> Warrant Officer Eaves stated that it was at 300 feet and descending to 200 feet — necessary because the maximum height for its route closer to the airport had dropped to 200 feet. But even as it reached that juncture, Warrant Officer Eaves evidently felt obligated to repeat his instruction: The Black Hawk was at 300 feet, he said, and needed to descend
> Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.
> He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank. Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet. She did not turn left.
As much as the article tries to balance it out that the controllers should have done more it seems that ultimately the pilot flying was distracted and not following instructions from the instructor sitting next to them. It happened at least twice based on the captured recordings.
Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation? Otherwise they seemed qualified and flew that route a few times already.
mbrameld · 1h ago
> As much as the article tries to balance it out that the controllers should have done more it seems that ultimately the pilot flying was distracted and not following instructions from the instructor sitting next to them. It happened at least twice based on the captured recordings.
I'm a helicopter flight instructor, although I've never flown in the military. There are 5 magic words the instructor can, and I would argue is obligated to, use to fix the situation: "I have the flight controls"
Knowing they were 100 feet high and flying into the approach corridor with an aircraft on short final and not taking the controls is an enormous failure on the part of the instructor. The student was likely task-saturated and the instructor should have recognized that.
rconti · 46m ago
I was also struck by
| He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank.
Now, I'd love to _hear_ the actual comment/instruction here. He may have been hedging because he was trying to piece together the stepped on "pass behind" direction from ATC. But I also wonder if it's an inherent problem when the student outranks the instructor?
aaronbaugher · 39m ago
Seems like a lot of people have never had to deal with a higher-ranked person who might ruin the underling's career if shown up in a particularly embarrassing way. It's easy to imagine that prospect causing the instructor to hesitate just enough for disaster.
alistairSH · 8h ago
Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation? Otherwise they seemed qualified and flew that route a few times already.
Beyond her general lack of flight-time? Her primary role appeared to be some sort of liaison in DC, not flying Blackhawks.
rhcom2 · 4h ago
450 hours over 5 years for a Army helicopter pilot stateside doesn't seem to be abnormally low.
alistairSH · 3h ago
That's only 90 hours/year. Not even 2 hours/week.
That may be common for an Army pilot, but for somebody expected to fly during wartime, transport VIPs under stressful conditions, etc that's pretty goddam minimal.
sjs382 · 2h ago
Is that based on something other than vibes?
From what I can tell, that's the low end of average, but that's based on 5ish mins of fact-checking.
alistairSH · 2h ago
Vibes, I guess... 2 hours/week feels inadequate to maintain proficiency in a highly technical, high-stress role.
sjs382 · 1h ago
Seems that for a FAC 1, UH-60, 48 hours is required semiannually (every 6 months) and 12hr of sim can be applied to meet those flight time minimums. For FAC 2, it's 30 over 6 months, also allowing 12 hrs of that as sim time.
This is one of those situations where common intuition doesn't match reality. I've similarly been wrong in the past where my intuition was off wrt/ to hours on industrial equipment compared to their expected life.
mmooss · 1h ago
> Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation?
Why do you focus on that and not many other possibilities for distraction - cognitive overload, lack of sleep, an injury, other distractions in the cockpit, etc.
pj_mukh · 5h ago
I mean maybe instead of patholigizing to that level we maybe need to accept that there is a temporal normal distribution to human attention spans and design our systems around it.
It feels like semi-autonomous ATC and flight controls were possible as of 5 years ago. Has FAA even started writing initial reports on this?
rdtsc · 4h ago
> semi-autonomous ATC
Yeah, that one has been around as long as there have been computers. It's sort of like the flying car of the ATC world - it's always 5 years away.
> temporal normal distribution to human attention spans
Tn this case we had both the ATC and the instructor tell the pilot to do something different and they didn't listen. Not sure if that's an attention span issue, it may be, but it's not clear it's definitely what it is.
pj_mukh · 4h ago
AFAICT the technologies been around for a while (esp assistance). It's the regulation and the minefield of a roll-out plan that the FAA would rather not take on. Nobody gets fired for doing nothing and continuing to play whack-a-mole with human frailties.
IncreasePosts · 1h ago
It seems like both the pilot and instructor misidentified the plane they were supposed to be separated from, otherwise the instructor would have taken the controls and performed the maneuver himself if he knew a collision was imminent.
Maybe visual flight separation is a bad idea when there are a bunch of lights from the ground and a busy airspace. A plane on a collision course with you will just look like a static light, like many many other lights in the area.
YetAnotherNick · 7h ago
The warrant officer was the instructor and was training her. Few times doesn't make someone qualified. I think it was because of military egos and ranks, the warrant officer didn't force corrected the Captain.
Also why is training happening in such dangerous path where even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart.
johnmaguire · 5h ago
Coincidentally, Nathan Fielder is currently doing an entire season of The Rehearsal based on the premise that a number of flight crashes occurred after the co-pilot failed to contradict or take controls from the pilot.
> Nathan Fielder studies airliner black box transcripts in which the first officer feels too intimidated to challenge the captain, leading to fatal crashes due to pilot error. He discusses this with John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member, who had once recommended roleplay simulation to improve pilot communication.
Really good season so far!
mmooss · 1h ago
It's a well-known problem with well-known solutions. Fielder didn't discover it.
scrlk · 5h ago
> I think it was because of military egos and ranks, the warrant officer didn't force corrected the Captain.
I'd be shocked if the US military didn't provide crew resource management training for their aviators. This is exactly the kind of situation CRM is designed to prevent.
Similar in firefighting, we train new cadets about correcting or calling out situations to their officer, especially re (but not limited to) safety.
khuey · 4h ago
> Also why is training happening in such dangerous path where even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart.
Forget training, why is this happening under any circumstances ever? If a military transport mission is ever so critical that you're willing to fly it within 30 meters of a civilian airlines it seems to me that you should just close the airspace to civil air traffic at that point.
