NMLEG map of counties and population | https://www.nmlegis.gov/publications/handbook/counties.pdf

wiki 2020 census map | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/New_Mexi...

So is it safer? If the answer is "yes, until it fails" that's pretty bad. Things fail, systems degrade, and we need to be able to adapt safely. If the transition between "everything working" and "degraded performance" causes a safety issue... that's kind of a systemic failure isn't it?

[edit] maybe it's a UX issue? What if interacting with the GPS had the same UX as the VOR? The failover would be a lot less disruptive. That's kind of where I always end up with chart plotters.. like, you need to be using the paper chart anyway if you want to be able to fail over safely and quickly... so does the chartplotter really add anything? Or does it take things away?

We've also added blind spot warnings, but you're still responsible for doing a shoulder check before changing lanes. We have automatic emergency braking, but you need to stay back as well (if it does not work, or if conditions are slippery).

GNSS also tends to be used with glass cockpits, going back to the late 1990s (e.g., Garmin GNS 400/500), which not only did GPS but also VOR/DME. How transparent is getting a fix between the two and still getting good RNAV?

And they affect thousands of aircraft--Here's a thread where I analyze an earlier exercise at White Sands, called NAVFEST: https://bsky.app/profile/lemonodor.bsky.social/post/3ml7afb2...

  * Approximately 4000 aircraft experienced significant GPS interference
  * 90% of which were commercial jets
  * The military appears to have been jamming outside the posted NOTAM hours
    2750 aircraft jammed during the window, 1250 jammed outside the window.
  * Used to be called JAMFEST but "the Joint Spectrum Center became
    uncomfortable with the idea of associating its RFAs with events with the
    word 'jam' in their names."

> About 0005 the ARTCC operations supervisor contacted [the military] to stop jamming and at 0007:34 ADS-B data recording returned to 2-3 second intervals.

> The flight crew again reported they “[have] a visual on Ruidoso” at 0008:30 and that they could “go visual.”

> About 0010, the ARTCC operations supervisor informed [the military] that the airplane was on a visual approach and that they could resume jamming.

> The airplane impacted terrain about 250 ft southwest of the last recorded data point at an elevation of about 9,950 ft, and about 730 ft east and 230 ft below the Capitan Mountains Summit Radio Facility, located at an elevation of about 10,180 ft.

The image of the map from the report really helps me understand the path. It seems like the aircraft began visual approach and didn't know where it was, or didn't know about the mountain.

Vectoring by the controller to a visual or ILS approach still works but they'd be juggling a lot of planes. And while lots of the bigger/older airports still have ILS, many VORs and DMEs are being retired and many smaller airports don't have ILS at all.

Denied access to GPS in a large area in bad weather would likely result in lots of flight cancellations and contingency plans getting put in motion to get anything still in the air landed safely. But controllers would get very busy and ILS runways very congested.

Here in Europe, there have been a few cases of GPS denied areas especially closer to Russia. Mostly pilots and controllers at e.g. Helsinki airport are able to deal with this.

Pilots were so used to "the plane won't make a mistake" that they were not aware/not trained properly about things that are nothing to do with the FMS like frozen pitot tubes and also that the autopilot has a number of "modes" which mean you need to go back to basics like altitude, attitude and air speed.

This has not been the practical reality for many years for IFR flights (arguably not for VFR flight either but some of the good old boys will still argue that you should still be using a map and compass).

In Europe the minimum requirement has been B-RNAV and aircraft are controlled with reference to intersections which have no defined relationships with underlying VORs, and an expectation of being able to navigate direct to one from any arbitrary point in space. Airliners generally get away with this because they have DME-DME disciplined INS. Smaller aircraft, well the backup is vectors from ATC.

He hinted at this when he mentioned that ATC was dealing with other flights complaining about loss of GPS and coordinating with white sands. ATC crew were probably just out of their depth and trying their best, same as the flight crew. I wonder what the experience level of the ATC crew was and how much pressure they were getting from white sands to keep the jamming up.

