Military GPS jamming out of White Sands Missile Range was running across southern New Mexico on the night a medevac Beechcraft King Air C90 flew into the Capitan Mountains, killing all four people aboard. The crew reported losing GPS about eight minutes after takeoff. An Albuquerque controller phoned an operations supervisor and asked the military to stop jamming. The jammers went quiet. Then, once the crew reported the airport in sight and accepted a visual approach, the same chain told the military it could switch them back on. Five minutes later the airplane struck a ridge at roughly 3,033 meters (9,950 feet).

Pilots Keelan Clark and Ali Kawsara died on impact, along with flight nurses Sarah Clark and Jamie Novick. DroneXL has been tracking what happens when counter-drone and electronic warfare hardware operates inside the national airspace system since March 2025, through the phantom collision alerts at Reagan National and the El Paso airspace shutdown. Those ended in disruption and embarrassment. This one killed a crew on its way to collect a patient.

The NTSB preliminary report on accident WPR26FA186 describes a crew that lost satellite navigation eight minutes after takeoff, requested two different instrument approaches inside four minutes, then accepted a visual approach toward an airport with a mountain range in between, on a night the report records as having zero percent moon illumination.

The report lays the sequence out in seconds. N249CP, operated by Generations Jets under Part 135 for Trans Aero Medical Services, left Roswell Air Center at 23:52 on May 13 to collect a patient at Sierra Blanca Regional Airport in Ruidoso. At 00:00:26 the controller pointed out the airplane was 305 meters (1,000 feet) above its assigned altitude. The pilot answered that they had lost GPS and needed a heading. At 00:01:17 the controller called a supervisor to request the military stop jamming. Around 00:05 the supervisor made that call. At 00:07:34 the airplane’s Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast reporting interval snapped back from roughly one minute to two or three seconds.

At 00:08:30 the crew reported “a visual on Ruidoso” and said they could go visual. About 00:10 the supervisor told the military it could resume jamming. The airplane turned left toward the field rather than taking the right-hand vectors the controller had promised, and impact came at 00:15, about 222 meters (730 feet) east of the Capitan Mountains Summit Radio Facility.

Two Notices to Airmen, the preflight bulletins pilots know as NOTAMs, sat in the crew’s ForeFlight briefing. One warned that GPS, including the Wide Area Augmentation System, might be unavailable across a wide footprint centered inside White Sands, and it carried the military’s own designator for the exercise, WSMRNM GPS 26-13. It put the interference on a daily schedule running 03:00Z to 06:29Z on May 13 and 14. The King Air hit the ridge at 06:15Z, fourteen minutes before that window closed on its own. The second notice said the Sierra Blanca automated weather system was out of service.

Both instrument approach plates at Sierra Blanca carry a note that without a local altimeter setting, the procedure is not authorized. AOPA read that combination the way any Part 135 crew would have to read it: neither the satellite-based RNAV approach nor the ground-based Instrument Landing System was legally available that night. The jamming took the GPS approach. A broken weather transmitter took the backup. AOPA also notes what a bad altimeter setting does to an airplane whose other altitude reference is being jammed, and reminds pilots that terrain awareness and obstacle warning systems lean on the same satellite fix.

Two details cut against the line that these pilots were simply warned and ignored it. The crew was dispatched just after 23:00 for a launch at 23:52, which left under an hour for the entire preflight. And the preliminary report does not establish that they knew jamming was underway before they lifted off.

The Jamming Notice Reached Down to Drone Altitude

The enroute notice quoted verbatim in the NTSB report defines nested radii by altitude, and the lowest tier is the one every drone pilot in New Mexico, west Texas, southern Colorado, and northern Mexico should read carefully: 389 kilometers (210 nautical miles) at 15 meters (50 feet) above ground level, widening to 444 kilometers (240 nautical miles) at 1,219 meters (4,000 feet) AGL.

A Part 107 operator at 122 meters (400 feet) sits inside that footprint across a stretch of the Southwest larger than most European countries. GPS hold and precision return-to-home degrade or fail there. So does Remote ID compliance. Standard Remote ID broadcasts require aircraft and control station positions accurate to thresholds the FAA has pointed manufacturers toward WAAS-augmented GNSS to meet, and 14 CFR 89.310 says a standard Remote ID aircraft must not be able to take off if that equipment is not functional. The notice named WAAS explicitly. Nobody at the FAA has publicly explained what a compliant launch looks like inside an active jamming window, and until somebody does, pulling enroute GPS notices before a flight is not optional housekeeping.

A second irony is worth stating plainly. GPS jamming has become the default non-kinetic counter-drone tool worldwide, the technique behind systems like IAI’s HYPNOSIS, sold on the promise that it defeats threats without ammunition or debris. The Southwest just got a live demonstration of what that promise costs when the beam is wide.

Controllers Filed Warnings About the Stop Buzzer for Years

Air traffic controllers working the airspace around White Sands documented this exact failure mode in anonymous filings to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System long before May 14, describing requests to pause jamming that went nowhere and predicting, in writing, that somebody would eventually be hurt.

