The Pentagon is expanding its GPS jamming and electronic warfare testing across the United States even as the National Transportation Safety Board continues investigating the first fatal civilian aviation crash linked to military interference. New flight advisories issued for North Dakota and North Carolina show the testing is accelerating, while New Mexico’s congressional delegation demands accountability for a May crash that killed four medical crew members and sparked a $37.7 million wildfire.

The New Mexico Crash That Changed the Conversation

Just before midnight on May 13, 2026, a Beechcraft King Air C90 air ambulance departed Roswell, New Mexico, heading to Ruidoso to pick up a patient. Eight minutes into the flight, the pilot reported losing GPS signal. An air traffic controller immediately contacted the military, which was conducting its annual NAVFEST electronic warfare exercise at White Sands Missile Range, and requested a pause in jamming. As the aircraft approached Ruidoso, the controller notified the military that jamming could resume. Five minutes later, the plane crashed into the Capitan Mountains, killing two pilots and two flight nurses.

The crash ignited a wildfire that burned 31,860 acres over three weeks, required more than 1,000 personnel and seven helicopters to contain, and forced rural evacuations. The estimated cost to taxpayers: $37.7 million.

Representative Gabe Vasquez confirmed during a July briefing with the NTSB that “during the course of the flight in question, the Department of Defense was asked to turn off the jamming technology by the Air Route Traffic Control Centers controller and their supervisor after the pilot reported navigational issues, but shortly thereafter resumed the jamming activity”.

New Mexico’s entire congressional delegation—Senators Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, along with Representatives Teresa Leger Fernández, Melanie Stansbury, and Gabe Vasquez—sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanding answers. “If the DoD had not been jamming GPS in the region at the time of this crash,” they wrote, “it is very likely that the crash would have never occurred, four people would still be alive, and this wildfire would not have started”.

The NTSB has not yet determined probable cause, but its preliminary report confirms that active U.S. military GPS jamming was occurring in the area and may have contributed to the crew’s loss of navigation capability.

Testing Expands to North Dakota and North Carolina

Despite the New Mexico investigation, the military’s GPS interference testing shows no signs of slowing. A Federal Aviation Administration flight advisory issued for Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota scheduled daily jamming events throughout July 2026, with interference potentially affecting GPS signals including WAAS, GBAS, and ADS-B across a radius of up to 256 nautical miles depending on altitude.

The advisory warned that “GPS testing is scheduled as follows and may result in unreliable or unavailable GPS signal,” with events lasting the entire requested periods. Pilots were encouraged to report anomalies in accordance with the Aeronautical Information Manual.

A separate notice issued through the North Carolina Geodetic Survey described a different type of test that would impact an area from the surface to unlimited altitudes, running daily from 2:30 PM to 10:30 PM EDT. The notice explicitly distinguished this test from “the typical GPS interference test that is centered at a point and impacting an expanding radius with increasing elevation like an upside-down truncated cone”.

The Global Impact: Brazilian Airliners Grounded

The consequences of U.S. military testing have now crossed international borders. On September 22, 2026, Azul Linhas Aéreas was forced to suspend operations with its Embraer E195-E2 fleet after both GPS receivers on multiple aircraft failed simultaneously while still on the ground. Canadian carrier Porter Airlines reported identical problems, as did operators of Pilatus, Gulfstream, and Dassault aircraft equipped with Honeywell components.

The Air Force Research Laboratory acknowledged a preliminary connection between the failures and testing of the experimental NTS-3 satellite. According to the AFRL, “some receivers reacted to unexpected parameters during a routine and pre-approved test of the NTS-3 satellite.” The military had applied “measures intended to prevent NTS-3 interference with civil aviation, including the use of an authorized test signal that was publicly identified as experimental and not intended for operational use by civil GPS receivers”.

The leading hypothesis is that onboard modules detected the NTS-3 transmission, identified it as inadequate or outside standard parameters, discarded the frequency, and automatically triggered failure alerts. The military has suspended NTS-3 transmissions indefinitely pending safety reviews.

DARPA’s Backup Plan: Clocks That Outlast GPS

As the Pentagon grapples with the fallout from its testing, its research arm is pursuing a longer-term solution to GPS vulnerability. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been testing a new generation of ultra-precise clocks designed to provide military forces with reliable positioning, navigation, and timing even when GPS is jammed or spoofed.

“Positioning, navigation, and timing is the service that we get from GPS,” said Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. GPS satellites broadcast super-precise timestamps, and receivers compare signals from multiple satellites to determine location. But those signals are so weak by the time they reach Earth that they are vulnerable to interference.

The clocks developed through DARPA’s ROCkN program can maintain GPS-quality time for more than two to three weeks without resynchronization, compared to current technology that maintains such accuracy for only hours. The next phase, called “It’s About Time,” focuses on making the clocks practical outside research settings and determining whether they can be manufactured at scale and integrated into existing military platforms.

“We know GPS can be jammed, it can be spoofed, and that has a huge impact on how our military operates in so-called electromagnetically contested areas,” said DARPA program manager Mukund Vengalattore. If successful, the technology could eventually provide timing that is 1,000 to 100,000 times better than GPS.

Congress Pushes for Accountability

Representative Vasquez has requested a joint briefing from the Departments of Defense and Transportation by September 6, 2026, to review coordination procedures between the agencies. His questions include: What standard procedures does DoD follow to notify the FAA of testing that could impact civilian flight operations? What binding precautions are in place to ensure civilian aircraft safety during testing? How are air traffic controllers trained to guide pilots during jamming events?

Vasquez also secured passage of an amendment to the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act requiring the Department of Defense to improve coordination with the FAA before testing military technologies that could impact civilian aviation.

The NTSB’s final report on the New Mexico crash is expected next year. Until then, the fundamental tension remains unresolved: the Pentagon’s need to train for electronic warfare against near-peer adversaries versus the safety of civilian aviation in the world’s busiest airspace. As the New Mexico delegation wrote, “As the prevalence of drone warfare and electronic warfare grows globally and becomes central to our national defense, the risk of military and contractor activities disrupting civilian flights is likely to grow”.