I have absolutely no love for the US Army under its current Secretary of "war", but here the problem was with the air ambulance pilot(s). Sorry to blame people who died, who do important service for remote places under hard time constraints, but there has been fundamental errors on their side:
https://bsky.app/profile/mikeblack114.bsky.social/post/3mrux...
I find it a bit shocking they'd be caught by surprise by a planned GPS outage. The exercise happened as intended, and all aircraft in the affected areas should have received warnings BEFORE they even took off. These are not drug smugglers - they filed a flight plan before leaving the ground.
The automated weather service was also out. This made it difficult or impossible to use the ILS because they can't set the local altimeter. This was a swiss cheese chain of events. It was a moonless dark night so the mountains weren't visible.
What is the normal fallback for local weather service failure? Divert to an airport with working service? Proceed, using the "nearest working" information?
How much does air pressure vary over a region, and how quickly does it change?
I think it would be "fly vfr" but the main issue there is the wind direction, not the altimeter setting. In daytime you can read the wind sock while airborne but not possible at night.
Would they take off if they knew GPS would be jammed midway through the flight?
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.
> Would they take off if
medevac flight - there was probably some urgency.
Maybe. Urgency should not trump safety. A delay in transport is not worse than a dead patient, dead medics and flight crew, and loss of an aircraft.
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.
The losses were higher than if they hadn’t flown that night. But, then, they didn’t know GPS would be down when they were midway through the flight.
They certainly should have known. The information about GPS jamming appeared as a NOTAM in their Foreflight (electronic flight bag application) briefing, which 14 CFR § 91.103 requires them to review before the flight.
We can't be sure whether or not they read the briefing, but the NTSB preliminary makes clear that they at least downloaded it to their EFB app.
We also know that of they wanted GPS on until they landed they could have got it.
https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM This was discussed during the initial reporting. While the GPS jamming is an important technical issue, the broader lesson may be pilot preparedness for degraded-navigation scenarios. This accident also highlights the ongoing debate over whether accumulating flight hours is adequately complemented by realistic defensive training for GPS-denied and other abnormal operations.
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.
I too take random's words on socials over the NTSB. /s
In any case the news (and ntsb report) points that they are tied, not responsibility.
They are not in a disagreement. From the report:
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.
Trust in governmental institutions is at an all time low.
Questions must be asked about how and why we got here rather appeal to submission.
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The quotes are appropriate because only Congress, not executive action, can change the official name.
Congress has, through inaction, approved this
Not really. The official name is still Dept of Defense. The executive order applies a “also known as” because the POTUS cannot change the name. There’s nothing for congress to do because the name has not officially changed. The next POTUS can simply remove this order and it’s back to DoD.
It's very relevant because it otherwise would have been plausible that they were blaming the pilot to unfairly divert blame away from an entity they had a bias for.
You care enough to comment about it and ask them not to do it again because of, not only your feelings, but others too.
I care about keeping the discourse free from these virtue-signalling disclaimers, not about whatever you think you need to signal about. I consider it irrelevant whether you like or dislike this or that politician in this context and would prefer not to have such likes or dislikes interspersed between statements of fact. Let the facts speak for themselves and let polarising statements about politics and politicians be limited to discussions which actually concern such politics and politicians. That used to be how we discussed back in the day and it can be how we discuss in the future.