July 2026: A series of aircraft near-misses due to GPS jamming near the U.S. Army-operated White Sands Missile Range may have culminated in the fatal May 2026 crash of a civilian medevac plane and subsequent month-long wildfire. The U.S. National Transportation Board (NTSB) has issued a preliminary report investigating the role White Sands may have played in the accident, and marks the first report in which the NTSB has held GPS jamming as a factor.
The RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys, who has participated in GPS testing at White Sands, says that some tests in the region involve spoofing GPS signals. To avoid these signals misleading civilian aircraft, the Army placed powerful GPS jammers along the range perimeter, drowning them out. Dr. Humphreys remarked that it is likely this preventative ‘cover jamming’ that the medevac plane experienced in May, saying that “the jamming coming from White Sands is intense. It goes all the way up to low Earth orbit.”
Furthermore, FAA-certified navigation hardware of the kind used on civilian aircraft is heavily reliant on the L1 GPS frequency. These systems — unlike modern multi-frequency or multi-constellation GNSS receivers — are more susceptible to GPS interference. Dr. Humphreys noted that the “FAA certification process is so onerous and conservative that you’re dealing with aviation-grade receivers that are more than a decade old in technology.”
Read more about the crash, as well as White Sands’ effects on American airspace, with IEEE Spectrum.
