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At 11:52 on the night of May 13, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air lifted off from Roswell Air Center in Southeastern New Mexico and turned west toward the mountain town of Ruidoso. Four people were aboard: Captain Keelan Clark, thirty years old, a year and a half into his commercial license and one month into his fourth stripe; First Officer Ali Kawsara, twenty-three, two months on the job; and two flight nurses, Sarah Clark and Jamie Novick, riding in back to bring a patient home. The temperature was sixty-nine degrees. The sky was clear. The trip should have taken half an hour.
Eight minutes after wheels-up, the GPS went dark.
The crew knew it might. Two notices sat in their preflight briefing. One carried the military's own designator — WSMRNM GPS 26-13 — and warned that GPS could be unavailable across a wide footprint centered on White Sands, on a schedule that ran deep past midnight. The other told them the automated weather station at their destination, Sierra Blanca Regional, was out of service. So a medevac crew launched into a moonless night, over dark mountains, toward a field with no weather reporting, knowing the satellites might blink out. They launched anyway, because that is what medevac crews do, and because the whole U.S. military apparatus in New Mexico above them had decided this was a tolerable way to run an airspace.
One hundred miles west, the Air Force's 746th Test Squadron was running NAVFEST — an annual two-week exercise in which electronic-warfare units from across the armed services practice blinding satellite navigation. On actual civilian aircraft over New Nexico, in the same general area where the same military tested the first atomic bomb in 1945, sickening, poisoning and killing Americans, including my own mom. The Federal Aviation Administration had warned that GPS could be degraded up to four hundred miles out. The warning was real. The jamming was real. And on that nearly moonless night, over some of the darkest terrain in the continental United States, two young pilots suddenly had no magenta line to follow home.
What happened next is documented, second by second, in the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report on accident WPR26FA186, released June 18 and reconstructed in Wired by Jeff Wise but otherwise mostly ignored by the US propaganda news machine.
The crew reported the loss and asked Albuquerque Center for a heading. They asked to fly an instrument approach, then a second kind of instrument approach when the first proved impossible without GPS. An operations supervisor called the military and asked it to stop jamming. Around 12:05 a.m., the military complied. The King Air's GPS flickered back to life. Meanwhile the crew, waiting on vectors from a controller juggling three other planes that had also lost their signal that night, had overshot the landing pattern by ten miles. Then they saw the lights of Ruidoso through the windshield, cancelled the instrument approach, and asked to "go visual." The request was granted.
And the same supervisor turned to the military and cleared it to switch the jamming back on. For some asinine reason.
Roughly five minutes later, the King Air flew into the side of the Capitan Mountains, about 230 feet below the summit, at nearly ten thousand feet and full speed. Everyone died on impact. The wreckage sparked a fire that grew into a wildfire, burned for the better part of a month, and forced nearby communities to evacuate. The crash struck the ridge fourteen minutes before that night's jamming window was scheduled to close on its own. The military could have just stopped their idiotic exercise after they realized planes were struggling. They didn't.
Here is where the story turns more damning, not less, than the version rocketing around social media.
Once Clark and Kawsara reported the lights, abandoned their instrument approach, and accepted a visual, they were flying by eyeball — and at that point, whether the jammers ran or sat idle no longer touched how they aimed the airplane. A defense spokesman will tell you exactly that, and he will be technically right. The jamming did not fly the King Air into the Capitans. The disorientation did. The moonless black did. The decision to trade a stabilized instrument approach for a visual descent toward distant lights, with a ten-thousand-foot wall of rock lying invisibly in between, did. As one crash-investigation pilot put it, when a mountain rises up in the dark and swallows the lights you were flying toward, "you know you are in big trouble." That is a textbook controlled-flight-into-terrain, and the final report, when it lands in 2027, will likely name the crew's choices among the causes.
So ask the question the system would rather you skip. Why was a green crew — a captain with eighteen months' experience, a first officer with two — forced into that choice in the first place?
Because their tools were taken away by their own government playing war games with their lives. Strip the GPS, and two pilots who trained on it their whole careers were thrown back on ground-based beacons and mental geometry that airline veterans describe as the kind of thing that killed JFK Jr. Push them off their approach, hand them to a controller too busy to give timely vectors because three other aircraft were also blind, let them drift ten miles past the pattern, and the visual approach starts to look like the way out of the trap. The jamming built the trap. The crew stepped into it. Both things are true, and only one of them was avoidable by anyone wearing a uniform that night.
And the trap was not new. For years before this crash, air traffic controllers had been filing formal safety reports about the White Sands jamming through NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System, according to reporting by IEEE Spectrum, which reviewed the filings. In late 2021, a controller wrote that a request to halt the jamming had been refused outright, and that refusing to stop was commonplace. A 2024 filing described the delay in pausing jamming as a danger to the flying public. The people running the airspace over southern New Mexico had been warning, in writing, on the record, for years, that this exact scenario was coming.
