Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

新墨西哥州民用飞机坠毁事件与军方GPS干扰有关

This past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69 degrees; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most.

今年5月，一架双引擎比奇空中国王（Beechcraft King Air）医疗救援飞机从新墨西哥州罗斯威尔起飞，向西前往鲁伊多索镇接载一名病人。对于机上的两名飞行员和两名护士来说，这本不该是一次充满挑战的飞行。当时气温为69华氏度（约20.5摄氏度），天空晴朗。这段60英里的航程通常最多只需半小时。

But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

然而，飞机起飞后便遇到了麻烦。当晚，美国军方人员正在白沙导弹靶场进行GPS干扰演习，导致这架空中国王飞机的飞行员——以及方圆数百英里内的所有人——无法使用现代导航系统。被迫改用他们极少甚至从未使用的旧技术后，医疗救援飞行员迷失了方向，最终撞向山腰。机上无人生还。

The accident marked the first time that GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. But it was just one of a string of recent disruptions across the world. The skies are more contested than ever, whether it’s civilian drones wandering out of the approved zone or US agencies getting their signals crossed, as happened earlier this year when New Mexico and Texas scared the public by temporarily closing their airspace. (It turned out that US Customs and Border Patrol were using anti-drone lasers in that area.)

这起事故是美国首次有民用飞机因GPS干扰而坠毁。但这只是近期全球一系列干扰事件中的一起。如今的领空比以往任何时候都更具争议性，无论是民用无人机飞出批准区域，还是美国政府机构信号冲突——正如今年早些时候，新墨西哥州和德克萨斯州因临时关闭领空而引发公众恐慌（事后查明是美国海关及边境保卫局在该地区使用了反无人机激光设备）。

The GPS jamming exercise that led to this latest crash is not a singular event. In the past year, the US military appeared to have sent out notices for at least 10 such exercises. “As drone warfare and electronic warfare expand, airlines are increasingly encountering navigation disruptions hundreds of miles beyond the actual conflict zone,” says Eliran Almog, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Cyviation.

导致此次坠机事件的GPS干扰演习并非孤例。在过去一年中，美国军方似乎至少发布了10次此类演习的通知。网络安全公司Cyviation的首席执行官埃利兰·阿尔莫格（Eliran Almog）表示：“随着无人机战争和电子战的扩大，航空公司越来越多地在距离实际冲突区数百英里外的地方遭遇导航中断。”

It’s worth taking a closer look at what happened last May. While the Ruidoso crash was the first fatal accident in the US known to be linked to electronic warfare, there’s no reason to think it will be the last.

值得深入研究去年5月发生的事情。虽然鲁伊多索坠机事件是美国首起已知与电子战有关的致命事故，但没有理由认为这会是最后一起。

Even absent GPS jamming, medevac is one of the most dangerous categories of civil aviation. (Kreindler, a law firm specializing in air crash litigation, says that medevac flights have an accident rate more similar to combat flying than to civil aviation.) Flights are often organized on short notice, and they fly into airstrips that might be unfamiliar to the flight crew, and because human lives are at stake, there is an incentive to fly when weather conditions are marginal.

即使没有GPS干扰，医疗救援飞行也是民用航空中最危险的类别之一。（专门从事空难诉讼的律师事务所Kreindler表示，医疗救援飞行的事故率更接近于战斗飞行，而非民用航空。）此类飞行通常在短时间内组织，且经常飞往机组人员可能不熟悉的简易机场。由于人命关天，即使在天气条件恶劣的情况下，飞行员也有动力强行起飞。

Some of those factors were at play on the night of May 13. At 11 pm, the crew was notified that they had to fly to Ruidoso to pick up a patient and bring them to Albuquerque. The pilots were captain Keelan Clark, aged 30, and first officer Ali Kawsara, aged 23. Clark had gotten his commercial pilot’s license just a year and a half before; he’d been promoted from first officer to captain the previous month. Kawsara had just two months on the job. He’d only worked cargo jobs before this one.

5月13日晚，其中一些因素发挥了作用。晚上11点，机组人员接到通知，必须飞往鲁伊多索接一名病人并将其送往阿尔伯克基。飞行员是30岁的机长基兰·克拉克（Keelan Clark）和23岁的副驾驶阿里·考萨拉（Ali Kawsara）。克拉克获得商业飞行员执照仅一年半，上个月刚从副驾驶晋升为机长。考萨拉入职仅两个月，此前只从事过货运飞行工作。

Both men had demonstrated proficiency flying in low-visibility conditions using what’s called instrument flight rules, or IFR. There are two basic ways to navigate in bad weather. Modern cockpits are equipped with GPS-enabled equipment that shows where the plane is on a computer screen and portrays a magenta-colored line that shows pilots where they need to go. This is called RNAV flying; an “RNAV approach” brings planes all the way to the threshold of a runway for landing in low-visibility conditions.

