Plane crash DCA?
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Anonymous
Trump’s acute harassment of federal workers this week absolutely could have contributed to reducing performance by the military crew and FAA. It’s literally what he planned to do - “torture” federal employees. People undergoing torture don’t perform at their peak. |
Anonymous
The dashcam footage shows the helicopter seemingly moving too fast to have avoided the collision. |
Anonymous
In some of the near miss examples, it seems the planes had alerts / alarms telling them another plane was too close and they chose to manouever away. I wonder what we will hear on the black box for both. Do we know the helicopter made a sudden change in movement near the end? I thought they were just flying straight into the plane. |
Anonymous
Someone up thread said around 30+ minutes had elapsed between ATC communicating with helicopter for first time about the plane and if they had sight and when collision happened. That’s seems to be plenty of time to gain bearings and avoid the plane. |
Anonymous
That's fine but that wasn't the original flight plan - the tower ATC had multiple landings spaced too closely and needed one of them to move from the pattern (landing on 1) to landing on 33. This is normal, but it shouldn't be normal - there should be enough ATC capacity so that the tower doesn't get behind the queue. Like everything else by itself it's fine, but it's another hole in the swiss cheese that led to this disaster. Just like having see and avoid. Just like night vision goggles. Just like conflicting traffic patterns. None of these on their own was the only cause. They all had to line up together and they did tonight. The public has no idea how close things have been. |
Anonymous
Both aircraft would have had alerts for conflicts but the audio is disabled and conflicts for arriving aircraft are common. The tower had a Collision Avoidance alert that blared for 16 seconds before impact. Was the tower controller distracted doing 2 separate jobs? Likely. |
Anonymous
I bet the plane had no idea and didn’t see it coming at all. It certainly didn’t look like the plane suspected anything out of the norm and was just following course. It also looks like the helicopter turned last minute and flew directly into plane. But who knows. A lot of details unknown |
Anonymous
I strongly disagree with the "all had to line up together" argument. There is one issue that is one major violation of protocol that trumps everything: the altitude of the helicopter. You can discuss that there should be a better procedure in place and many would agree with you. But here is one that was in place and was violated. Everything else is a contributing factor. |
Anonymous
This is what my spouse who works in infrastructure and has to deal with the US military a lot says. They don't follow rules designed to promote cooperation among agencies/entities -- they view their mission as more important, always, and think they can make their own rules. But if someone violates *their* rules, even accidentally, you will be punished in some way because everyone is just supposed to know how the military operates internally. It's a problem of them feeling like they are above the law and that everyone should defer to them. Even though in this case, obviously this helicopter doing an unnecessary training run near an airport handling millions of passengers a day should have been deferring. To be clear, I'm not blaming the crew of the helicopter here but the culture of the military that led the people on that crew to think they can break standard procedure and it will be fine. Helicopters constantly fly above 200ft through that corridor and ATC is constantly having to tell them to go down, and planes have frequently had to abort landings to accommodate that. It's ridiculous. The military is not more important than FAA or NTSB, yet they the rules from those agencies don't apply to them. And as a result 67 people died for no good reason. |
Anonymous
Absolutely. Helicopters shouldn't be flying through the DCA approaches. |
Anonymous
They were practicing a night time extraction exercise, is getting the prez or CIA somebody out of the city. Flying down the east bank of a river at 200 ft should be easy. Even past the airport. Major and fatal problems ensue when they go to the middle or the river, and fly at 300-400 feet past the open airport, and don’t triple confirm runway 33 jets. |
Anonymous
Disobeying the command from ATC to wait until the plane passed in front of them was probably the bigger failure. |
Anonymous
Behavior scientist here. We actually see “blame” (basically a form of aggression when you can’t be physically violent) across multiple species when they perceive another animal has something they don’t. Example, if you have 2 rats together, and one has to press a button more than the other to get food, the one that has to press more will attack the one who has to press less. And if it can’t attack, it’ll often find other ways to behave aggressively. Even if it doesn’t result in more food for it. This is what goes on with trump and trump supporters. The see others getting things they don’t or in greater amounts (jobs, money, etc) and the gut instinct is to attack those people, especially if they are lower on the social hierarchy (in monkeys, they will attack lower status monkeys but groom higher status, which is why people fawn over Trump and Musk). It’s the whole crabs in a bucket thing. When logically trump’s solution make no sense. He says we need to have geniuses as pilots and ATC. This is one of his usual responses - we need better people, geniuses. But there just aren’t that many geniuses to fill every role he says need them. Military especially, which typically attracts people from low income families who don’t have many options. You can show trump or his supporters all the data in the world and it won’t matter because they are operating on a base level instinct to attack others. And in fact that typically makes things worse because you are taking away the one hope they have of their own lives improving. |
Anonymous
+1 during the last 10 days Trump has intentionally created chaos across the government and told workers they are an embarrassment and he wants to fire them. Of course, people who support Trump insist his actions are simply cutting waste because they DGAF about the numerous things that the government does that keeps society running. One of those things is preventing aircraft from colliding with one another. But let's say the insanity of the last 10 days has nothing to do with this particular crash. How can people be okay with the way Trump treats the very people who work day and night to keep people healthy and safe? |
Anonymous
Agree, they’d have to go of NAVs and say in thank you and pull up, get back in queue. Maybe someone with tons of DCA experience would have done that. Just assumed it was too risky with any helicopter traffic oncoming or below it. |