Highly dependent on weather and the complexity of the approach. Clear skies and VFR? I would agree. Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho.

> 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)

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justinhj 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They deferred navigation to ATC instead of using their own capabilities such as VOR.

	▲	toomuchtodo 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They requested navigation assistance ATC could not promptly provide. I strongly agree the pilot in command could've done better, but if ATC was overloaded, they should've promptly communicated that to manage expectations that immediate help was not forthcoming. An aircraft covers a lot of ground "in a couple of minutes." (assuming ~120-200 knots) 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)

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27183 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> Heavy weather and an instrument approach or confounding factors? Not accurate imho.

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.

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toomuchtodo 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's very easy to write this comment when you're not the one getting behind the plane in the middle of the night with multiple simultaneous challenges (speaking from experience; I can feel the anxiety writing this comment from similar "white knuckle" experience), and I agree, keep flying the plane. Systems fail, that is the point of investigating incidents to improve systems. Humans are always the weakest link. I agree that an experienced pilot should be able to safely land on an approach assuming a loss of GPS.

(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.

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SoftTalker 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel

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 "imstead 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.

	▲	27183 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		When I was training 20yr ago we practiced stalls, spin recovery, simulated random engine-out scenarios.. do they not do that anymore? 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.

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27183 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been in this situation too. But I was trained for it and had a mental checklist to follow. I never had a GPS, though. It seems from the details of the article, which you rightly highlighted, that the pilots were using their GPS as a crutch and had no ability to fall back on basic dead reckoning. It seems they didn't know where they were. That's pretty inexcusable, like embarrassing even.

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.