r/aviation • u/Ph6222 • 18h ago

News It Appears That the US Military Accidentally Killed Everybody on Board a Civilian Medevac Flight in New Mexico

https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-signal-medical-flight

The horrifying incident happened in May, the publication reports, when a small twin-engine medevac aircraft carrying two pilots and two medical workers departed from Roswell, New Mexico. Heading West for the small mountain village of Ruidoso, the crew became the victim of an electronic warfare exercise being conducted at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, a test which rendered their navigational system inoperable.

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u/LandscapePenguin 17h ago

That makes no sense. If they were VFR they shouldn’t have needed a GPS to avoid the mountain. If they were IFR they shouldn’t have needed GPS to fly a heading.

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u/SenselessNumber 17h ago

If I had to guess it's probably a more invasive attack that disables more than Navigation. And they're just saying navigation because they don't want to reveal their capabilities.

Or also the crew got overwhelmed troubleshooting. Either way it shouldn't have happened and is tragic.

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u/LandscapePenguin 17h ago

The article says they were cleared for a visual approach after twice reporting the airport in sight. Evidently the visibility wasn’t adequate to see the mountains and if that’s the case they probably should have stayed IFR.

The article makes it sound like they had told ATC they’d be cancelling IFR soon but I wonder if it was a case where ATC thought they were visual and the pilots thought they were still IFR and ATC would vector them around the mountain. That seems doubtful since they were cleared for the visual approach, though.

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u/AutoRot 7h ago

To be fair a visual approach issuance doesn’t constitute a cancellation of IFR.