Federal investigators are looking at the role that scheduled GPS interference testing at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico may have played in the deadly crash of a light medevac airplane, killing the two pilots and two nurses on board. The plane was en route to picking up a patient. Five minutes before its crash into a mountain on May 14th, one of the pilots alerted an air traffic controller that they no longer had GPS signals.
According to several media reports, an air traffic controller requested that the military cease its tests of GPS interference - and the military complied -- but testing resumed after the controller learned that the pilot was able to complete the flight visually. A report in the IEEE Spectrum said that the preliminary findings do not state whether the air-traffic controllers let the pilots know that the jamming had been halted - or that it had started up again.
These findings were contained in a preliminary report released in June by the National Transportation Safety Board. Investigators do not expect to reach any final conclusions until next year. The US Army site in New Mexico site is known to conduct tests on spoofing and jamming systems and the US Federal Aviation Administration confirmed to an IEEE investigative reporter that jamming was also a concern during incidents in 2021 that led several close calls, or aircraft flying off course, in the region.
