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Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

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201–210 of 295 posts

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

#201

The loss is tragic but I’m sorry GPS jamming was not a factor here. There was a NOTAM indicating it’s going on, the pilots should have been aware and it appears when they reached out with a request the jamming was stopped. It was a visual approach at a moonless night at an airport in high terrain, this was pilot error unfortunately.

Luckily, aviation investigations haven't concluded with "pilot error" for over half a century, or else there would be a lot more accidents as we never fixed any of the actual causes and just blamed the dead pilots.

Sure they do. Go search recent NTSB reports and you'll see it. Normally it's described a bit more elaborately, e.g. "The pilot’s failure to maintain a proper glidepath during landing which resulted in a landing short of the runway." But there are plenty of modern reports that do nothing but blame the pilot.

Certainly it's a lot less common than it used to be. There's a bigger push to find underlying causes that can be fixed, and not just say "the pilot forgot to perform a crucial step out of the several dozen crucial pre-flight items they were supposed to have committed to memory, sucks to be them" or whatever. But sometimes it really is "the pilot did a dumb and shouldn't have," especially for smaller planes with less experienced pilots.

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

#202
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The highest mountain summit in Florida is 105 meters above sea level.

Did you misspell hill? It’s not like some sand mountain jets up 300 feet all of the sudden.

Right. I said mountain to stress the importance of topography in the NM accident. The parent commenter may pat himself on the back for never flying into terrain during GPS outages in Florida, but there are factors in play in addition to his superior skills.

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

#203
post #127

The ridiculously criminal government of the Banana Republic of Serbia last year used this technique to prevent drones from being able to take video of a 300,000+ person protest in Belgrade. They spoofed the GPS signal to make the drones think they were flying near the Nikola Tesla Airport nearby so that they would autonomously land. https://ground.news/article/lazni-signali-rusili-dronove-avi...

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

#204
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's valid. I wouldn't call that a clear sky, personally, but I suppose it can still be considered one.

This is a real issue, where conditions that are legally considered sufficiently clear for visual flying aren't necessarily safe for it. A famous example is JFK Jr. He was flying over water on a hazy night with poor illumination without an instrument rating. This was considered clear and was perfectly legal, but he got disoriented and crashed into the ocean.

It's hammered into pilots that safe and legal are two different things, and you must evaluate whether the conditions are something that you can actually handle safely, not merely whether you're legal to fly in them.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, aviation investigations haven't concluded with "pilot error" for over half a century, or else there would be a lot more accidents as we never fixed any of the actual causes and just blamed the dead pilots.

Sure they do. Go search recent NTSB reports and you'll see it. Normally it's described a bit more elaborately, e.g. "The pilot’s failure to maintain a proper glidepath during landing which resulted in a landing short of the runway." But there are plenty of modern reports that do nothing but blame the pilot. Certainly it's a lot less common than it used to be. There's a bigger push to find underlying causes that can b…

And why did the pilot fail to maintain a proper glide path?

If he was drunk, then sure, pilot error. If he was insufficiently trained, why did he think that he had a sufficient level of training for this flight? If he had too much get-there-itis, is there anything in the training that could help prevent that? Seems there is surely potential training changes relating to GPS dependence.

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

#206
post #15

When I used to fly in Florida in the 2005-2015ish timeframe, NOTAMs for GPS interference (it didn't say that exactly but that's what it meant) were an everyday occurrence along my path, it became boilerplate. I experienced it a few times. One moment the GPS thinks you're plodding along next to Ocala, next moment it thinks I've teleported a thousand miles away, and then it'd just quit. But that's what we train for. Th…

What do you think Florida terrain is like in comparison to New Mexico?

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

#207

Airline captain here... A visual approach to an airport in mountainous terrain on a moonless night is very risky. In our operation, departing to an airport with missing weather reports would not be permitted, so in a Part 121 scheduled service this flight may not have been able to dispatch legally. Airliners have DME/DME triangulation which allows them to achieve area navigation (RNAV) without GPS. The interference w…

Would using the ILS without the local altimeter actually be a safe way to land the plane? (Ignoring whether or not ATC is allowed to give you clearance for that.) Is the requirement of a local altimeter just overly cautious?

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

#208
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your GPS enabled flight computer will indeed yell at you VERY LOUDLY if you're about to hit a mountain. It will not allow you to get particularly close to terrain without noticing.

You say GPS-enabled. What about a GPS-jammed flight computer? Can that do it too?

GPS + a topo map yelling at you for being too close to the ground is extremely simple, a very basic feature.

Dead reckoning (keeping track of position over time without an external source of truth) and radar altimeters are high level features that some avionics do have, but these are expensive and not expected to always be present.

Inertial navigation systems you'd find on missiles are precise enough that if you leave one running on a table in the upper floor of the building you can track the rise and fall of the building as it heats up and grows because of thermal expansion throughout the day (in other words, they are extremely precise).

So it depends.

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

#209
The civilian uses for GPS are obvious and as a pilot I'm more than pleased to make use of it. But... the military is jamming a military product that happens to have civilian uses. It's not flying the plane. That's like saying "heavy rain crashes car"

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

#210
post #15

When I used to fly in Florida in the 2005-2015ish timeframe, NOTAMs for GPS interference (it didn't say that exactly but that's what it meant) were an everyday occurrence along my path, it became boilerplate. I experienced it a few times. One moment the GPS thinks you're plodding along next to Ocala, next moment it thinks I've teleported a thousand miles away, and then it'd just quit. But that's what we train for. Th…

You're not wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean Uncle Sam should be dicking around with GPS jammers as a normal thing (at least not without acknowledging that doing so changes the risk profile of aviation to some extent).

" acknowledging that doing so changes the risk profile of aviation to some extent" Isn't that what the NOTAM is?
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