A U.S. Air Force electronic warfare test knocked out GPS navigation across hundreds of miles of New Mexico airspace on the night a medevac plane flew straight into a 10,000-foot mountain, killing all four people aboard.
The twin-engine Beechcraft King Air left Roswell just before midnight on May 13, carrying two pilots and two nurses on a mission to pick up a patient in Ruidoso and fly them to Albuquerque. Eight minutes after takeoff, the crew reported losing GPS and asked air traffic control for help. By 12:08 a.m. on May 14, the aircraft had overshot the landing pattern by roughly 10 miles. The pilots never made it to the airport. The plane struck the Capitan Mountains at full speed, and nobody survived.
The crash has been linked to a GPS-jamming exercise called NAVFEST, run by the Air Force's 746th Test Squadron out of White Sands Missile Range, roughly 100 miles from where the King Air went down. The FAA had warned pilots before the exercise that GPS signals could be disrupted up to 400 miles away between May 12 and 18. Four Americans are dead, and federal investigators will not issue a final determination of the cause until next year.
The crew was dispatched at 11 p.m. on May 13 for what should have been a routine air ambulance run. Captain Keelan Clark, 30, had earned his commercial pilot's license roughly 18 months earlier and been promoted to captain the previous month. First Officer Ali Kawsara, 23, had been on the job for two months after flying cargo planes. Nurses Sarah Clark, 33, and Jamie Novick, 33, rounded out the crew.
They departed Roswell at 11:52 p.m. under clear, nearly moonless skies. Within minutes, the GPS dropped out, and the King Air was not the only aircraft in trouble. Three other planes were simultaneously reporting the same problem to air traffic controllers, who scrambled to provide radar headings to all of them.
Controllers gave the King Air crew headings toward Sierra Blanca Regional Airport in Ruidoso. The pilots spotted the airport's lights from 31 miles away and received permission for a visual approach. That decision, in pitch darkness over unfamiliar terrain, proved fatal.
Pilot and aviation commentator Juan Browne described the danger of descending toward a mountain-ringed valley at night:
"When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble."
As the King Air descended, the Capitan Mountains, rising to 10,000 feet, blocked the valley lights below. Browne said the effect could cause "confusion and a loss of situational awareness." The aircraft hit the mountainside before the crew ever saw it coming.
Modern instrument approaches into mountain airports depend on GPS precision. Without it, pilots must fall back on older ground-based systems, if those systems are available and the crew is trained and current on them.
Steve Arroyo, an aviation safety expert and longtime United Airlines pilot, explained the gap:
"GPS can bring you in precisely with a margin of safety that's required and bring you down for landing. But if you don't have GPS, you can't make that approach within those margins and you may drift outside using conventional navigation."
That margin, the difference between a safe descent and a mountainside, vanished the moment the 746th Test Squadron's jamming signal reached the King Air's avionics. The crew tried to switch to the airport's ground-based instrument landing system, but the aircraft was already well off course.
Retired airline pilot John Cox, CEO of Safety Operating Systems, offered a more cautious assessment. "The loss of GPS should not result in the loss of an airplane, so there's got to be more to it than that," Cox said. The NTSB's preliminary report described the GPS problems the pilots encountered, but the board will not assign a formal cause until its final report, expected next year.
The FAA had issued a notice to pilots ahead of the NAVFEST exercise, cautioning that GPS signals could be knocked out across a 400-mile radius from White Sands between May 12 and 18. That warning raises a question the NTSB has not yet answered publicly: why was a medevac flight dispatched into that airspace, at night, over mountainous terrain, during an active jamming window?
The medevac company that operated the King Air has not been named in available reporting. Whether the company factored the FAA's GPS-disruption warning into its dispatch decision remains unknown. So does whether the military or the FAA received real-time reports of civilian GPS failures during the exercise before the King Air took off.
Three other aircraft reported losing GPS on the same frequency that night. Whether any of those flights experienced near-misses or other safety incidents has not been disclosed.
The impact did more than kill four people. The Seven Cabins Fire began burning in the Capitan Mountain Wilderness on May 14, the same day and location as the crash. The fire's connection to the wreckage has not been formally confirmed by investigators, but the timing and geography align precisely.
A memorial service for the four crew members was held in June. Captain Clark left behind a career just getting started. First Officer Kawsara had been flying the King Air for two months. Nurses Clark and Novick were on board to care for a patient they never reached.
The NTSB investigation is ongoing, and the final report is not expected until next year. But the known facts already frame a damning sequence: the military jammed GPS across a vast swath of airspace, the FAA warned pilots but did not ground civilian flights, a medevac crew lost navigation in the dark over 10,000-foot peaks, and four people died.
Whether the 746th Test Squadron coordinated with civilian air traffic control in real time during the exercise, and whether controllers had the authority or the information to divert the King Air before it was too late, remain unanswered. The FAA and the Department of Defense have not publicly responded to press inquiries about the crash.
The military has a legitimate need to test electronic warfare capabilities. No one disputes that. But testing them over airspace used by civilian medevac flights, cargo planes, and private aircraft, at night, in mountainous terrain, demands a level of coordination and safeguarding that plainly failed on May 13. Four Americans who climbed into a plane to save a stranger's life paid the price for that failure.