Sure, if it's obvious it's happening, like GPS being completely knocked-out.

If it's a GPS spoofing nudge by a few dozen metres per minute, then it's not so obvious. Enough to make a OWA drone miss its target, while also not being easily noticed by pilots.

A controller who has the capacity to spot something that seems off like a wrong heading or altitude might ask the plane if they are OK, but unless they are deviating from a flight plan in controlled airspace, they are more likely to assume VFR and pilot knows best.

There is not only one alternative.

When presented with two impossible (per your telling) options for landing, you choose option C: don't.

This is similar to the conclusion from one of the blancolirio videos about this crash[1]:

> The operation that dispatched this flight should have never dispatched this flight in the first place to begin with. There are simply too many variables working against you to accept this flight. And in my opinion, this is another classic situation where we're losing a lot of young pilots just trying to build up flying time to that magic 1500 hours to get on to a better job and a better future with the airlines. In my opinion, we should have never implemented the 1500 hour rule. These kids would have been much better off if they had been hired by the airlines at 500 hours and been trained and kept in a safer, more controlled environment in the right seat of the airline that they're going to work for for the rest of their career while they build up their time there to get to 1500 hours, where they can then get their ATP rating and then upgrade to the left seat; instead of sending all of our young pilots out there to do all kinds of risky flying operations in an effort to build up the magical 1500 hours as required by a knee-jerk reaction by Congress to assuage the family members of the Colgan Air crash victims. Get rid of the 1500-hour rule.

1. https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?t=977

If I'm not mistaken the US still has the 1500 hour requirement that was illogical even when it was first introduced. It was introduced as a response to a crash by poorly trained pilots, but both pilots in that crash had over 2000 hours each, so the lesson should clearly have been that a raw number of hours is a very poor indicator of competence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_transport_pilot_licenc...

One technical point that initially puzzled me was why Spidertrax appeared to retain GPS coordinates while the FMS did not.

My understanding is that certified FMS GPS receivers use Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM) and other integrity checks. During GPS jamming, the increased noise and degraded signal quality can cause the receiver to determine that it can no longer guarantee a reliable navigation solution, resulting in a NAV FAIL or RAIM warning.

A tracking device such as Spidertrax, on the other hand being a glorified telematics grade positioning device, is designed for best-effort position reporting rather than certified navigation, so it may continue outputting an estimated position using noisy GNSS data and motion filtering, even when that solution is no longer suitable for primary aircraft navigation.

Anyone else firing up a jammer is going to get triangulated and arrested very quickly.

Individual GPS signals typically arrive at the antenna below the receiver’s thermal noise floor and the system relies on processing gain in the receiver to generate a fix.

GPS is comically easy to jam or spoof and assuming it will work all the time is just a silly, dangerous assumption.

We just happened to live through a brief period where you could believe that

What would have been the "skill issue" difference people keep mentioning? It's getting really frustrating how reckless the US military is with the skies. They keep putting people in danger. I can't help but think about the DCA crash due to the continuity of government drills.

There's no reason they should have been flying dark for a drill that night.

> The ARTCC controller subsequently cleared the flight to SRR, cleared the flight for a visual approach, and informed them they could cancel IFR in the air above 9,000 ft msl or they could cancel their clearance via the flight service station after landing. The flight crew acknowledged the clearance and responded that they would cancel IFR “in just a couple of minutes.” There were no additional radio transmissions received from the flight crew.

It's not at all clear to me that they did go visual. They communicated that they intended to cancel instrument clearance later and that suggests they were still using it...

VOR Candidate Retention List | Federal Aviation Administration https://www.faa.gov/ato/navigation-programs/vor-retention-li...

But yeah, IFR is getting more dependent on gps approaches…

which is incredibly stupid because it becomes trivial to disrupt air navigation. It’s a bit better with newer chipsets that support GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou… but I’d venture that when the military is jamming I’d does them all. I can buy a jammer that will take out GPS over about a kilometer for less than $1k. They are used all over the place by criminals in many countries, because there often aren’t standardized addresses and if your drug house can’t be located on gps in the favella, you get a lot more warning before a raid. That same transmitter with a directional antenna could knock out a 10 degree sector for 30km.

