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Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

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Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#161

Post by PhaedrusV »

Suzuran wrote: post #54
K0balt wrote: post #17

GPS is not essential to air navigation. It’s nice to have, and there are some approaches that legally require it to be operational in order to fly them (IFR procedures) but aviation has other systems in place to guide aircraft under conditions where visual flight navigation is impossible. In this case, IMHO, the pilots had become complacent and lax in their navigational rigor because of the fact that GPS makes a lot…

Don't worry, our government is doing their level best to make GPS the only option for air navigation. After all, we all know that technology NEVER fails, and the sooner we can turn off all those big bad old ground radars and navigation aids, the sooner we can sell all that real estate and use the money for things that the American public desperately needs, like more corporate bailouts and bathroom security cameras.

That's not accurate. Navigationally critical VORs are continuing to be maintained, they're just turning off the podunk redundant ones.

VOR Candidate Retention List | Federal Aviation Administration https://www.faa.gov/ato/navigation-programs/vor-retention-li...

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#162

Post by georgemcbay »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #100
ceejayoz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN threads on aviation are always a bit goofy to anyone who's actually flown a plane, yeah.

Perhaps I'm being a bit reductive, but threads on anything that you're more well versed in than the average person, are evidently almost always goofy. It's called the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect.

> It's called the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect applies everywhere, but in my experience it is hyper-amplified on HN because of the fact that tech/software people (and I say this as someone who has been coding since the 1980s) are much more convinced than the average person that they are experts in complex topics that they don't have much actual experience on.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#163

Post by Magicrafter13 »

If the sky was clear, as the article states, then lack of GPS is not a good enough excuse for a trained pilot to crash into a mountain, unless the cockpit has no windows.

It's not fun to lose GPS, but, a trained pilot ought to have been able to handle this situation fine. All instruments can fail, but weather notwithstanding, no instruments are required to land a plane back down on a runway (implied in my statement is that, if you lose all your instruments, you should still try to land rather than continue your flight).

At the end of the day, if you aren't proficient in VFR, then your IFR proficiency doesn't mean much. Hopefully this pushes the relevant flight schools to do more training, because this crash appears highly avoidable - and while the pilots take some amount of blame since they are behind the controls, there are also people who failed them by not giving them sufficient training.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#164

Post by 27183 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #133
27183 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was training 20yr ago we practiced stalls, spin recovery, simulated random engine-out scenarios.. do they not do that anymore? I was pretty confident barring some catastrophic mechanical failure I could probably get it on the ground or into the water (or trees) in one piece. The big question remains though: what now? If you're knocked unconscious (likely--lap belt, big flat instrument panel at face height) the…

Mechanical failure and engine outs will always rely on muscle memory and training imho, but I strongly presume everything else is going to be "Push red button to survive, switching to autonomy." Garmin Is Automating In-Flight Emergencies (Autoland, Smart Glide, ESP) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996106 - July 2026 (0 comments) The accountability problem exposed by the first Garmin Autoland deployment - htt…

That stuff just seems awfully gimmicky to me. I'm glad it worked and saved some lives. I don't think I'd want that system in my plane, though. I just wouldn't be able to trust it.

But I also wouldn't want anything to do with the new glass cockpit stuff, way too easy to just lose all your instruments at once. I'll take properly maintained, independent mechanical or electromechanical systems over digital ones every time for things that actually need to work.

Digital systems always seem to accumulate tons of complexity ("features") rendering them extremely brittle. Until we can figure out how to stop doing that, I prefer to avoid depending too heavily on them for important stuff.

The Cirrus parachute system seems pretty simple and trustworthy, that approach feels more directionally correct. Not much more complex than an automotive airbag.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#165

Post by FireBeyond »

gosub100 wrote: post #132
toomuchtodo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agr…

There's also the out-of-cockpit pressure from both the patient needing medical transport, and the employer who may retaliate against a pilot who refuses to fly. Apparently most of these pilots are trying to build 1500 hrs to be eligible to fly for the airlines, so they are feeling pressured from that angle too.