两人都曾证明过自己在低能见度条件下使用仪表飞行规则（IFR）飞行的熟练程度。在恶劣天气下导航有两种基本方式。现代驾驶舱配备了GPS设备，可以在电脑屏幕上显示飞机位置，并用一条洋红色的线条标出飞行路径。这被称为RNAV飞行；“RNAV进场”可以让飞机在低能见度条件下一直引导至跑道入口进行着陆。

This method of flying is much easier than the previous iteration. Before GPS became widely available in the 2000s, airliners navigated using a combination of magnetic compasses, ground-based radio beacons, and inertial systems derived from old-fashioned gyroscopes. Flying by radio beacons requires pilots to form a 3D mental map of their location relative to the beacons. They have to practice until they become so efficient that they can stay calm under pressure, lest they panic, lose their situational awareness, and spiral out of control. “Just ask Kennedy,” says Kenneth Krentsa, a retired airline pilot, referring to JFK Jr.’s 1999 nighttime crash.

这种飞行方式比以前的方法容易得多。在2000年代GPS普及之前，客机主要依靠磁罗盘、地面无线电信标以及源自老式陀螺仪的惯性系统进行导航。依靠无线电信标飞行要求飞行员在脑海中构建出相对于信标的3D地图。他们必须经过反复练习，直到能够熟练掌握，在压力下保持冷静，以免惊慌失措、失去态势感知并陷入失控。“问问肯尼迪就知道了，”退休民航飞行员肯尼斯·克伦萨（Kenneth Krentsa）说道，他指的是小约翰·肯尼迪1999年的夜间坠机事故。

Clark and Kawsara took off at eight minutes to midnight and initially headed due west, toward Ruidoso. The weather was clear, but because the night was nearly moonless and the area is rural, the only visual references available were the lights of scattered settlements. “It’s a black hole out there,” says Juan Browne, an airline pilot who hosts a crash-investigation podcast.

克拉克和考萨拉在午夜前八分钟起飞，最初向正西方向飞往鲁伊多索。当时天气晴朗，但由于当晚几乎没有月光，且该地区地处偏远，唯一的视觉参考只有零星的定居点灯光。“那里就像一个黑洞，”主持空难调查播客的民航飞行员胡安·布朗（Juan Browne）说。

Unable to orient themselves without visual cues, the pilots called up Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center—Albuquerque Center, for short—and requested permission to fly instruments-only to Ruidoso. The request was approved.

由于缺乏视觉线索无法辨别方向，飞行员呼叫了阿尔伯克基航路交通管制中心（简称阿尔伯克基中心），请求获准仅依靠仪表飞行前往鲁伊多索。该请求获得批准。

Under normal circumstances, the flight that followed would have been uneventful. The pilots would have followed the magenta line, and the GPS navigation equipment would have lined them up for a smooth landing.

在正常情况下，随后的飞行本应平安无事。飞行员会沿着那条洋红色线条飞行，GPS导航设备会引导他们平稳着陆。

But 100 miles to the west, an Air Force Unit called the 746th Test Squadron of the 704th Test Group was holding its annual NAVFEST event at the White Sands Missile Range. The event draws together electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of exercises, in which units test different technologies for disrupting GPS and dealing with adversaries’ disruption.

但在西边100英里处，隶属于第704测试大队的空军第746测试中队正在白沙导弹靶场举行年度NAVFEST演习。该活动汇集了来自各军种的电子战部队，进行为期两周的演习，测试各种干扰GPS以及应对敌方干扰的技术。

The event is held at White Sands because it’s among the most remote and sparsely settled areas of the continental United States. (Not coincidentally, the first atomic bomb was detonated there.) But in the run-up to NAVFEST, the Federal Aviation Administration warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18.

该活动之所以在白沙举行，是因为它是美国本土最偏远、人口最稀少的地区之一。（并非巧合的是，第一颗原子弹也是在那里引爆的。）但在NAVFEST开始前，美国联邦航空管理局（FAA）曾警告飞机运营商，5月12日至5月18日期间，方圆400英里内的GPS信号可能会受到影响。

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…

5月14日午夜，在克拉克和考萨拉从罗斯威尔起飞八分钟后，他们告诉阿尔伯克基中心，他们的GPS信号丢失了。由于无法自行导航，他们请求管制员提供航向——即飞行的磁方位。管制员给了他们一个航向……