VMC prevailed at the time of the accident, although it was a dark moonless night. The flight in question only needed to maintain an altitude above the mountains until a visual to the airport was established along with their distance from the runway.

My guess based on the flight path is they had a visual on the airport but were lost and didn’t know where they were. If the gps hadn’t come back on for a minute they probably would have been fine, but it came back on and they fixated on the shiny screen instead of using their navigation skills.

Unless you want trust your life to an instrument, you fly like it might not be trustworthy. Granted, there are many instruments in an airplane we trust our lives to, but they can mostly be cross-referenced against other inputs. The trouble with gps is that it enables procedures that make that essentially impossible, and the major failure mode is not one you can carry an extra for. In aviation, situational awareness is life.

In any case the news (and ntsb report) points that they are tied, not responsibility.

Of course there have also been crashes where pilots wrongly dismissed sensor data.

In the Kegworth air disaster [1] the pilots had sensor data telling them the left-hand engine was at fault - but a previous model of the plane had a reputation for unreliability in that sensor, and the pilots shut down the right-hand engine on the basis of other evidence.

So we don't want pilots blindly trusting broken sensors - but we also don't want them to dismiss working sensors as broken.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane/accid...

If it isn’t true, then the military is partially responsible for the crash of this aircraft.

Dead reckoning (keeping track of position over time without an external source of truth) and radar altimeters are high level features that some avionics do have, but these are expensive and not expected to always be present.

Inertial navigation systems you'd find on missiles are precise enough that if you leave one running on a table in the upper floor of the building you can track the rise and fall of the building as it heats up and grows because of thermal expansion throughout the day (in other words, they are extremely precise).

So it depends.

It's still pretty useful to know where you are and not die hitting an invisible guy wire.

Certainly it's a lot less common than it used to be. There's a bigger push to find underlying causes that can be fixed, and not just say "the pilot forgot to perform a crucial step out of the several dozen crucial pre-flight items they were supposed to have committed to memory, sucks to be them" or whatever. But sometimes it really is "the pilot did a dumb and shouldn't have," especially for smaller planes with less experienced pilots.

It appears there were too many sources of confusion. GPS jamming, moonless night, busy ATC, not planning on VFR before takeoff, 20 minute short flight, instrument approach disabled, young pilots, mountains, and perhaps others.

Flight safety is about removing entropy and there were several steps which could have been taken, including not flying at all because of forced VFR on a moonless night near mountains.

However, that doesn't change the fact that the intersection that ATC are flying you towards are actually now defined as coordinates, not radials or distances from nearby VORs.

If an ATC tells you "direct OKSAW" they won't give you a VOR radial to intercept - you are expected to go straight there in a relatively straight line from your current position. There were boxes like the KNS80 that could do VOR-VOR navigation to do this kind of thing but it's not user friendly by modern standards.

Questions must be asked about how and why we got here rather appeal to submission.

> The VOR MON program is designed to enable aircraft, having lost GPS service, to revert to conventional navigation procedures. This will allow users to continue through the outage area using VOR station-to-station navigation or to proceed to a MON airport where an Instrument Landing System (ILS), Localizer (LOC) or VOR approach procedure can be flown without the necessity of GPS, Distance Measuring Equipment (DME), Automatic Direction Finder (ADF), or surveillance. Any airport with a suitable instrument approach may be used for landing, but the VOR MON assures that at least one airport will be within 100 Nautical Miles (NM).

* https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...

2011:

* https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2011/12/15/2011-31...

I'm not sure of ATC's rules, but my assumption is that they would NOT clear me for an ILS approach in this circumstance. But that's moot, I would not ask for it because it's not authorized anyway. It would be a visual approach, we'd just happen to fly the ILS course and use the GS for vertical guidance.

