A medevac crew flying from Roswell to Ruidoso, New Mexico, lost GPS navigation during a military jamming exercise and struck a mountainside, killing all four aboard, and experts warn the FAA's slow certification process is leaving pilots with outdated equipment.
The Beech King Air departed shortly before midnight on May 14 carrying two pilots and two flight nurses on an emergency medical run. Minutes after takeoff, the crew radioed that their GPS had failed. Three other aircraft in the area reported the same problem. On the ground below, the U.S. military was running a planned GPS-denial exercise out of White Sands Missile Range, a drill designed to simulate the kind of signal blackout troops might face in combat.
Air traffic controllers asked the military twice to suspend the jamming while they guided the stricken aircraft. The military complied, and the crew reported the destination airport in sight, requesting a visual approach. Then the military resumed the exercise. The aircraft descended toward the runway and struck the Capitan Mountains, killing everyone on board.
The National Transportation Safety Board issued a preliminary report on the crash but has not determined whether the GPS interference caused or contributed to the disaster. That distinction matters legally. But the sequence, GPS loss during a known jamming exercise, a crew forced onto visual navigation in mountainous terrain at night, and a fatal impact, has sharpened a debate that aviation safety experts say the federal government has been too slow to confront.
The FAA had issued a Notice to Airmen, or NOTAM, before the flight warning that the scheduled military exercise could disrupt satellite navigation across a radius of hundreds of miles around White Sands Missile Range. Pilots operating in that airspace were on notice. But a NOTAM is a warning, not a fix. When the crew lost GPS shortly after departure, the burden fell on air traffic controllers to manage the emergency in real time.
Controllers reached out to military officials and asked them to halt the jamming, not once, but twice. The military stopped the exercise. During that window, the crew told controllers they had the airport in sight and requested a visual approach. The military then resumed jamming. After that, the aircraft descended and hit the mountain.
The NTSB has not drawn a causal line between the resumption of jamming and the crash. Investigators are still examining the full chain of events. But the timeline raises an obvious question: why resume an exercise while an aircraft that already lost GPS in that same exercise is still in the air, flying visually toward a runway surrounded by mountains in the dark?
Fatal aviation incidents involving multiple casualties have become a persistent concern for safety regulators. A recent small-plane crash near Bowie, Maryland killed all three aboard after a late-night flight, underscoring the risks that darkness and limited visibility impose on general aviation.
Todd Humphreys, director of the University of Texas' Radionavigation Laboratory and a leading GPS expert, told Fox News Digital that the crash exposes a widening gap between consumer technology and the equipment the FAA certifies for cockpit use.
Humphreys put the problem in terms any smartphone owner can grasp:
"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 is not a knock on the crew. It is an indictment of a certification regime that moves so slowly that off-the-shelf consumer devices outpace the avionics the government approves for flight. Humphreys argued that the FAA's process, which he described as taking "years and millions and millions of dollars", has become a barrier to safety rather than a guarantee of it.
Humphreys was blunt about the agency's pace:
"The FAA, I think they've just got to move faster. They've got to wake up and recognize that sticking to their old rules about you know, certification that takes years and millions and millions of dollars to get through is not at the service of safety anymore, because the environment has changed."
The FAA declined to comment on the ongoing investigation. The agency said it issues notices alerting pilots to planned GPS disruptions and maintains backup navigation systems to help aircraft navigate during satellite outages. It did not directly address Humphreys' criticism about certification timelines or the gap between certified and commercially available GPS technology.
The New Mexico crash did not happen in a vacuum. GPS jamming and spoofing, where a signal is blocked or replaced with a false one, have been spreading worldwide, driven largely by military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. Nations have discovered that disrupting GPS is an effective way to neutralize drones, and the technology to do it is neither expensive nor hard to deploy.
Humphreys framed the broader threat directly:
"Nation states have woken up to the fact that this is one of the ways they can protect themselves from drones. We've got to move more quickly on the aviation side to build better systems, better receivers, better antennas to deal with this so that flights can be safer again."