Titan2189 · 2h ago
That helicopter route is available to anyone, not just army helicopters
ultrarunner · 1h ago
Everyone else has ADS-b and uses shared comms.
multjoy · 4h ago
I don’t know if the US shares a great deal with UK armed forces, but an officer ignoring a senior NCO, especially one training them, does so very much at their own peril.
It is far more likely to be something like cognitive overload rather than a clash or personalities - you don’t get to be in that position in the first place if you have a tendency to disregard instructors.
YetAnotherNick · 2h ago
I am talking about instructor. He didn't took control himself even likely knowing the captain was putting both in risky place.
rdtsc · 7h ago
> I think it was because of military egos and ranks, the warrant officer didn't force corrected the Captain.
I think they should prohibit such type of flights when ranks are reversed. Let's imagine he would have yanked the controls and avoided the crash. Now the Captain could have said "you're insubordinate and tanked my qualification flight, there will be a price to pay".
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 4h ago
Extremely unlikely. Laughably so.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 4h ago
I've personally never met a warrant officer afraid of (or even the least bit timid about) correcting a commissioned company-grade officer (O-3 in this case).
542354234235 · 3h ago
While I can’t speak to their individual temperaments, this is not an issue in the Army. Warrant officers are probably the least likely to worry about rank being confused with authority. They have the military experience from serving in the enlisted ranks as an NCO, with the protection of being officers that are above enlisted but still fall outside the commissioned officer ranks. They aren't untouchable but are highly insulated from petty tyrants.
I don’t know why the instructor didn’t take a more forceful/active role leading up to the crash, but I don’t think rank was a contributing factor.
mbrameld · 1h ago
I agree with everything you said, just want to point out that there's a "street to seat" program for Army aviators, so the warrant may have never served as an enlisted soldier. I still don't think a reluctance to act based on rank was the issue, like at all. Aviation is different from the rest of the military, there is generally a culture of safety that supersedes the rank structure.
rob74 · 5h ago
That's actually the crux of the matter - not only shouldn't they have done training (at night, with night vision goggles) in conditions where aircraft could be only 30 m apart, this construct of a helicopter flight corridor being within an altimeter's tolerance of the glide path for an airport runway shouldn't have been allowed to happen at all! It's unfortunate that the article focuses on who made what missteps and doesn't mention this systemic issue.
somat · 4h ago
With regards to training for high tolerance situations. Places and times where a small error can have large consequences.
Yes you ease into it, the first level of training is done in a safe environment, however as the person gains competence the training moves into the domain in question, the person gains experience at doing the thing in question while being supervised. Or to put it another way.
What? You expect that their first flight through that tight corridor at night should be done alone?
In conclusion, I think it is fine in general that they were doing training on that flight path. However the fact that the both pilot and the trainer erred so badly indicates the need for better low level training and a reevaluation of the need for such a tight flight path in a civilian zone.
Update: unrelated thought, I could not decide if low or high tolerance was the term i wanted, after waffling a bit I went with high tolerance. as that is the correct engineering meaning, but really the term is ambiguous and means the different things in different domains, he has a high tolerance for alcohol means the opposite of he made a high tolerance part.
milkshakes · 7h ago
exploring this phenomenon is the premise of season two of "the rehearsal"
Onavo · 7h ago
A hundred feet in aviation unfortunately just isn't that much. It's the equivalent of driving 3 miles over the speed limit on the highway. I am not sure about rotorcraft but if you are flying a traditional Cessna for training, a bit of wind shear or updraft can easily change your altitude by hundreds of feet.
rdtsc · 5h ago
> A hundred feet in aviation unfortunately just isn't that much. It's the equivalent of driving 3 miles over the speed limit on the highway. I am not sure about rotorcraft but if you are flying a traditional Cessna for training, a bit of wind shear or updraft can easily change your altitude by hundreds of feet.
I would agree in general, but in that particular environment around DC with the restricted WH fly zone, the busy airport, the river and the bridges and the ADSB switched off it can make a huge difference.
Onavo · 3h ago
Yeah, I find the report to be more of a morning after quarterback situation. For general plane to plane vertical separation, you are supposed to maintain a minimum of hundreds of feet. A hundred feet shouldn't make a difference.
xienze · 1h ago
> Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation?
Probably something as simple as she thought he was “mansplaining.”
firesteelrain · 1d ago
I still don’t understand the policy of the Army at the time to allow disabling of ADS-B Out in civilian airspace. I can understand in wartime.
howard941 · 1d ago
The idea is that you're supposed to train as you fight.
yuliyp · 6h ago
The ADS-B transponder tells other planes where you are. It doesn't tell you where the other planes are. Turning it off when there are civilian planes doesn't improve your ability to aviate. it just hurts the situational awareness of the civilian planes who aren't supposed to be learning how to fight.
ceejayoz · 2h ago
ADS-B goes both directions - you can broadcast, and you can listen. In this case, having it on would've told the Blackhawk crew a plane was way closer than they thought, even if the Blackhawk had broadcasting off.
ClumsyPilot · 2h ago
This sounds very strange:
- What combat situation will require a military aircraft to be flying 30 meters from civilian jet doing routine flights?
- i don’t believe that there really is no technical solution to provide awareness to civilians of the presence and location of military aircraft without altering the pilot’s experience
- if it had told the Blackhawk crew a plane was way closer, the crew would still be alive. That’s like the whole point.
I have no expertise or n the area, but I can’t share the feeling that decision making is extremely poor, and sometimes it actually takes an outsider, who is free from groupthink and cope, to see that a decision is stupid.
ceejayoz · 1h ago
> What combat situation will require a military aircraft to be flying 30 meters from civilian jet doing routine flights?
Evacuating leadership during a 9/11 scenario?
> i don’t believe that there really is no technical solution to provide awareness to civilians of the presence and location of military aircraft without altering the pilot’s experience
There is. That’s ADS-B. Which broadcasts your position. So it’s turned off in military aircraft at times, for obvious reasons.