Mark Harris at IEEE Spectrum pulled those filings. A controller in late 2021 wrote that a request to halt jamming was refused outright, adding that “refusing to stop buzzer is commonplace.” A 2024 filing called a manager’s policy of delaying the pause a danger to the flying public. Spectrum also reports an anonymous source describing FAA managers telling controllers that each stop buzzer costs the military between five and ten million dollars. Neither the FAA nor White Sands would comment on that figure.

The trend line behind those filings is steep. AOPA counted five reports mentioning GPS interference in 2019 and four in 2020, running at roughly half a dozen a year through 2023, then 50 in 2024 and 40 in 2025. Many of those occurred outside the United States. AOPA has been pressing the FAA to make interference warnings more visible to pilots since 2019, and the White Sands exercise shows why. Alongside the enroute notice, the FAA Safety Team posted its own public advisory on the same jamming outside the notice system entirely, on a website a pilot has to know to visit.

Retired airline pilot John Cox, now head of Safety Operating Systems, gave the Associated Press the fair counterweight: “The loss of GPS should not result in the loss of an airplane.” He is right, and the final report will have to reckon with a low-time crew, a black night, and a decision to descend toward lights with terrain in between. But the chain that produced that decision started with a jammer, and controllers had been writing it down for five years.

Certified Aviation GPS Is More Fragile Than the Phone in Your Pocket

The strangest detail in this accident is that the cheapest satellite receiver aboard the airplane rode out the jamming better than the certified avionics did, and the pilots had no way to see what it was telling them, because that box was built to talk to the operator on the ground rather than the crew in the cockpit.

The King Air’s primary GPS fed its ADS-B transponder, which is why the reporting interval collapsed during the jamming. A separate Spidertracks unit kept producing usable position data through the same window, possibly because it could fall back on Galileo. Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas at Austin explains the gap to Spectrum: FAA-certified navigation hardware is locked to the single L1 GPS frequency, while an ordinary smartphone pulls Galileo and BeiDou as well. The planned move to a second civil frequency, L5, is waiting on military ground station work that has run years behind.

Drone pilots already live on the better side of that divide. Consumer and enterprise airframes have been multi-constellation for a decade, and the GPS-denied navigation work coming out of Ukraine is pushing toward vision-based positioning that needs no satellites at all. Crewed aviation is flying certified receivers whose core technology predates most of the threat.

The Counter-Drone Buildout Keeps Running Into Civil Aviation

This crash is the fourth entry in a pattern DroneXL has tracked since March 2025, in which counter-drone and electronic warfare equipment operating inside the national airspace system has disrupted civil aviation, and it is the first entry with a body count.

Counter-drone testing triggered false collision alerts at Reagan National in March 2025, weeks after 67 people died there. Senator Ted Cruz attributed that testing to the Navy and the Secret Service, and FAA analysis pointed at a Secret Service counter-drone system at a nearby defense site, though the Secret Service publicly denied conducting drone system testing in the region that day. In February 2026 the FAA shut down El Paso airspace for ten days over an uncoordinated laser test, then the Pentagon destroyed a CBP drone at Fort Hancock because the two agencies were not talking to each other. In April the FAA formally cleared the military to use anti-drone lasers in U.S. airspace. The SAFER SKIES Act inside the FY2026 NDAA pushed mitigation authority down to state and local police for the first time.

Kris Brost of Robin Radar Systems framed the problem for WIRED, whose Jeff Wise reconstructed the Ruidoso flight this week, better than any agency has: “Counter-drone technology has to be surgical, not a sledgehammer.” A 389-kilometer jamming radius at 15 meters above the ground is not surgical. The K2 Airways 737 freighter lost over the Arabian Sea on July 7 is a reminder that this is a global problem rather than a New Mexico one, though the picture there is murkier: Flightradar24 logged GNSS interference around the aircraft’s departure from Sharjah and says the airplane had left that area before the crew reported a navigation fault. That investigation is young and the cause is unknown.

DroneXL’s Take

I have argued in this space that counter-drone authority is expanding faster than the guardrails around it. This is what the bill looks like when it comes due.

Nothing here is an argument against White Sands or against navigation warfare testing. Ukraine settled that debate. A military that cannot test in a GPS-denied environment is a military that loses the next war, and there are very few places in the continental United States remote enough to do it. The testing is legitimate. The procedure around it is indefensible.

Read the stop buzzer sequence again. A controller asked for the jammers to stop because aircraft could not navigate. The jammers stopped. Then a supervisor cleared the military to resume the moment one crew said they had the field in sight, while three other aircraft in the same sector had also reported losing GPS. Somewhere in that chain, a test’s dollar value got weighed against a medevac crew’s ability to know where it was, and for five years of filings the dollars kept winning. The NTSB has assigned no cause and will not until 2027. It does not need to for that to be a scandal.

For the drone community the lesson is narrower and more urgent. The counter-drone apparatus we keep being told is precise and proportionate produced a satellite blackout the size of a small country, reaching down to 15 meters above the ground, and the FAA has no public answer for what Remote ID compliance means inside it. Every pilot reading this should be pulling enroute GPS notices the same way they check temporary flight restrictions. Most are not, because nobody told them to.

Spectrum reports jamming has been scheduled at White Sands on at least twelve days since the crash. The thing to watch is whether the NTSB issues an urgent safety recommendation on stop buzzer procedure before the final report lands rather than after. The Board has done exactly that when it concluded a documented hazard was still live. This one is still live.

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DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.