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The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the role U.S. military GPS jamming may have played in the fatal crash of a civilian medevac plane in New Mexico in May.
The light aircraft slammed into the side of a mountain in the middle of the night while flying from Roswell to Ruidoso, New Mexico, to pick up a patient. The two pilots and two nurses on board died, and the impact sparked a massive wildfire that burned for a month.
Shortly after take-off from Roswell airport, one of the pilots reported to an air traffic controller that they had lost their GPS capability. Three other aircraft crews also reported problems. This prompted an air traffic controller to ask the military at nearby White Sands Missile Range to halt its GPS interference testing. The military paused jamming for a few minutes but resumed it after the flight controller reported that the plane had a visual fix on its destination. The aircraft crashed five minutes later.
The NTSB’s preliminary report into the accident does not state whether controllers informed the pilots of either the pause in jamming, or its resumption.
This report is the first time that the NTSB has mentioned GPS jamming as a potential factor in an investigation. However, White Sands has long been linked with disruptions to civilian aviation more than five hundred km around the base, reaching into neighboring states and even Mexico. It is one of the U.S. Army’s centers for testing in GPS-denied environments, and for developing its own jamming and spoofing technologies.
A Crash Foretold?
An IEEE Spectrum investigation into GPS jamming in 2021 included worrying reports of near misses in the White Sands region, as well as previously unseen data showing aircraft flying off course, accidentally entering military airspace, being unable to maneuver, and losing their ability to navigate. A follow-up story detailed how air controllers responsible for the airspace around White Sands became overworked during GPS testing, and experienced confusion about when they could request a “stop buzzer” – a temporary pause in the jamming for safety reasons.
The FAA told IEEE Spectrum then that it had cleared up and abated those concerns. However, a new review of anonymous reports to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System shows that some controllers remained unhappy. In late 2021, one controller wrote: “The GPS jamming at White Sands was effecting [sic] the safety of flight of the aircraft to the point to where they couldn’t navigate safely. I asked the controller in charge to stop buzzer… and was blown off, was told ‘we’re not doing that.’ Refusing to stop buzzer is commonplace.”
When the same thing happened in 2024, another controller reported: “This issue has been going on for years… Someone will get hurt ignoring the pilot reports or deciding for pilots how much equipment can fail or be unreliable before they agree or decide to stop GPS jamming.”
That same controller made another report a few weeks later, after multiple aircraft had lost GPS tracking in bad weather. He called his manager’s policy of delaying the stop buzzer “a danger to the flying public.”
According to one source, who asked to remain anonymous because they do not have permission to speak to the media, FAA managers told controllers at air traffic control centers that every time they stop buzzer on a GPS test, it costs the military between $5 and $10 million. Neither White Sands nor the FAA would comment.
The Remedy May Be The Problem
Todd Humphreys is director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, and has taken part in GPS testing at White Sands. He says that some tests within the 3,200-square mile base involve spoofing GPS signals so that receivers generate inaccurate location data. To avoid these misleading civilian aircraft, the Army places powerful jammers at the perimeter of the range to drown out the spoof signals.
It is likely this preventative “cover jamming” that the medevac plane and other aircraft experienced in May, says Humphreys: “The jamming coming from White Sands is intense. It goes all the way up to low Earth orbit and even affects satellites up there.”
The military does issue Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) to warn pilots of upcoming tests, and there are backup systems for both pilots and controllers to help cope with disruptions. Humphreys also points out that there are few areas in the U.S. large enough and remote enough for the Pentagon to test jamming and spoofing technologies, and to develop deterrents against them. Other recent military GPS test locations have included Fort Irwin in California, Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, and off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.
The need for navigation R&D is constant, as attacks on the GPS ecosystem are growing worldwide. The number of aircraft affected by GPS signal loss doubled between 2021 and 2024 according to the International Air Transport Association, and over 650 ships in the Middle East Gulf were spoofed in the first 48 hours of the 2026 U.S.-Iran war.
A confounding problem, says Humphreys, is that navigation hardware certified by the FAA is reliant on a single frequency of transmissions from U.S. GPS satellites, called L1. Other receivers, including those found in most modern smartphones, can also utilize signals from European Galileo, Chinese Beidou, and Russian GLONASS satellites, potentially making them more resilient to jamming.
The Roswell Crash
In the New Mexico crash, the aircraft’s primary GPS receiver was linked to its ADS-B transponder, a safety system that broadcasts the plane’s ID and position every second or so. Nearby planes and ground stations can then receive that data and use it to avoid collisions.
At take-off, the plane’s ADS-B was transmitting its location and altitude every two to three seconds. When it climbed into range of the jamming signal, ADS-B began recording only about once a minute – an indication that the receiver was in difficulty.
There was also a second GPS receiver on board, connected to an add-on tracking system called Spidertracks that beamed the plane’s location to Iridium satellites. That system does not seem to have suffered as badly from the jamming, perhaps because the unit could also access the Galileo constellation. But the Spidertracks location data was never visible to the pilots.
There is a plan for the FAA to incorporate a second GPS frequency called L5, although that process requires the U.S. military to complete a long-delayed process developing new GPS ground stations. Unfortunately, says Humphreys, the “FAA certification process is so onerous and conservative that you’re dealing with aviation-grade receivers that are more than a decade old in technology.”
The NTSB generally aims to complete its full investigations within two years, and an agency spokesperson cautioned that it would be premature to characterize the significance of GPS jamming in the New Mexico crash. Its investigators are also considering aircraft, avionics, operational history, recorded data, weather, and air traffic control information.
In the meantime, GPS interference testing at White Sands continues, with at least 12 days having jamming scheduled since the crash in May.
