ground track.

And before the pedants get stuck on it: the fact it may be "illegal" to follow that localizer beam because of some altimeter setting potato, isn't causal either. Besides, all they had to do was merely align with it while on vectors, call visual once established, and use it as advisory guidance to the runway and bob's your uncle, everybody goes home. No "bUh thE ruLz saY" pearl clutching needed.

It was just bad luck White Sands turned the music back on so quick, ABQ certainly didn't mean to screw them. Ultimately it was a decisional error, borne out of impatience. A seemingly shallow reason to die over. The rest of us still alive ought to take these narratives to heart to remind ourselves there's no need for that rush. If your employer is that hard up for cutting corners off a 20 minute sortie, that ain't a job worth taking. Not saying that's the position of the employer either; just making the macro point about making impulsive corner-cutting decisions when in a non-emergent situation.

All that said, I sympathize with the argument about folks being upset with White Sands messing with local GPS signal, especially at night.
 
hindsight2020 said:
Sure, we get that. But it mattered here insofar as they were basing their impatient choice, that of going present position via left turn over the mountains, on having got the GPS reception back. Presumably to make use of GPS terrain alerting to stagger step down. Unfortunately, they weren't counting on White Sands proceeding to immediately turn the music back on, once ABQ called them back to inform White Sands that all/last ABQ customer traffic was now "on visual".

That isn't meant to imply the GPS signal is causal here. The causal was their impatience in not wanting to take the more circuituous right turning vectors that ABQ was gonna set them up for, to swing them back to the flatter/safer ILS ground track.

And before the pedants get stuck on it: the fact it may be "illegal" to follow that localizer beam because of some altimeter setting potato, isn't causal either. Besides, all they had to do was merely align with it while on vectors, call visual once established, and use it as advisory guidance to the runway and bob's your uncle, everybody goes home. No "bUh thE ruLz saY" pearl clutching needed.

It was just bad luck White Sands turned the music back on so quick, ABQ certainly didn't mean to screw them. Ultimately it was a decisional error, borne out of impatience. A seemingly shallow reason to die over. The rest of us still alive ought to take these narratives to heart to remind ourselves there's no need for that rush. If your employer is that hard up for cutting corners off a 20 minute sortie, that ain't a job worth taking. Not saying that's the position of the employer either; just making the macro point about making impulsive corner-cutting decisions when in a non-emergent situation.

All that said, I sympathize with the argument about folks being upset with White Sands messing with local GPS signal, especially at night.
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My watch has a spring inside it that stores energy to run the watch. Amazing piece of engineering. It has to be wound occasionally to keep it running.

Best pilot watch ever.
 
CENTURION said:
Reading reports of controller advising possible GPS disruption in the area and pilot reporting they lost GPS and were climbing.
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dans2992 said:
I flew through NM a couple weeks ago, at night, me and a bunch of other aircraft on frequency “lost GPS”.
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dans2992 said:
Turning off the GPS chip in the missile seems like a much better way to test it…
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White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) GPS jams very regularly. There's a Youtube regarding Ukraine figuring out how to get drones and missiles accurately to target whether GPS jamming or ground overload spoofing in-correct info. Their system relies on using embedded maps, learns to ignore GPS (missing, jammed or spoofed coordinates) adding a NAV database that the system can fly automatically by pilotage (using landmarks, falling back to dead-reckoning and lastly actually using cell tower info also).

Pretty sure the El Paso airport shutdown recently was regarding same type of testing.

Unfortunately, Ruidoso airport (KSRR) is a high elevation, dark black hole approach with mountains on all 4 sides ... not fun for a visual night approach there ...
 
Was it mentioned what avionics were on board, specifically TAWS?
Without GPS, I suppose this and the Terrain imagery offered on many Garmin nav units would show only "Fail".
 
I flew into KSRR this evening. No GPS issues for me but was VFR/daytime. RW 6/24 is closed so I came in on RW12. The approaches to 24 both have REYOK as the IAF coming from the north. If you are 3.5nm right of course from the FAC after that IAF, you are flirting with a 10,100’ peak at the east end of the Capitan range. It is a shame that the crew did not request a vector back north/north east then to REYOK and the localizer when they lost GPS. Currently, the ILS is out but not sure if it was out that night. With minimal illumination on the edge of the plateau that the field lies on, I could see not seeing the ridgeline ahead of you on course north of the FAC for 24 if attempting a visual approach. RIP
 
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