SRR is serviced by two instrument approaches, the ILS or LOC RWY 24 and the RNAV (GPS) RWY 24. Both instrument approach plate notes section contain the following statement: “When local altimeter setting not received, procedure NA (Not Authorized).”

IFR approach was not possible, the flight plan was unrealistic.

The only thing you need a precision altimeter setting for is to determine the safe decision altitude (point at which you need to see the runway environment to continue, else initiate a missed approach) and a fairly theoretical chance to intercept a false glideslope lobe.

With the clear weather, knowing the decision altitude with precision was not important and the false glideslope is easy to identify by comparing outside view and descent rate needed to stay on the glideslope.

Annoyingly all of these systems have VOR and DME equipment, it would be trivial to have a back up position to well within en-route navigation accuracy limits and certainly close enough to prevent this kind of accident. But regulation and certification requirements being what they are they are no one does it.

In an ideal world we'd have some kind of INS but the ring laser gyros and accelerometers required are stubbornly expensive.

Even in the absence of GPS jamming, you can effectively lose GPS for all kinds of reasons in a plane--a connector failing somewhere on the back of your panel, a wire chafing through, etc. GPS is nice, but it's probably a lot less reliable in most light aircraft than the other options.

It's been 20yr since I've flown a plane, so maybe attitudes have changed, but my instructors always stressed the importance of always being able to fall back quickly and seamlessly to a paper chart, your watch, flight computer, and basic instruments. Because you will lose everything else at some point.

Visual approach is a specific IFR procedure. It's basically designed to expedite and simplify the landing process in situations where the pilot can see the airport and traffic allows - instead of flying a detailed set of waypoints provided by an approach plate (via RNAV/GPS, ILS/VOR/DME, or vectors), the pilot and ATC both agree "hey, you can see the runway and/or traffic, you got this now" and the pilot lands.

By asking for a visual approach and getting approved, then not subsequently asking for another approach, the PIC was flying visually. There's nothing more to it. There's no nuance or gotcha here, and nothing seems procedurally incorrect or even out of the ordinary.

"Canceling" IFR just means concluding the flight plan and "closing the file;" which they were given the option to do in the air or on the ground, but it's not relevant to the approach they chose to fly.

The root cause of this incident is clearly pilot error; the pilot specifically chose to fly a visual approach without adequate visual reference and descended into terrain.

There are proximate causes too, which may or may not relate to the GPS jamming and for which more information is required. For example - did the pilot choose to request the visual approach because they didn't want to fly an RNAV approach in case GPS was inaccurate, or because they didn't want to burden ATC? or did they just choose the visual approach because they could see the airport and it's easier that way? Was this in line with any guidelines from their operator? We don't know that yet. And there's some chance that without GPS jamming, a secondary safety system (GPWS, moving map, etc.) may have saved the pilots from their decision. But these things are all secondary.

GPS NOTAM'd as unreliable on a dark, moonless night?

Fly the ILS approach (or fly a visual approach along the track of the ILS approach backing up your visual with the radio signals). That will give you terrain and obstacle clearance all along the route using locally generated navigation signals that will be entirely unaffected by GPS jamming.

https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2607/06922IL24.PDF

It's hammered into pilots that safe and legal are two different things, and you must evaluate whether the conditions are something that you can actually handle safely, not merely whether you're legal to fly in them.

(sites surfacing this information are obtaining it from actual automated observations from aircraft ADS-B broadcasts that contain GPS accuracy and positioning information, treating the entire commercial air traffic system as a GPS/GNSS observatory sensor network, which is very cool imho)

Is climate change going to make it more difficult to see outside?

What if they actually never had a visual on the runway? It was a long ways away and they were off course--what if they had a visual on what they thought was the runway but was something else entirely?

WSMR does enough GPS jamming that I'm surprised these pilots didn't have more experience with, or at least expectation of, it happening.

If he was drunk, then sure, pilot error. If he was insufficiently trained, why did he think that he had a sufficient level of training for this flight? If he had too much get-there-itis, is there anything in the training that could help prevent that? Seems there is surely potential training changes relating to GPS dependence.

