US Military testing sowing chaos in civilian skies

Almost every day , the military tests various emerging technologies across the U.S ., including drone and counter-drone systems and GPS jamming.

To a certain extent, this testing is inevitable. But, as experts told RS, the government has in many cases not ensured that the proper safeguards and necessary interagency coordination are in place to make sure such tests can be conducted safely. These testing issues strain civilian airspaces — increasingly disrupting aircraft and even sometimes leading to accidents.

Drone and counter-drone mayhem

In particular, the military’s domestic testing and use of drone- and counter-drone technologies have precipitated several recent high-profile mishaps.

Last March, the Navy and Secret Service tested counter-drone technologies at a military base near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA). As a result, several flight crews received faulty alerts warning of possible collisions with nearby aircraft.

In 2020, an MQ-9 reaper drone crashed during testing at the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, which shares its flight line with Syracuse Hancock International Airport. Military officials did not tell the public about the incident, which caused over $6 million in damages, until more than a year later.

Interagency disagreements and coordination issues over the tech’s use in U.S. airspaces have only caused more problems.

Back in February, the military lent a counter-drone laser to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP subsequently used it, without coordinating with other agencies, to target what it thought were Mexican cartel drones. Instead, it hit party balloons.

The incident prompted the FAA — which had concerns about the laser’s possible effects on civilian aircraft — to temporarily close the surrounding airspace. The agency did so without notifying other agencies in advance, causing confusion amid fears that the U.S. could intervene militarily in Mexico.

Later in February, the military shot down a CBP drone with a laser-based anti-drone system after mistaking it for a cartel drone — again prompting the FAA to close airspace around El Paso.

The FAA and Pentagon formally agreed in April that the laser system's safety controls work and “do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft.”

But broader tensions over the testing and use of these technologies in civilian airspaces persist.

The FAA’s departing deputy administrator, Chris Rocheleau, said at a drone leadership conference late last month the agency is being "nudged" to accept “more risk” regarding uncrewed drones. FAA officials told Politico last week that the Pentagon's decisions about aviation often prevail over the FAA's safety concerns in practice.

Following the repeated airspace closures in Texas, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) called for an investigation into “potential serious and alarming problems and deficiencies” with interagency coordination and oversight over counter-drone systems.

“As we saw with the DCA Midair Collision, failures in interagency planning create an unacceptably dangerous situation where it’s no longer a matter of if but rather when the next catastrophic accident occurs that will claim American lives,” Duckworth wrote , referencing a collision between a commercial flight and an Army helicopter near the DCA airport in January of last year.

As Dana Goward, founder and president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, tells RS, warns RS, it’s “not clear” the U.S. is prepared for drone and counter-drone operations in its airspace.

He questioned whether officials consistently know where and how such systems are used, and whether they have adequate safeguards to manage them safely and efficiently.

“My sense is that while those things are being worked on, they're not in place right now,” Goward said. That “should be a concern.”

Aircraft 'couldn't navigate safely' near White Sands

The U.S. military has also been testing GPS jamming across the continental U.S., especially in the American Southwest. While it has worked to notify pilots of its efforts, testing often stands to interfere with civilian aviation in practice.

A notable example is a recent accident back in May in New Mexico, where a small medical plane lost its GPS signal due to military jamming testing in the White Sands region. Attempting to land with older navigation methods, the plane became disoriented and crashed into a mountain.

Under investigation , the crash is the first known case where military jamming testing can be directly linked with a civilian plane crash in the U.S. But many other episodes could have come close.In 2021, engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum revealed internal Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records showing that 233 GPS interference incidents took place in the southwestern U.S., where military testing is especially frequent, during 2017 and the early months of 2018.

In those cases, testing repeatedly led commercial, civilian and medical aircraft to lose their navigation capabilities, drift off course, and sometimes enter restricted airspaces. Pilots declared emergencies in five of the incidents.

“The GPS jamming at White Sands was effecting [sic] the safety of flight of the aircraft to the point to where they couldn’t navigate safely,” an air traffic controller anonymously wrote to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System in 2021. They added that the military often refuses to stop testing when asked to do so by pilots nearby.

The military issues Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) before it tests electronic warfare technologies like jamming, spoofing, and anti-jamming and -spoofing capabilities, which can all disrupt aircraft navigation systems.

But these NOTAMs often cover regions spanning thousands of square miles and cannot predict exactly where or when interference will occur. Pilots receive large numbers of NOTAMs with little relevance to their flights and can often fly through NOTAM-affected areas without experiencing interference. Such circumstances mean many pilots overlook or otherwise miss important warnings.

In any case, the air traffic controllers assisting the troubled medical plane crew in New Mexico helped three other aircraft without GPS signal on the same evening — despite a NOTAM having warned pilots of possible interference beforehand.

Pilots are required to know how to use older navigation aids in case they lose access to GPS mid-flight. But, as Goward tells RS, GPS has become central to how pilots navigate in practice.

GPS “is something that they've grown up with, and trained with, and used for decades,” Goward said. “When that system is no longer available [due to interference], the workload increases, distractions increase, and safety margins decrease.” (In aviation, safety margins refer to the buffers crews maintain to manage unexpected events, including having additional time and fuel, and maintaining greater distances from other aircraft.)

“You end up with a higher likelihood that something bad is going to happen,” Goward said.

As Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, tells RS, “there is no question that testing increases aviation risk in the short term.”

“But not doing the testing would increase aviation risk in the long term,” he warned. “We need to test anti-jam and anti-spoof technologies if we hope to put them on planes in the years to come.”