LgWoodenBadger · 22h ago
Within reason, which is why soldiers train with blank-firing adapters and blanks, and not live ordnance when simulating combat.
Turning ADS-B on/off likely has zero effect on the training/fighting relationship.
ceejayoz · 8h ago
The article says the reason is a bit different - that the route they were practicing is (in theory) sensitive information.
> But the Black Hawk did not operate with the technology because of the confidentiality of the mission for which the crew was practicing. That is because ADS-B Out positions can be obtained by anyone with an internet connection, making the system a potential risk to national security.
Seems like leaving it in listen-only mode would be wise, though.
alistairSH · 5h ago
The route is a public/known helicopter flight path. There's nothing secret about it.
Yes, this group transports VIPs and sometimes does so in secret. This training flight was a "simple" check-ride for the pilot (simple in scare quotes because part of the ride was using the NVGs, which strikes me as fairly ridiculous in the DCA air space).
ceejayoz · 5h ago
The route itself, sure.
When this specific helicopter/mission joins the route, how fast it goes, what callsign it uses, when it leaves the route, etc. may not be so public. Or at least be treated as "try not to make it unnecessarily public".
Overclassification is absolutely a thing, too. I recall when the Snowden NSA leaks came out, government employees were still forbidden from reading the documents, even if they were published in the newspapers. Pointless? Yes. But those were the rules.
dmoy · 1h ago
> Overclassification is absolutely a thing, too. I recall when the Snowden NSA leaks came out, government employees were still forbidden from reading the documents, even if they were published in the newspapers. Pointless? Yes. But those were the rules.
Not just government employees. I was at a defense contractor at the time, and we were also instructed to not read any of the documents online, even for people who were technically cleared to read them through proper channels.
Edit: misremembering, wasn't the Snowden leaks, it was some earlier set of leaks on WikiLeaks
ClumsyPilot · 2h ago
Surely either you are training, or you are on a mission, but in that case you should be competent pilot.
training on a confidential mission is just inviting disaster
ceejayoz · 1h ago
Training for a mission tends to mean pretending it's the real mission, as closely as possible. People fire off $100k missiles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrhybKEzb-0) so they know what it'll be like to do it in combat for real.
Competent people still make mistakes. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near DCA airspace, personally.
alistairSH · 32m ago
The ADSB is a simple switch. All it does is broadcast the position. It would have had zero impact on operational readiness. It’s not like they were actually flying “dark” - lights were on, they were in context with ATC, etc.
firesteelrain · 3h ago
Listen-only mode would be ADS-B In. Black Hawk's support ADS-B Out.
I don't think the Black Hawk can support ADS-B In and usually its the surveillance type aircraft that carry it. I updated my post above. There is limited cockpit space in Black Hawks anyways. There might be a specific modernization occurring for a variant of UH-60 that has ADS-B IN, but vast majority do not.
My dad's little four seat hobby plane has both In/Out. You can track him on FlightAware as a result, because it's continually broadcasting its location; it's certainly not rare or sophisticated equipment.
> The Army Black Hawk helicopter crew involved in the midair collision with an American Eagle CRJ700 last January at Reagan National Airport had turned off ADS-B because they were practicing a classified flight profile, according to a New York Times investigation.
firesteelrain · 2h ago
We are both in agreement that ADS-B OUT is required. But, I am referring to ADS-B IN which most military aircraft do not have as a matter of practice. If ADS-B IN was running in addition to ADS-B OUT on both aircraft then it might have provided additional situational awareness assuming the Black Hawk pilot was operating the helicopter properly. The original comment was about putting the receiver in listening mode and that's simply not possible with the Black Hawk.
I have been running an ADS-B receiver at home for 6 years via PiAware along with an AIS receiver. So yes, low cost :)
ceejayoz · 2h ago
It's really not that rare. Especially with stuff like ForeFlight.
> A majority of respondents had used ADS-B In, with 56% of respondents reported having experience with either an installed or portable system. Of the group who had experience with ADS-B In, 85% used portable systems and 30% used installed systems.
And that's in 2019.
firesteelrain · 2h ago
No disagreement. ADS-B IN is just a feature that most military aircraft to include UH-60's (Black Hawk) do not have yet.
ClumsyPilot · 2h ago
Sounds like they should sort it out before placing civilians in danger
firesteelrain · 7m ago
In retrospect, it was a bad plan to let a young Captain who mostly served as a liaison in DC and not a helicopter pilot to train on that route. A simpler one where she could progressively train up to would have been wiser. She also should have listened to her more well seasoned Warrant Officer copilot. ADS-B In wouldn’t have addressed any of those problems
542354234235 · 3h ago
The route they were training for was to evac government personnel during an emergency (terrorism, incoming attack, etc.). ADS-B is live location whereas transponder is delayed. In a real scenario, you wouldn’t want to be transmitting live location, since whatever the emergency is likely involves targeting of VIP government personnel. But in training, that would not effect your training, since the ADS-B is for others benefit, and doesn’t change your situational awareness or capability.
edit: To add and make clear, the route will be known for a training or real situation, but it will be delayed. So for training, turning off the ADS-B does not protect the route information and that is why there is no reason to fly with it off for training.
ceejayoz · 1h ago
If you train to turn the ADS-B on, there's a decent chance you'll turn it on during the real thing. That's the point of training.
xhkkffbf · 6h ago
They were coming back from Langley. I'm told it was just to "refuel."
ceejayoz · 5h ago
On one hand, I've got a reputable news organization publishing an article with specific information from experts, pilots, etc.
On the other hand, I've got an internet rando who once told me to Google up MGTOW saying "I'm told".