Had they known they wouldn't be able to rely on GPS, all that back and forth with ATC would not be needed, and they'd already have a plan B and a plan C for navigating.

It's unfortunately all slices of swiss cheese aligned perfectly, but I'd still blame the military for poking extra holes on the GPS slice.

> At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.

> The pilots said that they wanted to fly an RNAV approach to Ruidoso. This being ruled out while GPS is jammed, the King Air pilots changed their request and asked to use an alternate form of landing system called Instrument Landing System, or ILS, that doesn’t require GPS reception. At 12:05 am, the controller assured the King Air that they would provide them with vectors to guide them “in a couple of minutes.” In the meantime, they kept flying north.

> In retrospect, tragedy might have been avoided if Albuquerque air traffic control had been able to pay closer attention to the young pilots in the King Air. But tonight they were busy. Three other aircraft also reported that they’d lost their GPS and needed help. One was struggling to get a bearing on a radio beacon.

> As they turned and descended toward Ruidoso’s lights, what the pilots couldn’t see was the 10,000-foot-high mass of the Capitan Mountains lying across their path. As they drew closer, the dark mass of rock appeared to rise up, swiping away the lights of the valley. This could have created "confusion and a loss of situational awareness,” Browne says. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble.”

Potentially low time pilots with degraded navigation aids at night (midnight) got behind the plane in an area with terrain, along with a high workload ATC not able to provide assistance more rapidly.

(disclaimer: have a private license)

How much does air pressure vary over a region, and how quickly does it change?

If GPS signal is sufficiently degraded or lost, TAWS is probably unavailable (highly dependent on what navigation system is on board). TAWS might have saved them. But needing TAWS implies loss of situational awareness.

This flight crashed in the mountains ~6 miles north of the ILS 24 approach course. At ~12 miles out on the approach course, the ILS course width is ~1 mile. A full needle deflection translates to 1/2 mile off the course. A flight is not established on the approach course with a full needle deflection. Course intercept with localizer or VOR is basic instrument work - GPS not required.

The flight requested ILS 24, later they indicated airport in sight, requested and received a clearance for a visual approach. That means pilots have full responsibility for terrain and obstruction clearance. The visual approach requirement is to maintain contact with with airport.

It seems to me they went off course, by a lot, for reasons I'm not clear on, and then descended prematurely into hostile terrain at night, which is likely why they lost visual contact with the airport. The terrain blocked their view and by the time they realized they were descending into hostile terrain they crashed.

If that's what happened, GPS signal loss is perhaps an instigating source of distraction and confusion but I do not see how it's a primary factor. If the signal becomes degraded, navigation should indicate it (auditory and visual) and that source is ignored entirely. Falling back to ground based navigation should be familiar, it doesn't need to be as precise as GPS, the instrument approach procedure has terrain clearance baked into it.

Best practice is to follow the instrument approach procedure to the final approach fix, then do the visual approach - especially at night which many have argued constitutes instrument flight conditions - mountains will be invisible. Pitch black on black.

Yes, the change we are undergoing and that the current administration seems to be doing their best to accelerate includes an increase in heavy precipitation across north america.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect applies everywhere, but in my experience it is hyper-amplified on HN because of the fact that tech/software people (and I say this as someone who has been coding since the 1980s) are much more convinced than the average person that they are experts in complex topics that they don't have much actual experience on.

A crash is usually the end result of several previous bad decisions.

I would 100% (and have) take center's altimeter setting and fly the track of an ILS or localizer rather than "whelp, nothing can be done..." This was VMC; you don't need a local altimeter setting to be safe using the radio navaids; you would need it to legally fly the approach as an ILS approach.

The only correct conclusion here is more investigation is necessary than what has been publicly published.

This week I witnessed a similarly illogical argument between someone who thought they could argue about AI in movies and someone who actually works in the movie industry and has years of experience. The hacker was lecturing the movie person about why they were wrong about the future of the movie industry, with zero experience to back it up other than "I dabble in AI and watched some movies".

