Just before midnight on May 13, a twin engine Beechcraft King Air lifted off from Roswell, New Mexico, on a routine medical flight. Four people were on board: two pilots and two flight nurses, heading to Ruidoso to collect a patient and fly them to Albuquerque. Roughly twenty minutes later the aircraft flew into the side of a mountain at close to full speed. Everyone aboard was killed, and the post impact fire grew into the Seven Cabins Fire, which burned more than 30,000 acres of forest.
The National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report confirmed something that had been rumored since the night it happened. The United States Air Force was running a GPS jamming exercise at the time, and the crew lost satellite navigation minutes after takeoff.
What Actually Happened That Night
The sequence in the preliminary report is worth reading slowly, because each individual step looks survivable and the combination was not.
| Point in the flight | What the report describes |
|---|---|
| Before departure | The crew’s preflight briefing included a warning that GPS jamming was scheduled in the area, covering their time and route |
| Just after takeoff from Roswell | GPS is lost. The crew alerts Albuquerque Center within minutes |
| During the climb | A controller telephones White Sands Missile Range and asks for the jamming to stop. Position broadcasts from the aircraft resume shortly afterward |
| Approaching Ruidoso | The aircraft overflies the landing pattern by about 10 miles while awaiting vectors. Three other aircraft in the sector are also reporting GPS problems |
| Around 12:08 am | The crew reports seeing the airport and is cleared for a visual approach. The jamming resumes |
| Roughly five minutes later | The King Air strikes the Capitan Mountains at approximately 10,000 feet |
The exercise was NAVFEST, run annually by the Air Force’s 746th Test Squadron at White Sands. It is not a secret operation. The FAA had issued notices telling pilots that GPS could be degraded between May 12 and May 18, over an area extending as far as 400 miles from the range depending on altitude. The system worked as designed in the sense that everyone was warned. The question the NTSB has not yet answered is whether a warning is an adequate mitigation when the failure lands on a night medevac flight with no moon.
Why Losing GPS Is Worse Than It Sounds
A common reaction is that pilots flew for decades without satellite navigation, so losing it should be an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. That was true when the ground based infrastructure and the training around it were built for that world. Neither is fully true anymore.
Modern instrument approaches lean heavily on GPS. RNAV procedures, which use satellite positioning to fly a precise path down to a runway, exist at thousands of airports that could never justify the cost of ground based landing equipment. Sierra Blanca Regional Airport in Ruidoso sits in mountainous terrain at high elevation, and approaches into it are exactly the kind that GPS made routinely possible.
Then there is the detail in the report that has received the least attention and may matter most. The airport’s automated weather reporting system was already out of service that night. Without a current weather observation, the crew had no approved instrument approach available at their destination from the moment they took off. Their only legal way in was a visual approach, which requires seeing the airport and the terrain around it.
On a moonless night over dark, unlit mountains, “seeing the airport” and “seeing what is between you and the airport” are very different things. The crew reported the runway lights from around 31 miles out. The 10,000 foot Capitan Mountains were in between, and there was nothing to make them visible.
The Two Questions Investigators Have Not Answered
The preliminary report is deliberately narrow. It describes, it does not conclude. But it flags two things worth watching in the final report.
- A 600 foot altitude discrepancy. Two systems tracking the aircraft’s height above the ground disagreed by roughly 600 feet in the final minutes. Whether the resumption of jamming caused that gap is unresolved. If GPS interference can corrupt altitude data that crews and controllers rely on, the safety implications reach far beyond this one flight.
- The decision to launch at all. The crew knew about the jamming warning and knew, or could have known, that the destination’s weather system was down. Medevac flying has a long documented problem with pressure to take marginal missions. How that calculus was made is likely to be central to the final analysis.
It is also worth noting what the report did not say. It did not conclude that jamming caused the crash, and NTSB preliminary reports never do. The aircraft was flying a visual approach when it hit the mountain, which means the immediate cause was a failure to see and avoid terrain. The open question is how much the loss of satellite navigation shaped the chain of decisions that put a King Air 10 miles past its landing pattern, at night, in mountainous terrain, on a visual approach it should probably never have needed to fly.
This Is Not an Isolated Incident
Deliberate interference with satellite navigation has moved from a niche electronic warfare topic to a routine aviation hazard in a remarkably short time. Reported GPS attacks have spiked sharply around active conflict zones, with jamming and spoofing affecting commercial flights across the Middle East, the Baltic and the eastern Mediterranean on a near daily basis.
What separates New Mexico from those cases is that this was not an adversary. It was a scheduled test by the United States military, in United States airspace, with proper notification filed. Three other aircraft in the same sector reported problems that night, and one crew struggled to identify a navigation beacon and needed extra help from controllers. Air traffic control audio obtained by a local station captured a pilot asking whether there was a reason they might lose GPS, and a controller answering plainly that jamming had been underway and there had been GPS issues.
| Layer | What it is supposed to do | What happened here |
|---|---|---|
| FAA notices to pilots | Warn crews that GPS may be unreliable | Issued, covering May 12 to 18 and up to 400 miles |
| Ground based navigation aids | Provide a backup when satellites fail | The crew attempted to switch to a ground based approach |
| Airport weather reporting | Enable a legal instrument approach | Out of service, leaving only a visual approach |
| Air traffic control coordination | Get the jamming stopped when it causes problems | Worked, then the jamming resumed minutes before impact |
Read as a list, those layers look reasonably robust. Read as a night, they lined up badly. Each backup depended on another system being available, and on this flight several were not.
What Changes From Here
The NTSB’s final report, which will include a probable cause, is likely a year or more away. In the meantime, the incident has already pushed a specific question into the open: whether scheduled military GPS jamming should be permitted to run across airspace used by air ambulances and general aviation at night, and whether a notice to pilots is sufficient when the alternative navigation infrastructure at small mountain airports has been quietly allowed to thin out.
That is a familiar shape of problem. Aviation safety failures rarely come down to one broken component, and post accident reviews frequently find that the warning signs were visible in the system long before the accident, as the investigation into the fatal D.C. midair collision concluded. The technology worked exactly as specified here. It was tested on schedule, announced in advance, and paused when asked. Four people still died on a mountainside because the aggregate of correct decisions produced an aircraft with no reliable way to know where the terrain was.
For anyone who has assumed satellite navigation is simply part of the background of modern life, this is the useful takeaway. GPS is a fragile, low power signal arriving from 12,000 miles away, and it can be switched off over an area the size of a small country by equipment that fits on a truck. Aviation has spent two decades building around the assumption that it will be there. On the night of May 13, over New Mexico, it was not.
