A Beech King Air crew flying a medical transport out of Roswell, New Mexico, reported losing GPS capability minutes after departure on May 14 while the U.S. military conducted a planned satellite-denial exercise nearby. The aircraft later struck the Capitan Mountains on approach to its destination, killing both pilots and two flight nurses. The National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report has not determined whether the GPS interference caused the crash, but the sequence has drawn new scrutiny to a question regulators have handled so far with guidance documents rather than hardware mandates.
What the NTSB found
The crew departed Roswell shortly before midnight, bound for Ruidoso. After losing GPS, they requested assistance from air traffic controllers, who twice asked military officials to suspend the jamming exercise. Three other aircraft in the area reported outages during the same window. The crew later reported the destination airport in sight and requested a visual approach. After the military resumed the exercise, the aircraft descended and struck terrain.
The FAA had issued a notice to airmen before the flight warning that the scheduled exercise at White Sands Missile Range could disrupt satellite navigation across a radius of hundreds of miles. The agency says it maintains backup navigation systems for satellite outages and routinely issues such notices.
The certification gap
Todd Humphreys, director of the University of Texas Radionavigation Laboratory, has argued that aviation certification has not kept pace with the evolving jamming threat. Many FAA-certified cockpit GPS receivers rely on older technology more susceptible to interference than newer commercially available systems. His framing: the iPhone a pilot carries was almost certainly a better GPS receiver than the certified unit guiding the aircraft. The FAA did not directly address his criticism when asked.
The numbers are hard to dismiss. Industry data cited by the International Civil Aviation Organization show GPS loss reports increased 65% in the first half of 2024 compared with the prior year. The ICAO, the International Telecommunication Union, and the International Maritime Organization warned jointly in March 2025 that jamming and spoofing incidents can affect aircraft far beyond the immediate affected area.
The counterargument
Paul Deres, vice president of operations at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Air Safety Institute, puts the emphasis on pilot preparation and proficiency, pointing to a general aviation fleet that already spans a wide range of avionics generations. Technology fails, he argued, and that is exactly why crew readiness matters. The read-through from his position: new hardware mandates address one variable in a cockpit-management problem that has several.
The risk is that framing absorbs enough institutional support to delay action. Humphreys noted that GPS jamming as counter-drone defense will only grow more common, and the U.S. has so far avoided the routine disruptions airlines face in European and Middle Eastern airspace. On balance, the preliminary NTSB report leaves the causal question open. What it closes is the question of how fast a routine medical flight can become a navigation emergency the crew cannot recover from.