Relying on a tower in instrument conditions because GPS failed is unacceptable, because every other GPS user is in the same boat.

If you’re flying IFR, you should have a working set of instruments and be using them. Why didn’t these pilots have their VORs tuned in for positioning?

medevac flight - there was probably some urgency.

Then what are you supposed to do when your GPS craps out on approach in low visibility and heavy weather?

Obviously the answer is "fly the airplane". Which means you look at your artificial horizon, set trim and power for max climb, get to a safe altitude and figure it out.

If you're paying attention you already have your chart folded to the airport you're landing at, so it shouldn't be too hard to orient yourself and figure out what's next. Either you'll be making another attempt at this airport without GPS or you'll be going somewhere else.

There's never an excuse for failing to fly the airplane. That's basic airmanship. You need to be able to do it regardless of whether your GPS is working.

https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...

> The flight crew again reported they “[have] a visual on Ruidoso” at 0008:30 and that they could “go visual.” The ARTCC controller subsequently cleared the flight to SRR, cleared the flight for a visual approach, and informed them they could cancel IFR in the air above 9,000 ft msl or they could cancel their clearance via the flight service station after landing.

So you’re pointing out that they requested VFR, got clearance for it but still were flying under IFR rules? Basically the transition to VFR hadn’t completed fully?

There might be one person who's in the right place at the right time with the right understanding to second the nuanced professional take. There's a hundred idiots ready to agree with the simple BS that fits their priors all the time.

And of course, thanks to the vote based crap the peddlers of the latter will have their monkey brain trained to phrase their commentary to be appealing to the available pool of idiots. That's why you so often see crap surface level takes wrapped up with the sort of partisan language that gets the warmest response around here (and on every other platform too).

And I am happy to be corrected but as I understand it, in the rural west more medical transport than you might think is by air. Distances are large, and population is sparse. You can cover more area with the same number of medics using a few airplanes instead of ground ambulances. So not all air ambulance service is critically urgent, unlike what we are used to in more populated areas.

WAAS GPS (~7.6M accuracy) is reliable enough for IFR on its own that many approaches have removed legacy RF ILS equipment for instrument approaches (RNAV LPV with synthetic glidescope from GNSS). I would agree this does not apply to the vast majority of general aviation (although certified receivers supporting this are well within the reach of GA at ~$6k), but facts and specifics are important, so enumerating that GPS and these trimmings make it designed to replace traditional IFR equipment under certain circumstances. WAAS is not a paid service, the additional precision is free if your receiver and autopilot supports it.

Further reading:

https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2025/october/pi... ("Today most IFR pilots use GPS as a primary source of navigation, whether they’re flying a departure, airway, or arrival defined by VORs; or segments of approaches based on navaids or that require DME or ADF.") [My note: This is straight from the advocacy group for general aviation in the US, AOPA.]

https://www.flyingmag.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-...

https://boltflight.com/loc-vs-ils-vs-gps-approach-understand...

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System

> "The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) is an air navigation aid developed by the Federal Aviation Administration to augment the Global Positioning System (GPS), with the goal of improving its accuracy, integrity, and availability. Essentially, WAAS is intended to enable aircraft to rely on GPS for all phases of flight, including approaches with vertical guidance to any airport within its coverage area. It may be further enhanced with the local-area augmentation system (LAAS) also known by the preferred ICAO term ground-based augmentation system (GBAS) in critical areas."

> In 2007, WAAS vertical guidance was projected to be available nearly all the time (greater than 99%), and its coverage encompasses the full continental U.S., most of Alaska, northern Mexico, and southern Canada. At that time, the accuracy of WAAS would meet or exceed the requirements for Category 1 ILS approaches, namely, three-dimensional position information down to 200 feet (60 m) above touchdown zone elevation.