The numbers back him up. Industry data cited in a 2026 guidance document from the International Civil Aviation Organization, the U.N.'s aviation body, showed that reports of GPS loss increased 65 percent in the first half of 2024 compared with the previous year. The same guidance warned that the hazards associated with GPS jamming and spoofing have "rapidly spread" in recent years.
That guidance spelled out what can go wrong when pilots lose satellite navigation: they may deviate from assigned flight paths, misreport their position, lose situational awareness, and struggle to transition safely to backup navigation. Every one of those risks was present in the New Mexico crash.
In March 2025, ICAO joined with the International Telecommunication Union and the International Maritime Organization to issue a joint warning about increasing GPS jamming and spoofing incidents. European regulators have repeatedly updated guidance for pilots and air traffic controllers in response to the growing interference, most recently in July after analyzing additional incidents. The FAA itself advises pilots to be prepared to fly without GPS because intentional jamming is "of greater and growing concern."
Aviation disasters abroad have drawn similar scrutiny. A fatal skydiving plane crash in France that killed all eleven aboard prompted investigators to open a broad probe into the circumstances, reflecting the same institutional urgency that GPS-related incidents now demand.
The New Mexico crash is not the only recent incident linking GPS-related interference to government operations on American soil. In March 2025, multiple commercial airliners approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport received false collision alerts. Several crews performed go-arounds, aborting their landings and circling back, in response to warnings that turned out to be phantom threats.
Congressional testimony later revealed that the false alerts were triggered by counter-drone testing conducted by the Secret Service and the U.S. Navy. The tests were not rogue operations; they were authorized government exercises. But they disrupted commercial aviation at one of the busiest airports in the country, near the nation's capital, without adequate coordination to prevent false alerts from reaching cockpits.
The pattern is consistent. The military and federal law enforcement are conducting exercises that interfere with civilian navigation and alert systems. The exercises serve legitimate purposes, training troops, defending against drones. But the safeguards meant to protect civilian aviation are not keeping up. When technology failures lead to real-world consequences, the results can be catastrophic, as a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash in Texas demonstrated in a different context.
Humphreys offered a warning that should concern every American who flies:
"There are some in the community who believe that we have passed the point of peak safety in aviation, maybe four years ago."
That claim, that the safest period in American aviation history may already be behind us, runs counter to the assumption most passengers carry onto every flight. If Humphreys and his colleagues are right, the combination of aging certified equipment, expanding GPS threats, and a regulatory process that cannot keep pace with the changing environment is eroding the safety margin that decades of investment built.
Paul Deres, vice president of operations at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Air Safety Institute, offered a more measured view. He said the focus should remain on pilot preparation and proficiency, noting that today's general aviation fleet includes a wide range of older and newer avionics designed to improve situational awareness. But even Deres acknowledged the fundamental vulnerability.
"Technology can always fail, and it does."
That is true. But when the technology fails because a military exercise deliberately knocked it out, and when the FAA's own certification process has left cockpit GPS receivers years behind what a consumer smartphone can do, the failure is not random. It is predictable. Survivors of other aviation emergencies, like the eleven passengers who walked away from a floatplane crash near Washington state's San Juan Islands, were fortunate. The crew flying over the Capitan Mountains was not.
So far, the United States has avoided the scale of GPS disruption that European aviation has faced. Humphreys credited that partly to geography, American airspace is farther from the conflict zones driving most jamming activity. But the New Mexico crash and the Reagan National incident show that the threat is not limited to foreign battlefields. It is here, generated by the U.S. government's own operations, and the systems meant to protect civilian pilots are not keeping up.
Two pilots and two flight nurses climbed into a medevac plane to save someone's life. They deserved equipment and procedures that matched the threat environment they were flying into. The FAA knew the jamming was coming. The military knew civilian aircraft were in the area. And four people are dead. If that does not accelerate the agency's timeline, nothing will.