Which one would you find credible?
jjwiseman · 3h ago
It wasn't coming back from Langley. That's misinformation from people who don't know the subtleties of what's displayed by flight tracking sites. For more info see https://x.com/aeroscouting/status/1884983390392488306
lobotomizer · 23h ago
Wasting innocent civilians out of sheer stupidity, checks out.
firesteelrain · 1d ago
I get that but in DC airspace near Reagan?
howard941 · 23h ago
Yes, you're right, lousy airspace design. Flown perfectly the chopper should have been no closer than 75' from the airplane if everyone is flying exactly on altitude (which never happens, you have to give at least +/-50'). Couple that with the difficulty of picking out an airplane against the hundreds of backlights of the valley and disaster was inevitable.
ultrarunner · 1h ago
The FAA says that I can't fly closer than 500 ft to a shed in the desert, but a Blackhawk is fine to be within 75 ft of a part 121 airliner in a bravo.
howard941 · 48m ago
Yeah but the Blackhawk requested visual separation. It shouldn't have, it couldn't tell the difference between the CRJ and any number of lights around it. Anyway, at that point the request was granted and you see how it ended.
stefan_ · 22h ago
Its a switch in the cockpit. Does train as you fight mean you gotta hit the chaff dispenser aswell? Wheres the line?
shadowgovt · 22h ago
Almost certainly moving after this fiasco.
gwbas1c · 1d ago
> Doing so was Army protocol, meant to allow the pilots to practice secretly whisking away a senior government official in an emergency.
1: You don't want to do that for the first time in wartime.
2: In case you've been living under a rock, we are at war with Russia right now. We just haven't declared war.
lm28469 · 23h ago
I fail to see how flying untracked in a public airspace 8000km away from Moscow has anything to do with the US being in a new cold war, I don't see what good it brings, especially if it's to play hide and seek around a civilian airport
Hnrobert42 · 23h ago
The Russian Embassy is pretty close as is the Chinese. That said, they could easily track military helicopters with or without ADS-B Out.
firesteelrain · 22h ago
Easily? I suppose a surveillance radar on the roof of those embassies wouldn’t go unnoticed.
jamessinghal · 21h ago
American embassies do this worldwide, famously spying on Angela Merkel from the Berlin Embassy (probably). [1]
And how exactly does it help Russia to know there are planes and helicopters flying in the US around an airport
What's the next conspiracy? They have anti air weapons in embassies and wait for a military helicopter transporting a high value target?
Either way it's not worth 64 lives...
tonyarkles · 4h ago
> They have anti air weapons in embassies and wait for a military helicopter transporting a high value target?
I agree with you that it seems relatively unlikely that there would be a large weapons cache inside an embassy. I want you to consider the opposite scenario of what you're dismissing though.
If an American CIA officer in Russia wanted to shoot down a helicoper, do you think it would be that difficult for them to get ahold of a rocket launcher and do so?
ClumsyPilot · 2h ago
So what is the scenario, Russia does <what> to cause the president to be evacuated, and hopes he will fly through this route on a Blackhawk, as opposed to any other option, places an agent with a rocket launcher along the route, hopes it gets through countermeasures and shoots down the helicopter.
After this unlikely series of events, what is achieved? Do American people give up because someone killed an easily replaceable politician with bad approval rating?
pc86 · 8h ago
It should be pretty obvious to anyone who's spent more than about 45 seconds thinking about it that you can gather good information about a potential enemy by watching how they train. For military and intelligence operations you want layered security, and you don't want to make intelligence-gathering operations against you any easier than you need to. So it makes perfect sense at least up to the moment of this crash that if you're operating military training flights in an area with a lot of foreign assets that you'd disable a feature that literally broadcasts where you are with telemetry once per second.
This mindset isn't conspiracy and framing it as such makes you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about.
> They have anti air weapons in embassies?
It'd honestly be pretty surprising if they didn't, but this is also why when countries officially go to war with each other the embassies are typically evacuated and/or evicted.
> Either way it's not worth 64 lives
Not a single person here or elsewhere is claiming otherwise.
Passive RADAR is an incredibly cool technology. Instead of the RADAR station transmitting its own signals, it relies on nearby high-power cultural transmissions (FM radio, broadcast TV, etc) as the signal source and measures the reflections of those signals off of aircraft. Since the majority of traffic in the region would be broadcasting ADSB, you'd be able to figure out which tracks from your Passive RADAR system correspond to aircraft without ADSB.
chmod775 · 7h ago
You don't need radar to track aircraft with ADS-B on: The plane is actively broadcasting its position.
There's ADS-B receivers the size of a USB stick - because some are USB sticks and available for 50 bucks on Amazon.
firesteelrain · 6h ago
No, but if ADS-B is off then its not squawking unless its got like Mode-3 or Mode-S then maybe MLAT can be used.
jjwiseman · 3h ago
Just to be specific, PAT25 seems to have been using Mode C for an earlier portion of its flight and Mode S for the later portion.
firesteelrain · 23h ago
True, train as you fight. But this was like a check-ride for the young Captain. ADS-B Out didn’t need to be off.
HaZeust · 3h ago
>"We just haven't declared war."
Then we're not at war. Hope this clears things up for you!
calfuris · 3h ago
By this standard, the US has not been at war since WWII. This is an absurd result, so I conclude that the standard is wrong. Official declarations of war have become decoupled from actually being at war.
shadowgovt · 22h ago
If we haven't declared war we're not at War. Words mean things.
Especially in this era when this administration seems to be gearing up for military action in domestic spaces when Congress has declared no war.
cafard · 10h ago
For how many years was the United States engaged in a declared war, and for how many other years did its military engage in substantial operations?
shadowgovt · 6h ago
I'm not excusing the malfeasance of past administrations when highlighting the malfeasance of this administration.
actionfromafar · 23h ago
At war with Russia, or at war with Ukraine? It's hard to tell these days.
flowerthoughts · 2d ago
Why is there a flight path along the Potomac river, right in front of a landing strip, at landing altitudes?
The article claims the helicopter was higher than it should have been, but isn't it safer to fly high across the airport if you're crossing?
kube-system · 1d ago
There's a lot going on in a small area there. Even without helicopters, the main runway (01/19) is the busiest runway in the nation, and it points directly at a no-fly zone over the white house, so the approach has a complicated turn at the last moment. Directly across the river, there's a military base with a heliport. And those helicopters often transport important individuals inside of those areas and to areas up and down the river. Those helicopters aren't just casually flying through, they are doing things in the immediate area.