They simply didn't care.
So when a supervisor cleared the jammers to resume the instant one crew said "field in sight" — with three other planes in the same sector still degraded, and a quarter hour left on a window that would have expired on its own — that was the culture working as designed. Somewhere in that chain, night after night, a test's value got weighed against a pilot's ability to know where the ground was, and for years the test kept winning.
What happened to that supervisor? Publicly, nothing. The NTSB names no individuals in a preliminary report and assigns no cause; it will not until 2027. The Army will say only that it is "aware." The one accountability mechanism actually in motion belongs to our own delegation: Representative Gabe Vasquez has sent a letter to the NTSB and the Defense Department demanding a joint briefing, saying he has been briefed by the NTSB chair and that military technology played a role in the flight path of this crash. Whether that letter becomes a hearing, or evaporates into the Pentagon's favorite phrase — cannot comment while under investigation — is the fight worth watching.
Given how dependent the state economy and political infrastructure are on defense dollars, I would not hold my breath waiting for accountability. But can you imagine the uproar if, say, Iranian hackers had done this instead of our own military?
I also want to ask the question a New Mexican has to ask. Why here? Why is some horrid thing happening here, again, and being hushed up?
White Sands hosts this work because White Sands is considered empty. Remote, sparsely settled, disposable enough to absorb whatever the exercise throws off. That is the exact reasoning that put the first atomic bomb at Trinity, thirty-odd miles from where this King Air went down. The logic has never changed: the land is treated as vacant, the mostly rural, most poor people downwind treated as a rounding error. Subhuman. Collateral damage.
The Trinity downwinders like my mom have spent eighty years being told their cancers and deaths were the price of national security, and only recently pried the government's hand open far enough to be acknowledged at all. Now four coffins have come off a mountain, a month of wildfire has come off the same crash, and the families of Keelan Clark, Ali Kawsara, Sarah Clark and Jamie Novick have joined a long New Mexican tradition — the tradition of being what the country flies its experiments over because someone in a briefing decided nobody down there was quite important enough to protect.
And the pattern is spreading past our borders. In March of 2025, airliners landing at Reagan National got phantom collision alarms and aborted approaches; the Secret Service had been testing electronic-warfare gear near the vice president's residence. This past February, Customs and Border Protection's anti-drone lasers shut down airspace over El Paso and Fort Hancock, Texas. On July 7, a cargo 737 south of the Strait of Hormuz — a corridor thick with jamming from the U.S.–Iran fight — reported a navigation problem and then corkscrewed into the sea, killing five. GPS interference events reported to aviation authorities climbed from four in 2020 to fifty in 2024. The skies are being turned into a battlefield laboratory, and the aviation industry, still utterly dependent on GPS, is very slow to notice.
The difference in New Mexico is that we have seen this movie before. We know how it ends when Washington decides our sky and land near White Sands is a place to test a weapon, even with people there. We know because the mushroom cloud is still in our mothers’ and grandmothers' medical records.
Four coffins came off that mountain. The jammers were back on within minutes of the crew that died. And unless someone with the authority to change the procedure decides that a medevac crew's life outweighs an evening's worth of test data, the next Beechcraft is already fueling somewhere, and the next patient is already waiting.
Reporting drawn from the NTSB preliminary report (WPR26FA186, June 18, 2026); Jeff Wise's account in Wired (July 30, 2026); IEEE Spectrum's review of Aviation Safety Reporting System filings; and public statements from Rep. Gabe Vasquez's office. The investigation is ongoing; the NTSB's final probable-cause report is not expected before 2027.
I offer all my investigations, analysis and news for free, but your support is appreciated and necessary — now more than ever. Please like, share and comment. And subscribe. Paid, if you can spare $6 a month. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day allow me to write full-time. Thank you.
I do agree this is a mess. However, as a commercial pilot I know that when I say I'm switching to a visual approach, it's all my responsibility from that point. Pilot error is pilot error. And there are many alternatives to GPS to navigate. That's how I learned; didn't have a GPS on a plane I owned until 1998. I used VOR's and ADF's and such.
None of this negates the idea that the DOD is being way too arrogant about the way it's testing. This has always bothered me greatly.
La encantada is becoming lost meurtos. There are too many bodies and too many skeletons all throughout the whole white sands area. Keep their feet to the fire Alisa. We respect and admire you for your fearless reporting. Side not i dont speak Spanish so pardon me if my initial expression is wrong. I was trying to say the enchanted land is becoming a land of death.