Category II or III ILS GPS approaches are supported when the subject airport has a local reference station reporting corrections ("LAAS"). With enough precision, the aircraft can land itself with GPS and local corrections ("Autoland"). A King Air running Garmin's SafeReturn recently performed this autonomously with GPS alone (to the best of my knowledge).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-area_augmentation_system

https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/non_federal/g...

Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346214 - December 2025 (185 comments)

Event ATC recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Nl3LOZNjc

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ruFmgTpqA

https://www.airresearch.com/Pilots/AIM-08/Chap6/aim0602.html

> a. Radar equipped ATC facilities can provide radar assistance and navigation service (vectors) to VFR aircraft in difficulty when the pilot can talk with the controller, and the aircraft is within radar coverage. Pilots should clearly understand that authorization to proceed in accordance with such radar navigational assistance does not constitute authorization for the pilot to violate CFRs. In effect, assistance is provided on the basis that navigational guidance information is advisory in nature, and the responsibility for flying the aircraft safely remains with the pilot.

Potentially tangentially related to an overloaded and understaffed US ATC network, similar to the overloaded controller that led to the LaGuardia runway incursion on March 22, 2026.

https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/crj-collid... ("What’s the bet that the controller had been overworked and the cab was understaffed? Seems to be an incredibly common thread lately.")

American aviation is near collapse? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47494469 - March 2026 (106 comments)

LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503965 - March 2026 (310 comments)

Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47486386 - March 2026 (667 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47494936 (my comment with citations on this thesis)

(my flavor of autism includes aggressive pattern matching)

(General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel, tracking at roughly 1.0 to 1.1 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours. Statistically, GA's per-hour fatality rate is about 14 times higher than driving a car, carrying a risk profile comparable to riding a motorcycle)

Edit: My hot take is more communication and training needs to go into "As the pilot, you should be prepared to lose GPS at any time at critical moments in the flight lifecycle." Are we letting folks fly in potentially adverse conditions leaning too heavily on GPS leading to potentially avoidable accidents? I don't know, the NTSB is likely better informed to say so or not. If I was a flight instructor, I'd probably include loss of GPS during instrument approach at night and/or in weather as an experience to cover.

When they accepted the visual approach, they took responsibility for navigation and terrain/obstacle clearance.

Also someone is correctly pointing out to me downthread that a visual approach is technically an IFR procedure under IFR not VFR flight rules (the latter basically meaning you aren't using instruments at all). I'm assuming IFR in the summary is referring to the non-visual approach (rnav or ILS) but the preliminary report is I suppose ambiguous as to that.

This gave me a smile. I've never heard of pattern matching being described as aggressive.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av...

Since I've been paying attention from the peanut gallery, watching Blancolirio videos, etc. I would never fly on a small private plane. Seems like once a week there is a crash of a small GA craft somewhere, often with fatalities, due to loss of control (i.e. nothing wrong with the aircraft). Pilots seem to become overconfident or complacent, make bad decisions instead of "gettimg out the credit card and booking a hotel" as Juan likes to say -- if you can afford to fly your own plane you can afford a night at a hotel. They can't handle loss of visual flight conditions. They don't recognize when they need to ignore their inner ear and trust the instruments. They can't recover from stalls or upsets (and actual practice isn't required, because that too caused a lot of crashes). Worse, they often take family and friends with them.

There's a reason a lot of life insurance policies specifically carve out private aircraft operation or travel as an exception to coverage.

I don't fly anymore, but I see similar behaviors developing on the water. People who use chartplotters for navigation don't have a very good understanding of what's going on around them. If you're just interactively following a computed lay line or a plotted course you don't really need to know what the currents are doing. You don't need to know what the hazards are. You're not actively engaged in navigating the boat.

Fixed wing, maybe, I'm not familiar, but around here, I know most of the pilots for the two HEMS agencies (I used to be a paramedic). HEMS is considered the most lucrative of the post-military pilot careers for rotary. You fly high end machines, in all sorts of scenarios, and see all manner of things.

