The Global Positioning System was made publicly available to prevent civilian planes from being mistakenly shot down by any country’s military after the 1983 Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007. However, a U.S. military electronic warfare exercise likely contributed to the crash of a midnight medevac flight in May. With a crew disoriented by the loss of GPS, a Beechcraft King Air crashed into the side of a mountain in New Mexico while flying to pick up a patient. The crash killed the plane’s two pilots and two nurses.
Roughly 100 miles west of the crash, the U.S. Air Force was conducting NAVFEST at the White Sands Missile Range. The annual multi-week electronic warfare exercise tests the use and disruption of different types of navigation systems, and trains military personnel in GPS-denied environments. According to Wired, the Federal Aviation Administration warned that GPS could be impacted up to 400 miles away. There was obviously flying before GPS, but the King Air’s pilots were relatively inexperienced when they took off for Roswell. Keelan Clark, a recently promoted captain, had his commercial license for just a year and a half.
The dangers posed by electronic warfare to civilians is only get worse
Clark and his first officer, Ali Kawsara, were forced to use instrument flight rules to reach their destination in the dark. The pair relied on headings provided by the busy Albuquerque Air Traffic Control Center. While the controllers were busy assisting other aircraft without GPS, Clark and Kawsara overshot their landing pattern for Sierra Blanca Regional Airport by 10 miles. Instead of waiting for further instructions, the pilots spotted the lights of the airports and told ATC that they were attempting a visual approach. While they could see the runway, they couldn’t see the Capitan Mountains intersecting with their descent slope. By the time Clark and Kawsara realized their fatal error, it was too late. The Beechcraft plane slammed into the side of a mountain, killing everyone onboard.
The crash was likely the first for civilian aircraft in the United States where GPS jamming was a contributing factor. The rapid expansion of electronic warfare is catching civilians in the crossfire on a regular basis/ Two years ago, over 46,000 planes reported GPS issues while flying over the Baltic Sea. Officials widely believed the interference was caused by Russia’s military stationed in Kaliningrad, the country’s seaside exclave. The realm of electronic warfare has also expanded beyond the atmosphere. Earlier this summer, researchers at U.S. universities identified several Russian satellites as sources of GPS interference in Europe. Nowhere is safe from potential navigation jamming.
