A plane can go down for lots of reasons like the engine stops working, there are problems, the weather is bad or someone makes a mistake. What happened to a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 90 plane in May of this year was not like that. The Beechcraft King Air 90 plane crashed into a mountain in New Mexico and everyone on the Beechcraft King Air 90 plane died. Now people are saying that the U.S. Military is the reason the Beechcraft King Air 90 plane crashed.

According to ‘Wired’, the U.S. military was testing new GPS signal jammers at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on May 13—the same day as the air crash.

Air crash during a U.S. military exercise

According to the report, the plane took off from Roswell shortly before midnight to pick up a patient. On board were Captain Keelan Clark (30), First Officer Ali Kawsara (23), and two nurses. The flight, which normally takes about 30 minutes, began experiencing problems shortly after takeoff when the crew lost their GPS signal during the military exercise.

Medical evacuation (medevac) flights are considered among the riskiest in civil aviation, as they are often organized on short notice and may involve using unfamiliar runways. Although weather conditions were good, the rural terrain and lack of moonlight offered the crew few visual references, complicating the situation.

Eight minutes after take-off—at midnight on May 14—the pilots informed the Albuquerque Control Centre that they had lost their GPS signal. They requested heading instructions from air traffic control, which first directed them westward and then northward.

Initially, the crew wanted to perform an RNAV approach—which relies on GPS—but later requested an Instrument Landing System (ILS) approach. At 00:05, the controller informed them that navigation vectors would be provided “in a couple of minutes.”

However, other aircraft were also reporting GPS issues that night, and the controller had to manage multiple incidents simultaneously. By 00:08, the King Air had drifted 10 miles beyond the landing pattern. At that point, the pilots requested a visual approach, a request that was approved. A visual approach is one in which pilots fly primarily by sight, without relying on the heading and glideslope signals provided by instruments. Looming ahead of them were the Capitan Mountains, with an elevation of 10,000 feet.

Ultimately, the pilots became disoriented while attempting to continue the flight visually on a dark, virtually moonless night and crashed into a mountainside, resulting in the deaths of all four people on board. It should be noted that the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a statement following the report’s publication. The NTSB states that it “has not yet determined the probable cause or contributing factors of the accident.”

How did GPS jammers lead to the crash?

You see, the US military was reportedly testing new GPS jammers. Such jammers are used in electronic warfare when you want to disable navigation systems of enemy aircraft. That is, anyone within range of such a jammer is unlikely to be able to use GPS.

The US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) had warned that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18 for this specific test in New Mexico. This meant that the King Air 90 aircraft, among other flights, could not use GPS for navigation. Though the area is one of the least densely populated regions in the US, which is why it was chosen for the exercise, leading to fewer flights being impacted.

The report adds that the US military appeared to have issued notices for at least 10 such exercises in the past year, while other recent incidents in Washington and West Texas also disrupted flights.

As per the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association in the US, the number of GPS interference events has risen from 4 in 2020 to 40 in 2025. The US is not the only country where such interference has impacted flights though.

In July this year, a Pakistani cargo flight from K2 Airways crashed into the ocean just south of the Strait of Hormuz, an area that had been experiencing severe GPS jamming due to the US-Iran conflict.