The sooner Quantum Navigation (and its ilk) become the norm, the sooner GPS can take a backseat.
https://q-ctrl.com/blog/q-ctrl-to-showcase-worlds-first-airw...
Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
111–120 of 295 posts
Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very much goofy, especially when people here try to extrapolate ground stop / AOG / IROPS. True armchair warrior without any competence.
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 pe…
It's a numbers game.
There might be one person who's in the right place at the right time with the right understanding to second the nuanced professional take. There's a hundred idiots ready to agree with the simple BS that fits their priors all the time.
And of course, thanks to the vote based crap the peddlers of the latter will have their monkey brain trained to phrase their commentary to be appealing to the available pool of idiots. That's why you so often see crap surface level takes wrapped up with the sort of partisan language that gets the warmest response around here (and on every other platform too).
Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are a pilot and can't handle GPS dropping out, or the failure of any other single navigation aid, you should not be flying.
Highly dependent on weather and the complexity of the approach. Clear skies and VFR? I would agree. Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho. > At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magneti…
> Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho.
Then what are you supposed to do when your GPS craps out on approach in low visibility and heavy weather?
Obviously the answer is "fly the airplane". Which means you look at your artificial horizon, set trim and power for max climb, get to a safe altitude and figure it out.
If you're paying attention you already have your chart folded to the airport you're landing at, so it shouldn't be too hard to orient yourself and figure out what's next. Either you'll be making another attempt at this airport without GPS or you'll be going somewhere else.
There's never an excuse for failing to fly the airplane. That's basic airmanship. You need to be able to do it regardless of whether your GPS is working.
Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly dependent on weather and the complexity of the approach. Clear skies and VFR? I would agree. Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho. > At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magneti…
> Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho. Then what are you supposed to do when your GPS craps out on approach in low visibility and heavy weather? Obviously the answer is "fly the airplane". Which means you look at your artificial horizon, set trim and power for max climb, get to a safe altitude and figure it out. If you're paying attention you already have your chart fold…
It's very easy to write this comment when you're not the one getting behind the plane in the middle of the night with multiple simultaneous challenges (speaking from experience; I can feel the anxiety writing this comment from similar "white knuckle" experience), and I agree, keep flying the plane. Systems fail, that is the point of investigating incidents to improve systems. Humans are always the weakest link. I agree that an experienced pilot should be able to safely land on an approach assuming a loss of GPS.
(General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel, tracking at roughly 1.0 to 1.1 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours. Statistically, GA's per-hour fatality rate is about 14 times higher than driving a car, carrying a risk profile comparable to riding a motorcycle)
Edit: My hot take is more communication and training needs to go into "As the pilot, you should be prepared to lose GPS at any time at critical moments in the flight lifecycle." Are we letting folks fly in potentially adverse conditions leaning too heavily on GPS leading to potentially avoidable accidents? I don't know, the NTSB is likely better informed to say so or not. If I was a flight instructor, I'd probably include loss of GPS during instrument approach at night and/or in weather as an experience to cover.
Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are a pilot and can't handle GPS dropping out, or the failure of any other single navigation aid, you should not be flying.
Highly dependent on weather and the complexity of the approach. Clear skies and VFR? I would agree. Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho. > At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magneti…
They deferred navigation to ATC instead of using their own capabilities such as VOR.
Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
#116[flagged]
Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly dependent on weather and the complexity of the approach. Clear skies and VFR? I would agree. Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho. > At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magneti…
They deferred navigation to ATC instead of using their own capabilities such as VOR.
They requested navigation assistance ATC could not promptly provide. I strongly agree the pilot in command could've done better, but if ATC was overloaded, they should've promptly communicated that to manage expectations that immediate help was not forthcoming. An aircraft covers a lot of ground "in a couple of minutes." (assuming ~120-200 knots)
https://www.airresearch.com/Pilots/AIM-08/Chap6/aim0602.html
> a. Radar equipped ATC facilities can provide radar assistance and navigation service (vectors) to VFR aircraft in difficulty when the pilot can talk with the controller, and the aircraft is within radar coverage. Pilots should clearly understand that authorization to proceed in accordance with such radar navigational assistance does not constitute authorization for the pilot to violate CFRs. In effect, assistance is provided on the basis that navigational guidance information is advisory in nature, and the responsibility for flying the aircraft safely remains with the pilot.
Potentially tangentially related to an overloaded and understaffed US ATC network, similar to the overloaded controller that led to the LaGuardia runway incursion on March 22, 2026.
https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/crj-collid... ("What’s the bet that the controller had been overworked and the cab was understaffed? Seems to be an incredibly common thread lately.")
American aviation is near collapse? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47494469 - March 2026 (106 comments)
LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503965 - March 2026 (310 comments)
Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47486386 - March 2026 (667 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47494936 (my comment with citations on this thesis)
(my flavor of autism includes aggressive pattern matching)
Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The automated weather service was also out. This made it difficult or impossible to use the ILS because they can't set the local altimeter. This was a swiss cheese chain of events. It was a moonless dark night so the mountains weren't visible.
Would they take off if they knew GPS would be jammed midway through the flight? Had they known they wouldn't be able to rely on GPS, all that back and forth with ATC would not be needed, and they'd already have a plan B and a plan C for navigating. It's unfortunately all slices of swiss cheese aligned perfectly, but I'd still blame the military for poking extra holes on the GPS slice.
> Would they take off if
medevac flight - there was probably some urgency.
Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it a bit shocking they'd be caught by surprise by a planned GPS outage. The exercise happened as intended, and all aircraft in the affected areas should have received warnings BEFORE they even took off. These are not drug smugglers - they filed a flight plan before leaving the ground.
The automated weather service was also out. This made it difficult or impossible to use the ILS because they can't set the local altimeter. This was a swiss cheese chain of events. It was a moonless dark night so the mountains weren't visible.
What is the normal fallback for local weather service failure? Divert to an airport with working service? Proceed, using the "nearest working" information?
How much does air pressure vary over a region, and how quickly does it change?
Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it’s true that other navigation systems are as safe and capable as GPS, then GPS navigation should be randomly disabled in every aircraft occasionally to ensure that pilots remain fluent in using them. If it isn’t true, then the military is partially responsible for the crash of this aircraft.
No, pilots should ensure they're current at navigating without GPS because it can fail, just like pilots practice engine failure procedures and every other emergency / non-normal procedure. That doesn't mean it should be "randomly disabled" for the same reason that you don't test software in production or randomly turn off the engine of the plane. Obviously.
We don't know how it failed. Maybe it displayed their lat/long perfectly but at the wrong altitude. We think of failure as obvious, but it is often nearly impossible to tell unless you are looking for it.