> Apparently most of these pilots are trying to build 1500 hrs to be eligible to fly for the airlines, so they are feeling pressured from that angle too.

Fixed wing, maybe, I'm not familiar, but around here, I know most of the pilots for the two HEMS agencies (I used to be a paramedic). HEMS is considered the most lucrative of the post-military pilot careers for rotary. You fly high end machines, in all sorts of scenarios, and see all manner of things.

And as it is, often times fixed-wing EMS doesn't actually fly that often. Long range transport that can't go ground (and providers and insurers will go to some lengths, depending on the patient - one employer of mine was contracted for a ground transport from Seattle to Las Vegas).

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#166

Post by aftbit »

Magicrafter13 wrote: post #163

If the sky was clear, as the article states, then lack of GPS is not a good enough excuse for a trained pilot to crash into a mountain, unless the cockpit has no windows. It's not fun to lose GPS, but, a trained pilot ought to have been able to handle this situation fine. All instruments can fail, but weather notwithstanding, no instruments are required to land a plane back down on a runway (implied in my statement i…

I thought this at first, but then read farther and realized the flight started at 11pm on a moonless night. An unlit mountain is hard to see at night.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#167

Post by merely-unlikely »

gpm wrote: post #139
parineum wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse is a value judgement and, in context, the value would be "ability to fly by sight". Is climate change going to make it more difficult to see outside?

The value here is pretty simple, the frequency at which windows are rendered useless due to weather. Yes, the change we are undergoing and that the current administration seems to be doing their best to accelerate includes an increase in heavy precipitation across north america.

That's good news for the data centers.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#168

Post by coredog64 »

smcg wrote: post #160
SoftTalker wrote: post #106

Earlier 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.

Well in this case there were multiple failures... Should they have been identified earlier? Yes.

It's a truism that every accident is actually a chain of events, or at least it was 30+ years ago at Embry-Riddle. Lower stakes situations recognize this with the "5 whys" technique.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#169

Post by bri3d »

gpm wrote: post #59
fusslo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At 0000:26, the ARTCC controller advised the flight crew that the airplane was at 13,000 ft msl, 1,000 ft above their assigned altitude. The pilot responded that they were correcting their altitude and that the airplane had lost GPS capability. The pilot stated they would need a heading > About 0005 the ARTCC operations supervisor contacted [the military] to stop jamming and at 0007:34 ADS-B data recording returned…

Note that after the pilots said that they could go visual the preliminary report documents the following > The ARTCC controller subsequently cleared the flight to SRR, cleared the flight for a visual approach, and informed them they could cancel IFR in the air above 9,000 ft msl or they could cancel their clearance via the flight service station after landing. The flight crew acknowledged the clearance and responded…

That's not how this works, at all.

Visual approach is a specific IFR procedure. It's basically designed to expedite and simplify the landing process in situations where the pilot can see the airport and traffic allows - instead of flying a detailed set of waypoints provided by an approach plate (via RNAV/GPS, ILS/VOR/DME, or vectors), the pilot and ATC both agree "hey, you can see the runway and/or traffic, you got this now" and the pilot lands.

By asking for a visual approach and getting approved, then not subsequently asking for another approach, the PIC was flying visually. There's nothing more to it. There's no nuance or gotcha here, and nothing seems procedurally incorrect or even out of the ordinary.

"Canceling" IFR just means concluding the flight plan and "closing the file;" which they were given the option to do in the air or on the ground, but it's not relevant to the approach they chose to fly.

The root cause of this incident is clearly pilot error; the pilot specifically chose to fly a visual approach without adequate visual reference and descended into terrain.

There are proximate causes too, which may or may not relate to the GPS jamming and for which more information is required. For example - did the pilot choose to request the visual approach because they didn't want to fly an RNAV approach in case GPS was inaccurate, or because they didn't want to burden ATC? or did they just choose the visual approach because they could see the airport and it's easier that way? Was this in line with any guidelines from their operator? We don't know that yet. And there's some chance that without GPS jamming, a secondary safety system (GPWS, moving map, etc.) may have saved the pilots from their decision. But these things are all secondary.

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