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Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon switched its GPS jammers back on five minutes before a medevac plane hit a mountain. All four people aboard died.
Their names were Keelan Clark and Ali Kawsara, the pilots, and Sarah Clark and Jamie Novick, the flight nurses. They lifted off from Roswell, New Mexico just after midnight on May 14, flying a Beechcraft King Air to Ruidoso to pick up a patient.
Eight minutes after takeoff, their navigation was gone.
They told Albuquerque Center they’d lost GPS and asked for the instrument landing system instead, the approach that doesn’t need satellites. The controller said he’d have vectors for them shortly. He was busy. Three other aircraft in the same airspace had just reported losing GPS.
So they waited, flying north into the dark, about twenty miles past where they should have turned.
Then they saw the lights of the airport and told the controller they had it visually. They were cleared for a visual approach, at night, into mountain country.
At ten past midnight, a supervisor told the military it could resume jamming. At fifteen past, the King Air struck a ridge at 9,950 feet, 730 feet from the radio facility on the Capitan summit. The fire it started burned more than 30,000 acres.
Here’s the part the Pentagon will point at, and it’s true. The interference was announced in advance. Two notices to airmen were sitting in the crew’s briefing, carrying the exercise’s own designator. The controllers asked for a pause and got one. Every published protocol was followed.
Four Americans are still dead.
That isn’t a defense of the rules. It’s an indictment of them. A notice in a briefing packet does not put satellites back over a crew descending toward rock they cannot see.
Federal investigators have confirmed the jamming was active that night and have not yet assigned a cause. That will take months. But there’s a question that doesn’t take months, and it was never the NTSB’s to answer: does this country keep running electronic warfare exercises that blind civilian aircraft over the same sky where air ambulances fly at night?