Just as an example, look at a map and take note of where DCA is, where the Marine One hangar is, and where the White House is. All of this stuff is right around the airport.
queenkjuul · 1d ago
Doesn't fully explain why the military flight path runs right on front of the landing pattern for the main runway. Even with the proximity to each other, i don't see how that was necessary
kube-system · 1d ago
This accident didn't involve the main runway, but runway 33. Although -- look at a map -- runway 33 points across the river to a military base with a heliport. It seems obvious as to why military helicopters would have to be there.
Now, this particular flight wasn't landing there, but I don't think it is in any way confusing as to why military helicopters are in this area or taking these routes.
This is inherently very complicated and high volume airspace, and there is a lot of helicopters because there are important leaders who use military helicopter transport, not commercial airports, but many of the places they might be landing are all around DCA.
tbrownaw · 1d ago
> This is inherently very complicated and high volume airspace, and there is a lot of helicopters because there are important leaders who use military helicopter transport, not commercial airports, but many of the places they might be landing are all around DCA.
Three are occasional news articles and sci-fi worlds advocating for flying cars to replace normal cars. I imagine that would actually be like this situation but a gazillion times worse, rather than the promised elimination of traffic jams.
toast0 · 23h ago
Actually, its a great way to eliminate traffic jams. The vehicles involved in the collision will naturally exit the roadway. So long as the flame and smoke don't obscure visibility, traffic will unjam itself.
dylan604 · 22h ago
The naturally exiting vehicles then just rain debris down on whatever unsuspecting <insertWhateverHere>.
gymbeaux · 23h ago
My question would be “why not close down Reagan?” especially now that the DC Metro runs to Dulles. Yes, yes, Congress likes to fly into Reagan. Too bad.
Not only does Reagan have the same design problem as LGA and SFO (built before jetliners, runways too short), it’s incredibly close to restricted airspace. No civilian needs to fly into an airport that close to DC.
kube-system · 22h ago
The area has enough traffic to support three airports, and all three (DCA/IAD/BWI) carry between 26-27 million passengers a year, each. I don't think you could close one of them without some significant disruption to service.
Travel in/out of IAD from DC can take an hour, which is obviously why people there prefer DCA. And the flights there are all short-haul anyway, so many are the types of flights people are doing on short turnarounds.
janeerie · 6h ago
They're not all short haul. I can do a direct to DCA from SLC.
kube-system · 5h ago
There are a handful of exceptions (of which SLC is one), but broadly the airport is legally limited to destinations within a 1250 mile perimeter to keep long haul traffic at IAD/BWI.
gymbeaux · 8h ago
Well that settles it then, military aircraft will have to just turn on their ADS-B transponders when within X miles of a commercial/public airport
jandrese · 5h ago
I don't think IAD has the capacity to absorb the DCA traffic, at least not on a regular basis. Even if you include BWA I have my doubts that you wouldn't have to cut a bunch of flights due to gate or runway limitations.
gosub100 · 7h ago
A compromise could be to close it for arrivals during certain hours, opening up one entire side of airspace (depending on the wind).
The pain could be mitigated somewhat by adding seating areas and more aircraft parking while using larger planes. For instance, fewer flights total, consisting of 737s and a320s and eliminating flights that previously used shorter commuter sized aircraft.
gymbeaux · 6h ago
I think Midway (another old airport) is like this in that it’s “Southwest + some private flights”
michael1999 · 2h ago
It's an air-taxi service for VIPs. DC traffic is terrible.
standyro · 1d ago
the military gets what it wants in DC, and the pilots were too comfortable and on different radio systems (helo can’t hear airplanes and vice versa, air traffic control is their intermediary)
A disaster waiting to happen in retrospect. Similar issues at other airports like runway incursions, especially at crowded small airports like SFO and LaGuardia with antiquated runway layouts.
psunavy03 · 1d ago
Let's wait for the investigation to complete before we opine on what is or isn't a "disaster waiting to happen." The entire aviation system is a "disaster waiting to happen" unless you assume a baseline level of aircrew competence, and the question will be whether or not the aircrew fell victim to a systematic risk inherent in what they were doing, or whether they just screwed up.
Sad to say, as a former aviator, I have seen it before where people died and families lost loved ones ultimately because of a systematic risk inherent in what they were doing, but also other times because someone flat-out just screwed up.
tremon · 1d ago
FTA:
data recently analyzed by the board revealed that National Airport was the site of at least one near collision between an airplane and a helicopter each month from 2011 to 2024
I would say that statistic in and of itself qualifies as a "disaster waiting to happen". I agree that we should wait for the full report, but I don't think the GP is using hyperbole in this case.
goku12 · 5h ago
One near collision every month (minimum) for 13 years? How is that a disaster waiting to happen, as much as it is a case of wilful criminal negligence? How many near collisions are needed for the authorities recognize that it's an unacceptable risk? How did they let this happen?
banannaise · 2h ago
One of the biggest challenges for the FAA et al. is preventing both individuals and organizations from developing this kind of complacency, where something extremely dangerous becomes "just how we do it here, and it's fine".
Unfortunately, they don't always succeed. Every crash is a lesson learned too late. We endeavor to learn earlier than that, and when we don't, we make sure we learn in the aftermath.
jonah · 6h ago
That line really stood out to me. One would hope that someone would realize this was a disaster waiting to happen and make changes before it actually happened.
LorenPechtel · 23h ago
Relying on seeing another aircraft in the air at night is pretty much a disaster waiting to happen.
You don't see aircraft at night, you see lights. And they're over a city--a gazillion lights. Thus all you really see are moving lights. But if two objects are on a steady collision path neither moves relative to the other. Thus both sets of pilots would simply have seen stationary lights, invisible against a sea of stationary lights.