And as it is, often times fixed-wing EMS doesn't actually fly that often. Long range transport that can't go ground (and providers and insurers will go to some lengths, depending on the patient - one employer of mine was contracted for a ground transport from Seattle to Las Vegas).

I was pretty confident barring some catastrophic mechanical failure I could probably get it on the ground or into the water (or trees) in one piece. The big question remains though: what now? If you're knocked unconscious (likely--lap belt, big flat instrument panel at face height) then two things can happen:

(1) if in the water, you drown before you can get out.

(2) if you're on land, the fuel tank right underneath that instrument panel or the ones up in the wings might torch you before you can get out.

It's probably about right to compare the risk profile to motorcycle riding.

Garmin Is Automating In-Flight Emergencies (Autoland, Smart Glide, ESP) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996106 - July 2026 (0 comments)

The accountability problem exposed by the first Garmin Autoland deployment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793561 - January 2026 (0 comments)

Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346214 - December 2025 (185 comments)

(Garman SafeReturn is reliant on GPS though, so unsure how it would handle loss of GPS during autonomous operations, I presume silicon photonics for precision dead reckoning as a backup nav input are the future, or perhaps relying on jam-resistant GPS services and/or multiple GNSS providers simultaneously)

I'd say it's probably not, many motorcycle riders deliberately choose a motorcycle because it's "fun", meaning they go around speeding on purpose, so the crash stats are very negatively skewed by those deliberately behaving recklessly, just how driving crash stats are skewed by people driving under the influence.

That's a bit of a different approach than to flying a plane, and yet GA is super dangerous. That's because unlike motorcycling, flying is inherently unsafe, there's no "just stop" option if you have an issue. The default is crashing. The only reason commercial aviation is so safe is the incredible effort that's been put into engineering safety systems at thousands of layers, from mechanical to human factors, but hardly any of that applies to GA.

So IMO, if you ride as responsibly as you fly, riding should be way safer.

Stalls, on the other hand are part of standard instruction. Recognizing the beginning of a stall early and preventing it will prevent the spin.

Spin recovery is no longer required to be instructed (and was not previously required to be demonstrated during the practical test either [as many aircraft are placarded as "intentional spins prohibited"]).

CFR for the instruction requirements: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...

Airman Certification (Practical Test) Standards: https://www.faa.gov/training_testing/testing/acs/private_air...

But I also wouldn't want anything to do with the new glass cockpit stuff, way too easy to just lose all your instruments at once. I'll take properly maintained, independent mechanical or electromechanical systems over digital ones every time for things that actually need to work.

Digital systems always seem to accumulate tons of complexity ("features") rendering them extremely brittle. Until we can figure out how to stop doing that, I prefer to avoid depending too heavily on them for important stuff.

The Cirrus parachute system seems pretty simple and trustworthy, that approach feels more directionally correct. Not much more complex than an automotive airbag.

In some sense it felt safer than the 172 because I could fly a higher, tighter pattern. It was easier to lose a bunch of altitude on final by putting it sideways in an aggressive slip. The 172's small rudder didn't let it get as sideways, so it was a little more constrained. The 172 did have functioning instruments and dual radios, not just a handheld. It also had flaps. I think it was probably 10-15yr newer? Still a relatively "old" airframe. I probably had 5x or more as many hours in the Clipper so all that could just be biased towards familiarity.

Point being, old plane does not mean unsafe plane. It's not like you're riding around in some rusted out hooptie in the sky. There are rigorous mandatory inspections and maintenance schedules for every single component, which results in mechanical failures being really rare even in aircraft that are nearly 100 years old.

None of that obviates the need to know what you're doing, of course. The pilot in command needs to have control of the plane. I'm pretty skeptical of systems that kind of try to smooth over that sharp edge, I can understand the altruistic motivation behind it, but there's likely a side effect of reducing the perceived risk. That's a problem, because it makes people complacent. So in terms of overall safety, it might not be a win? You're trading on average higher complacency and lower situational awareness for maybe some better outcomes in rare situations? Probably not the best trade.