^that's a really good article for local news!
But GPS shouldn't have caused this.
If you are on the notams, WSMR does this frequently. I'm not a pilot but I receive those and I'm well outside the area.
What I don't understand is why an aircraft on VFR with runway in sight does a CFIT d/t GPS spoofing/jamming? GPS issues do not adequately explain CFIT in these circumstance. There are folks asking about a 600ft delta between the WSG84 (GPS) and baro altitudes, but that is not a strange difference necessarily attributable to the WSMR activities. I watched one of our medevac helos with that delta yesterday and they managed to not CFIT during VFR (daylight) mountain flying.
These pilots would be flying on the baro alt on VFR to my understanding, so one asks, did he calibrate the baro alt? TRACON should see both ADSB (which has baro alt and gps alt) and primary return so ATC should have seen the low alt as the aircraft was almost 1000ft below the ridge. But ATC doesn't have responsibility for terrain clearance once the aircraft declared VFR airport in sight.
The pilots should have known there was a ridge at 10,200ft on that approach. That ridge didn't spring out of nowhere. After they went VFR and said they would soon cancel IFR 24, they descended. They were at
9300ft at 14mi from runway 24 at RUI which would have suggested a minimum altitude to maintain of 11,000ft for
the ILS/VOR approach and 10,700ft minimum if doing a RNAV GPS approach (which, why if you know GPS is unreliable?). Being VFR doesn't mean you don't pay attention to your charts on a moonless night. Waiting for a ridge to eclipse the runway lights is a deadly way to discover terrain.
The chart shows they were below minimums over 25mi out (12 miles and 3.5 minutes before impact) and below the ridge height 21mi out. Again, GPS issues does not scramble the baro altimeter. They were VFR airport in sight and they were descending until almost the point of impact. ~45s before impact they realized they were too low and climbed 500+ft, but not nearly enough:
NTSB Preliminary
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 King Air 90 was being flown as a 2 pilot aircraft. CFIT by definition is loss of situational awareness, usually due to pilot error, workload/CRM issue, or spatial disorientation. All speculation is wild, was this pilot error/CRM failure, ATC issue, GPS issue, mechanical, weather, or something else?
What it is for sure: a tragedy. RIP to the two pilots and two flight nurses
www.kob.com