Animats · 1d ago
> Let's wait for the investigation to complete before we opine on what is or isn't a "disaster waiting to happen."
Yes. The info still isn't that good.
That said, allowing helicopter operations underneath a final approach path is iffy. Ops.group has a discussion.[1]
The helicopter did not cross the airport. The helicopter crossed the approach path to the airport, it was supposed to stay low enough not to be in the approach path. Then the pilot steered around the wrong plane and blundered right into the plane that they were supposed to be avoiding.
Politicians wanting contradictory things, oops.
jandrese · 4h ago
Ironically it would probably be safer if the helicopter crossed directly over the airport. At least then airplanes are usually on the ground, except for the cases where someone has to abort a landing and go around. Still dangerous, but it should happen less often.
psunavy03 · 1d ago
It's "safer" not to do a lot of things you do in military aviation, for one. And second, the flight path was deliberately plotted out requiring aircrew to maintain certain altitudes and stay within certain lateral boundaries to avoid other traffic. This is no different than any number of corridors like it around the country.
At some point, it's like saying "isn't it 'safer' not to take the freeway because everyone drives so fast?"
ClumsyPilot · 1h ago
The appropriate analogy would be to take the freeway on a unicycle, naked. Otherwise known as inviting disaster.
michael1999 · 2h ago
The military run a VIP helicopter-taxi service, with routes right though active landing flight paths.
lupusreal · 1d ago
Training to evac politicians from what I understand. From wikipedia:
> "The helicopter was part of the Continuity of Government Plan, with the flight being a routine re-training of aircrew in night flight along the corridor."
Continuity of Government Plans is what they do when nukes get launched or a 9/11 sort of thing happens.
vkou · 1d ago
Should the people who had the most ability to prevent a global nuclear war be survivors of one?
That seems like a misalignment of incentives.
dkokelley · 1d ago
Not sure what the next best option here is. There was a thought experiment once where it would require the president to kill the key holder in order to launch a nuclear attack (the launch codes would be embedded in the designated key holder's heart). In theory this would make sure the president knew the seriousness of his or her actions, but it was never seriously considered as a protocol.
kube-system · 1d ago
The US's ability to respond to a nuclear attack is a deterrence to one beginning in the first place.
vkou · 19h ago
The chain of command is designed to be resilient enough to do so without having to bail the VIPs out of the frying pan they landed themselves and the rest of the world in.
They need to have as much skin in the game as everyone else.
542354234235 · 2h ago
In the case of a nuclear attack, most of the nuclear “chain of command” would be targeted and, realistically, many would not survive. The continuity of government plan for a nuclear attack isn’t designed to get all the influential muckety mucks out of the frying pan, it is to attempt to get the bare minimum of decision makers to secure facilities like Site-R or onto Doomsday Planes so they can wage an all-out nuclear retaliatory war. Very very few people would make it out of DC, and even getting anyone Sec Def or above out would be a very close thing.
The point is that for deterrence to work, it has to be credible. If Russia thought it could “kill” the US government so that no one would be able to effectively order a counterattack (either because they are dead or because they can’t communicate orders to actual nuclear forces), would they do it?
tbrownaw · 1d ago
OTOH, turning "instigate a nuclear war" into a way to assassinate specific people also seems like a bad idea?
Mountain_Skies · 5h ago
Penn & Teller's book 'Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends' included a short story whose premise was a test to see if the president would be more likely to start a nuclear war if a safe bunker was available.
listenallyall · 1h ago
> He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left
This is an interesting sentence. In a very generous interpretation, the pilot (if she had survived) might claim that she wasn't directed to turn, just that the instructor believed ATC wanted her to turn, and thus she still needed to evaluate the situation and decide what to do. In other words, she might claim she didn’t defy an order, because being told an instructor "believes" something is different than being directed to do it.
mmooss · 1h ago
What are the actual words used by the warrant officer? I think you are taking a characterization in the article too literally.
listenallyall · 47m ago
Very possible. That's kind of the point of my comment - like you I'm curious what actual words were said and whether they are normal protocol for a training exercise, and at what point does the trainer abandon the exercise and just go "you're about to crash!" either out of urgency or panic?
> Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.
> He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank. Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet. She did not turn left.
As much as the article tries to balance it out that the controllers should have done more it seems that ultimately the pilot flying was distracted and not following instructions from the instructor sitting next to them. It happened at least twice based on the captured recordings.
Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation? Otherwise they seemed qualified and flew that route a few times already.
I'm a helicopter flight instructor, although I've never flown in the military. There are 5 magic words the instructor can, and I would argue is obligated to, use to fix the situation: "I have the flight controls"
Knowing they were 100 feet high and flying into the approach corridor with an aircraft on short final and not taking the controls is an enormous failure on the part of the instructor. The student was likely task-saturated and the instructor should have recognized that.
| He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank.
Now, I'd love to _hear_ the actual comment/instruction here. He may have been hedging because he was trying to piece together the stepped on "pass behind" direction from ATC. But I also wonder if it's an inherent problem when the student outranks the instructor?
Beyond her general lack of flight-time? Her primary role appeared to be some sort of liaison in DC, not flying Blackhawks.
That may be common for an Army pilot, but for somebody expected to fly during wartime, transport VIPs under stressful conditions, etc that's pretty goddam minimal.
From what I can tell, that's the low end of average, but that's based on 5ish mins of fact-checking.
One source among many: https://helicopterforum.verticalreference.com/topic/24169-ar...
This is one of those situations where common intuition doesn't match reality. I've similarly been wrong in the past where my intuition was off wrt/ to hours on industrial equipment compared to their expected life.
Why do you focus on that and not many other possibilities for distraction - cognitive overload, lack of sleep, an injury, other distractions in the cockpit, etc.
It feels like semi-autonomous ATC and flight controls were possible as of 5 years ago. Has FAA even started writing initial reports on this?
