Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

Missing from the article is that, once the pilots reported to ATC that GPS was inoperable, ATC was going to have them circle to the right and guide them along the ILS approach, which would've avoided the worst of the mountains. ATC also asked the military to stop GPS jamming, which they did for a brief while... and the pilots probably noticed GPS start working again... except...

Instead, the pilots saw the airport visually and requested a visual approach. ATC cleared them, and told the military they could resume GPS jamming, meaning any terrain awareness warning system the pilots might have had or been relying on would no longer work. The visual approach involved a left turn and descending directly over the mountains.

blancolirio's video about this (second one, after the prelim investigation report): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcyup4xVQuM

He focuses on the fact that both instrument approaches were impossible under the conditions; gps jamming made RNAV impossible, and an inoperable weather broadcasting system at the destination made ILS impossible. The alternative, visual approach in mountainous terrain on a moonless night, is clearly unwise for inexperienced pilots.

One thing he doesn't mention, though, is that ATC could have waited until the plane was on the ground to tell the military they could resume GPS jamming, knowing this was a medevac flight lacking the usual planning and level of caution of typical pilots.

The satellite GPS signals are incredibly weak.

Individual GPS signals typically arrive at the antenna below the receiver’s thermal noise floor and the system relies on processing gain in the receiver to generate a fix.

They’re going to eliminate windows?

I'd say this can be generalized: threads on HN are goofy about all the kinds of things HN readers and hackers are unfamiliar with but think they have the common sense to reason about.

This week I witnessed a similarly illogical argument between someone who thought they could argue about AI in movies and someone who actually works in the movie industry and has years of experience. The hacker was lecturing the movie person about why they were wrong about the future of the movie industry, with zero experience to back it up other than "I dabble in AI and watched some movies".

(Per other comments, a visual approach is still an IFR operation; they were still IFR, but flying a visual approach.)

It's very common to cancel IFR in the air, especially for late night operations to non-towered airports. (At an airport with an operating tower, they will close your IFR flight when you land.) At a non-towered airport, you have to either call on the phone or use a radio relay to close your flight plan, which can be a pain, so in benign conditions it's very common to cancel IFR in the air where you have line of sight [meaning good comms] to the ARTCC radio transceiver and avoid the hassle of bad cell phone coverage and/or no radio contact possible on the ground. (There is no radio relay at Ruidoso; the nearest RCAG is at Roswell, 50+ nm away with terrain in between.)

ZAB ARTCC's transmission that "they could cancel IFR in the air above 9,000 ft msl" tells the crew "once you get below 9000 MSL, you probably won't be able to talk to us on the radio".

When the crew said "we'll cancel IFR in a couple minutes", that's also common. It means "we're going to stay IFR and fly the visual until we're a little closer and landing is reasonably assured."