The small medevac plane that crashed into a New Mexico mountainside in May lost its satellite navigation because the US military was jamming GPS signals across the area at the time, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board. No previous NTSB probe has publicly pointed at military GPS jamming as a possible cause of an accident.
The flight departed Roswell Air Center on the night of May 14, 2026, heading for the airport that serves Ruidoso to pick up a patient. Shortly after takeoff, the crew radioed the controller that their navigation was gone. Three other planes in the vicinity reported the same problem. Minutes later the aircraft flew into the Capitan Mountain Wilderness, killing both pilots and two flight nurses; the impact ignited a wildfire that eventually burned roughly 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres). Investigators noted the crew had been warned to expect jamming in the area.
The sequence of events that night has drawn particular scrutiny. After the GPS reports came in, a controller contacted personnel at White Sands Missile Range, the Army test site whose electronic-warfare exercises have long spilled beyond its borders, and asked them to pause the interference testing. The Army stopped briefly, then resumed after controllers said the medevac crew had established visual contact with their destination. About five minutes later, the aircraft crashed. The preliminary report does not say whether the flight crew was ever informed that the jamming had been suspended, or that it had started again.
White Sands has been a hub for GPS-denied testing for years, and the fallout has been documented well before this accident. Earlier incidents linked the range’s exercises to navigation disruptions more than 480 km (300 miles) away, including aircraft drifting off course, entering restricted airspace, and losing nav capability mid-flight. Reports filed with NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System repeatedly warned that the outages were an accident waiting to happen; one 2024 submission from a controller said someone would eventually get hurt if the pattern continued. An unnamed source cited in reporting on the investigation claimed each suspension of the tests, known internally as a “stop buzzer,” carries a reported price tag of $5 million to $10 million per stoppage.
The aircraft carried two independent navigation systems, and their behavior under jamming illustrates the stakes. Its primary FAA-certified GPS receiver fed position data to the ADS-B transponder that broadcasts the plane’s location to air traffic control; once the plane crossed into the affected zone, the transponder’s position updates, sent every couple of seconds at takeoff, stretched out to about one per minute, a sign the receiver was struggling to hold a satellite signal. A secondary tracking system routed through Iridium’s satellite network kept transmitting more consistently, possibly because it could also use Europe’s Galileo constellation, but that data went to ground monitors rather than the cockpit.
Satellite navigation experts point to a broader vulnerability: many certified aviation receivers still rely almost exclusively on the legacy GPS L1 signal, while consumer devices commonly combine GPS with Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou, making them far harder to knock out. The FAA plans to add support for the newer L5 signal, though that upgrade depends on the military finishing a modernization of the GPS ground control network.
The larger trend is not reassuring. The International Air Transport Association says the number of aircraft experiencing GPS interference doubled between 2021 and 2024, and in the opening two days of the 2026 US-Iran conflict, over 650 merchant vessels in the Persian Gulf were hit by spoofed signals. Jamming exercises at White Sands have continued since the crash, with tests scheduled on at least a dozen days in the months that followed. The NTSB’s final determination will examine the airframe, avionics, flight data, weather, and air traffic communications, and typically takes up to two years.
Sources: Military jamming disrupted GPS on plane that crashed in New Mexico (AP News, Aug 4, 2026); US military GPS jamming exercise suspected of contributing to civilian plane crash in New Mexico (Tom’s Hardware, Aug 5, 2026); NTSB Investigates GPS Jamming in Fatal New Mexico Medevac Crash (AirGuide, Jul 23, 2026); A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame? (Wired, 2026)