A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame?
▻https://www.wired.com/story/a-civilian-plane-crashed-in-new-mexico-was-the-militarys-tech-to-blame
▻https://archive.ph/eR0QD
But 100 miles to the west, an Air Force Unit called the 746th Test Squadron of the 704th Test Group was holding its annual NAVFEST event at the White Sands Missile Range. The event draws together electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of exercises, in which units test different technologies for disrupting GPS and dealing with adversaries’ disruption.
[...]
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 magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.
[...]
In retrospect, tragedy might have been avoided if Albuquerque air traffic control had been able to pay closer attention to the young pilots in the King Air. But tonight they were busy. Three other aircraft also reported that they’d lost their GPS and needed help. One was struggling to get a bearing on a radio beacon.
[...]
As the King Air flew north, they were high enough to see the lights of Ruidoso’s airport 31 miles to the southwest. To the pilots in the cockpit of the King Air, a visual approach must have seemed a tantalizing prospect.
[...]
As they turned and descended toward Ruidoso’s lights, what the pilots couldn’t see was the 10,000-foot-high mass of the Capitan Mountains lying across their path. As they drew closer, the dark mass of rock appeared to rise up, swiping away the lights of the valley.
[...]
The pilots slowed their descent, even climbing a little, but it wasn’t enough. They kept flying straight toward the mountain.
▻https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/33.5080/-105.3764&layers=P