Yeah, that one has been around as long as there have been computers. It's sort of like the flying car of the ATC world - it's always 5 years away.
> temporal normal distribution to human attention spans
Tn this case we had both the ATC and the instructor tell the pilot to do something different and they didn't listen. Not sure if that's an attention span issue, it may be, but it's not clear it's definitely what it is.
Maybe visual flight separation is a bad idea when there are a bunch of lights from the ground and a busy airspace. A plane on a collision course with you will just look like a static light, like many many other lights in the area.
Also why is training happening in such dangerous path where even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart.
> Nathan Fielder studies airliner black box transcripts in which the first officer feels too intimidated to challenge the captain, leading to fatal crashes due to pilot error. He discusses this with John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member, who had once recommended roleplay simulation to improve pilot communication.
Really good season so far!
I'd be shocked if the US military didn't provide crew resource management training for their aviators. This is exactly the kind of situation CRM is designed to prevent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
Forget training, why is this happening under any circumstances ever? If a military transport mission is ever so critical that you're willing to fly it within 30 meters of a civilian airlines it seems to me that you should just close the airspace to civil air traffic at that point.
It is far more likely to be something like cognitive overload rather than a clash or personalities - you don’t get to be in that position in the first place if you have a tendency to disregard instructors.
I think they should prohibit such type of flights when ranks are reversed. Let's imagine he would have yanked the controls and avoided the crash. Now the Captain could have said "you're insubordinate and tanked my qualification flight, there will be a price to pay".
I don’t know why the instructor didn’t take a more forceful/active role leading up to the crash, but I don’t think rank was a contributing factor.
Yes you ease into it, the first level of training is done in a safe environment, however as the person gains competence the training moves into the domain in question, the person gains experience at doing the thing in question while being supervised. Or to put it another way.
What? You expect that their first flight through that tight corridor at night should be done alone?
In conclusion, I think it is fine in general that they were doing training on that flight path. However the fact that the both pilot and the trainer erred so badly indicates the need for better low level training and a reevaluation of the need for such a tight flight path in a civilian zone.
Update: unrelated thought, I could not decide if low or high tolerance was the term i wanted, after waffling a bit I went with high tolerance. as that is the correct engineering meaning, but really the term is ambiguous and means the different things in different domains, he has a high tolerance for alcohol means the opposite of he made a high tolerance part.
I would agree in general, but in that particular environment around DC with the restricted WH fly zone, the busy airport, the river and the bridges and the ADSB switched off it can make a huge difference.
Probably something as simple as she thought he was “mansplaining.”
- What combat situation will require a military aircraft to be flying 30 meters from civilian jet doing routine flights?
- i don’t believe that there really is no technical solution to provide awareness to civilians of the presence and location of military aircraft without altering the pilot’s experience
- if it had told the Blackhawk crew a plane was way closer, the crew would still be alive. That’s like the whole point.
I have no expertise or n the area, but I can’t share the feeling that decision making is extremely poor, and sometimes it actually takes an outsider, who is free from groupthink and cope, to see that a decision is stupid.
Evacuating leadership during a 9/11 scenario?
> i don’t believe that there really is no technical solution to provide awareness to civilians of the presence and location of military aircraft without altering the pilot’s experience
There is. That’s ADS-B. Which broadcasts your position. So it’s turned off in military aircraft at times, for obvious reasons.
Turning ADS-B on/off likely has zero effect on the training/fighting relationship.
> But the Black Hawk did not operate with the technology because of the confidentiality of the mission for which the crew was practicing. That is because ADS-B Out positions can be obtained by anyone with an internet connection, making the system a potential risk to national security.
Seems like leaving it in listen-only mode would be wise, though.
Here's a map of the helicopter routes in the area. In this case, they were flying on route 4... https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3851p.ct004873/?r=0.67,0.258,0...
Yes, this group transports VIPs and sometimes does so in secret. This training flight was a "simple" check-ride for the pilot (simple in scare quotes because part of the ride was using the NVGs, which strikes me as fairly ridiculous in the DCA air space).
When this specific helicopter/mission joins the route, how fast it goes, what callsign it uses, when it leaves the route, etc. may not be so public. Or at least be treated as "try not to make it unnecessarily public".
Overclassification is absolutely a thing, too. I recall when the Snowden NSA leaks came out, government employees were still forbidden from reading the documents, even if they were published in the newspapers. Pointless? Yes. But those were the rules.
Not just government employees. I was at a defense contractor at the time, and we were also instructed to not read any of the documents online, even for people who were technically cleared to read them through proper channels.
Edit: misremembering, wasn't the Snowden leaks, it was some earlier set of leaks on WikiLeaks
training on a confidential mission is just inviting disaster
Competent people still make mistakes. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near DCA airspace, personally.
1. C-17 Globemaster III (transport)
2. C-130 Hercules (transport)
3. KC-135 Stratotanker (tanker)
4. KC-10 Extender (tanker)
5. P-8 Poseidon (maritime patrol/reconnaissance)
6. E-3 Sentry (AWACS)
7. E-8 Joint STARS (reconnaissance)
^ above have ADS-B In capability
This answer on Aviation Stack Exchange did some research into ADS-B statistics for military aircraft: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/107851/military...
TCAS (collision avoidance) can use Mode A/C/S however it depends on if the aircraft has the earlier or later model TCAS: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/90356/does-tcas...
Military aircraft have permission from the FAA to turn off one, or both, for fairly obvious reasons. https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/communications-navigati...
My dad's little four seat hobby plane has both In/Out. You can track him on FlightAware as a result, because it's continually broadcasting its location; it's certainly not rare or sophisticated equipment.
Here's a military Blackhawk toodling around as we speak: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae27fc
https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/blackhawk-ads-b-was-off-...
> The Army Black Hawk helicopter crew involved in the midair collision with an American Eagle CRJ700 last January at Reagan National Airport had turned off ADS-B because they were practicing a classified flight profile, according to a New York Times investigation.
