A federal investigation found that U.S. military GPS jamming disrupted navigation systems aboard a medical transport plane that crashed into a New Mexico mountainside in May, killing two pilots and two flight nurses.
The National Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary report on August 5, confirming that GPS jamming activities conducted by the Army's White Sands Missile Range, roughly 40 miles from the flight's destination, were underway when the Beechcraft King Air C90 lost its navigation capability and slammed into the Capitan Mountains at 9,950 feet. Pilots Keelan Clark and Ali Kawsara died in the crash, along with flight nurses Jamie Novick and Sarah Clark. All four were on a mission to pick up a patient for transport to Albuquerque. None survived.
The crash raises hard questions about how the military coordinates GPS jamming exercises with civilian air traffic, and whether federal aviation regulators have done enough to ensure pilots can fly safely when satellite navigation disappears.
The medevac plane departed Roswell Air Center at 11:52 p.m. Mountain Time on May 13, bound for Sierra Blanca Regional Airport near Ruidoso. The crew planned to pick up a patient and fly to Albuquerque. Approximately 12:15 a.m. on May 14, the aircraft went down near Lincoln, a small community along U.S. Route 380 about 60 miles west of Roswell.
The NTSB report states that minutes after departure, the crew lost GPS capability. Before the crash, one of the pilots radioed that he had "a visual on Ruidoso," but the transmission was "stepped on by other radio traffic." The pilots were not flying blind to the jamming risk, the FAA had issued a Notice to Airmen, or NOTAM, warning that GPS might be unreliable in the area due to military activity. The crew had access to that warning through ForeFlight, a standard flight-planning app, the Washington Examiner reported.
Three other aircraft operating in the same area also lost GPS during the same period. Air traffic control supervisors contacted the military and asked them to stop jamming while controllers assisted the medevac flight. The military paused. But after controllers cleared the pilots for a visual approach, they told the military it could resume jamming, less than a minute before the aircraft's ADS-B tracking data began recording at degraded intervals again.
Then the plane hit the mountain.
Retired Gen. Glen VanHerck, former commander of U.S. Northern Command and NORAD, told reporters that "losing GPS navigation, including due to GPS jamming, should not cause loss of control of an aircraft." Retired airline pilot John Cox, CEO of Safety Operating Systems, told the AP much the same:
"The loss of GPS should not result in the loss of an airplane, so there's got to be more to it than that."
But aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo offered a more specific concern. Without GPS, he said, pilots cannot make a precision instrument approach, the kind that guides an aircraft down to a runway with tight safety margins. "If you don't have GPS, you can't make that approach within those margins and you may drift outside using conventional navigation," Arroyo said.
That distinction matters. The medevac crew was flying at night, in mountainous terrain, toward a regional airport that likely depends on GPS-based approaches. When that guidance vanished, the pilots attempted a visual approach, and misjudged their clearance from the mountains by a fatal margin.
Todd Humphreys, director of the University of Texas Radionavigation Laboratory, pointed to a deeper systemic failure. The GPS receivers certified by the FAA for cockpit use are less resilient to jamming than the chips inside a modern smartphone, Fox News reported. Humphreys put it bluntly:
"The iPhone that the pilot carried was almost certainly a better GPS receiver inside than the FAA-certified receiver providing navigation guidance to the aircraft."
That gap between consumer electronics and certified aviation equipment is not a new complaint. But the New Mexico crash gives it a body count. Humphreys went further, warning that the broader trend lines are moving in the wrong direction. "There are some in the community who believe that we have passed the point of peak safety in aviation, maybe four years ago," he said.
GPS interference reports worldwide increased 65 percent in the first half of 2024 compared to the prior year, according to guidance issued by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 2026. Military jamming exercises are only one source. GPS spoofing and jamming tied to geopolitical conflicts, particularly near conflict zones in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, have surged in recent years. American airspace is not immune.
The four people who died were not test pilots or military personnel accepting known risks. They were medical professionals flying a routine medevac run in the middle of the night. Pilots Keelan Clark and Ali Kawsara operated the aircraft for Generation Jets. Flight nurses Jamie Novick and Sarah Clark were employed by Trans Aero Medical Services and were passengers on board, heading to pick up a patient who needed emergency transport.
Trans Aero Medevac, the emergency transportation company that serves southeastern New Mexico and West Texas, identified the victims and issued a statement on its Facebook page:
"Together with their families, friends, colleagues, first responders, healthcare partners, and community members, we will celebrate their lives, recognize their service, and remember the lasting impact they made on so many."
Lincoln County officials said at the time that the plane had lost communications and radar and never arrived at its destination. The crash also ignited a wildfire in the Capitan Mountains that burned for weeks. The U.S. Forest Service reported the fire spread to nearly 50 square miles before it was contained.
The NTSB has stressed that its preliminary report does not assign blame. An NTSB spokesperson said the crash "is still under investigation, and as the statement notes, no causes or contributing factors have been determined at this time." A final report is expected in the coming months.
Several critical questions remain unanswered. Which specific Army unit authorized the jamming exercise? Did military planners know civilian medevac flights were operating in the affected zone that night? Why did air traffic controllers clear the pilots for a visual approach and then authorize the military to resume jamming within seconds? And what, if anything, has the military changed about its coordination procedures since four people died?
The military has not issued a public statement about the crash or the jamming exercise. That silence, nearly three months after the accident, is itself a kind of answer.
Americans accept that the military needs to train, including with GPS jamming, which is a real battlefield threat. But when that training intersects with civilian airspace, the people flying through it deserve better than outdated cockpit equipment, a one-minute warning window, and a mountain they cannot see.
