When the Federal Aviation Administration shut down air traffic to El Paso Airport earlier this year, nobody could have guessed than an experimental high-energy laser weapon was the cause. After days of chaos and speculation, it was revealed that Customs and Border Patrol officials had fired off a laser volley from a US Army base adjacent the El Paso Airport.
Though the trigger-happy Border Patrol grunts evidently thought they were firing at drug-smuggling drones, their real target turned out to be a kids’ party balloon. Regardless, it was later reported that the cutting-edge weapon was taken for a test-drive a week before FAA and Pentagon officials had a chance to discuss how to safely implement the laser device, making it a small miracle that nobody in the air was killed.
Not every use of an experimental aerospace weapon goes off without a hitch, however.
New bombshell reporting by Wired reveals an incident in which the testing of an experimental GPS jammer resulted in a medical plane crashing into the side of a mountain.
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.
Due to a combination of low visibility and an air-traffic control that was stretched far beyond capacity — at least three other planes reported navigation disruptions due to the GPS jamming — the pilots failed to register a mountainous formation between their plane and the landing strip.
As airline pilot and aviation crash analyst Juan Browne told Wired, the visual effect of that approach would have been stupefying. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble,” Browne explained.
Unfortunately, the disoriented crew ran straight into the side of a mountain they likely never saw, resulting in the loss of every life on board. It’s the first known instance where military GPS jamming played a role in downing a civilian plane in US airspace. Reported incidents of GPS jamming within the continental US have skyrocketed in recent years. According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the number of GPS interference events went from four in 2020 to 50 in 2024, and 40 across 2025.
Though the crew involved in the New Mexico crash was warned that GPS interference may be present, there evidently weren’t enough safeguards or air traffic control personnel in place to prevent a tragedy.
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