I have been running an ADS-B receiver at home for 6 years via PiAware along with an AIS receiver. So yes, low cost :)
https://download.aopa.org/advocacy/2019/dhowell_jking_DASC20...
> A majority of respondents had used ADS-B In, with 56% of respondents reported having experience with either an installed or portable system. Of the group who had experience with ADS-B In, 85% used portable systems and 30% used installed systems.
And that's in 2019.
edit: To add and make clear, the route will be known for a training or real situation, but it will be delayed. So for training, turning off the ADS-B does not protect the route information and that is why there is no reason to fly with it off for training.
On the other hand, I've got an internet rando who once told me to Google up MGTOW saying "I'm told".
Which one would you find credible?
1: You don't want to do that for the first time in wartime.
2: In case you've been living under a rock, we are at war with Russia right now. We just haven't declared war.
[1] https://www.duncancampbell.org/content/embassy-spy-centre-ne...
What's the next conspiracy? They have anti air weapons in embassies and wait for a military helicopter transporting a high value target?
Either way it's not worth 64 lives...
I agree with you that it seems relatively unlikely that there would be a large weapons cache inside an embassy. I want you to consider the opposite scenario of what you're dismissing though.
If an American CIA officer in Russia wanted to shoot down a helicoper, do you think it would be that difficult for them to get ahold of a rocket launcher and do so?
After this unlikely series of events, what is achieved? Do American people give up because someone killed an easily replaceable politician with bad approval rating?
This mindset isn't conspiracy and framing it as such makes you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about.
> They have anti air weapons in embassies?
It'd honestly be pretty surprising if they didn't, but this is also why when countries officially go to war with each other the embassies are typically evacuated and/or evicted.
> Either way it's not worth 64 lives
Not a single person here or elsewhere is claiming otherwise.
Passive RADAR is an incredibly cool technology. Instead of the RADAR station transmitting its own signals, it relies on nearby high-power cultural transmissions (FM radio, broadcast TV, etc) as the signal source and measures the reflections of those signals off of aircraft. Since the majority of traffic in the region would be broadcasting ADSB, you'd be able to figure out which tracks from your Passive RADAR system correspond to aircraft without ADSB.
There's ADS-B receivers the size of a USB stick - because some are USB sticks and available for 50 bucks on Amazon.
Then we're not at war. Hope this clears things up for you!
Especially in this era when this administration seems to be gearing up for military action in domestic spaces when Congress has declared no war.
The article claims the helicopter was higher than it should have been, but isn't it safer to fly high across the airport if you're crossing?
Just as an example, look at a map and take note of where DCA is, where the Marine One hangar is, and where the White House is. All of this stuff is right around the airport.
Now, this particular flight wasn't landing there, but I don't think it is in any way confusing as to why military helicopters are in this area or taking these routes.
This is inherently very complicated and high volume airspace, and there is a lot of helicopters because there are important leaders who use military helicopter transport, not commercial airports, but many of the places they might be landing are all around DCA.
Three are occasional news articles and sci-fi worlds advocating for flying cars to replace normal cars. I imagine that would actually be like this situation but a gazillion times worse, rather than the promised elimination of traffic jams.
Not only does Reagan have the same design problem as LGA and SFO (built before jetliners, runways too short), it’s incredibly close to restricted airspace. No civilian needs to fly into an airport that close to DC.
Travel in/out of IAD from DC can take an hour, which is obviously why people there prefer DCA. And the flights there are all short-haul anyway, so many are the types of flights people are doing on short turnarounds.
The pain could be mitigated somewhat by adding seating areas and more aircraft parking while using larger planes. For instance, fewer flights total, consisting of 737s and a320s and eliminating flights that previously used shorter commuter sized aircraft.
A disaster waiting to happen in retrospect. Similar issues at other airports like runway incursions, especially at crowded small airports like SFO and LaGuardia with antiquated runway layouts.
Sad to say, as a former aviator, I have seen it before where people died and families lost loved ones ultimately because of a systematic risk inherent in what they were doing, but also other times because someone flat-out just screwed up.
data recently analyzed by the board revealed that National Airport was the site of at least one near collision between an airplane and a helicopter each month from 2011 to 2024
I would say that statistic in and of itself qualifies as a "disaster waiting to happen". I agree that we should wait for the full report, but I don't think the GP is using hyperbole in this case.
Unfortunately, they don't always succeed. Every crash is a lesson learned too late. We endeavor to learn earlier than that, and when we don't, we make sure we learn in the aftermath.
You don't see aircraft at night, you see lights. And they're over a city--a gazillion lights. Thus all you really see are moving lights. But if two objects are on a steady collision path neither moves relative to the other. Thus both sets of pilots would simply have seen stationary lights, invisible against a sea of stationary lights.
Yes. The info still isn't that good.
That said, allowing helicopter operations underneath a final approach path is iffy. Ops.group has a discussion.[1]
[1] https://ops.group/blog/the-dangers-of-mixed-traffic/
Politicians wanting contradictory things, oops.
At some point, it's like saying "isn't it 'safer' not to take the freeway because everyone drives so fast?"
> "The helicopter was part of the Continuity of Government Plan, with the flight being a routine re-training of aircrew in night flight along the corridor."
Continuity of Government Plans is what they do when nukes get launched or a 9/11 sort of thing happens.
That seems like a misalignment of incentives.
They need to have as much skin in the game as everyone else.
The point is that for deterrence to work, it has to be credible. If Russia thought it could “kill” the US government so that no one would be able to effectively order a counterattack (either because they are dead or because they can’t communicate orders to actual nuclear forces), would they do it?
This is an interesting sentence. In a very generous interpretation, the pilot (if she had survived) might claim that she wasn't directed to turn, just that the instructor believed ATC wanted her to turn, and thus she still needed to evaluate the situation and decide what to do. In other words, she might claim she didn’t defy an order, because being told an instructor "believes" something is different than being directed to do it.
Username checks out :)
(One of these years we'll build a more specialized system for aggregating related links)