Plane crash DCA?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Trump spent two minutes on plane crash and condolences and 38 minutes blaming Obama and Biden!

And then Fox News spent most of its discussion afterwards praising Trump’s empathy and saying he was in “Consoler-in-Chief” mode and performing magnificently. It’s why the Trump/MAGA fan’s Shield of Stupidity is impenetrable. They feed themselves nothing but lies, and then demand that those of us with functioning brains and eyes call it the truth.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One of the problems is that the FAA makes most of the flights land from the South even when winds are from the south. They think they can increase capacity because of the two runways there, but it gets so busy that it is dangerous. So many people asked the FAA why they insist on landing from the south most of the time and this is what the FAA put out:

https://www.flyreagan.com/sites/flyreagan.com/files/legacyfiles/2019_09_18_-_operational_advantages_of_a_north_configuration_at_dca_dlh.pdf

The poorer people live south of DCA and complain less than North Arlington and Bethesda. That's why.

Mclean/Langley fought to make planes change flight patterns so they wouldn't fly over their houses.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Trump isn’t to blame, Biden isn’t to blame. Neither is ATC. They followed protocol, even if short staffed, they still did exactly what they should have done. I don’t see how the finger can be pointed anywhere other than directly at the helicopter at this point.

THIS.

I would say there is no doubt the fault is with the helicopter but it seems sometimes the ATC or the pilots of the other planes are able to take preventative action even for things that aren't their fault. They are able to see or say or hear something that leads to a near miss instead of a crash.

We’d all like to see the DCA data on near misses.

I’m a pilot and I’d issue a citation every time I aborted landing due to a joyride helicopter right by the airstrip.

Basically you just don’t land if there’s a helicopter around now. Full stop. Do a flyby.

Sorry folks, let’s clog up the landing queue some more, circling around again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Trump isn’t to blame, Biden isn’t to blame. Neither is ATC. They followed protocol, even if short staffed, they still did exactly what they should have done. I don’t see how the finger can be pointed anywhere other than directly at the helicopter at this point.

Put aside blame, Trump’s reaction to this crash has been immoral and unconscionable. There are nearly 70 dead Americans, including 3 soldiers (he doesn’t even seem to realize what Commander-in-Chief actually means, he just thinks it sounds cool I guess) and his impulse is to place blame on everyone else and somehow imply that if only we could hire white men all the time, none of this would have happened.

He is a soulless monster, and an incredibly stupid person.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Came out last night that the sidestep to 33 was because ATC had put multiple jets on final for 1 too close. The whole event started long before, with at least one plane refusing to switch to 33. Still primarily the helicopter fault but having 1 tower ATC was a large contributing factor. Many of us in the aviation community have felt this is the exact scenario the multiple near collisions over the last 24 months would bring.

Runway 33 is perfect for regional jets.

200 seaters can’t use it.

Not a big deal. Usually.

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.

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.

A later poster brings up a great point - how often do helicopters violate the 200’ altitude rule in this situation? If the answer is “never”, then yes, I think we can consider it a major transgression. But we don’t know that answer yet. Perhaps, as the later poster said, there was an obstacle to avoid, like a flock of birds. Perhaps the 200’ feet rule was not adhered to all the time, much like most of us don’t adhere to the 55 mph rule on the highway.

The point is, there are too many factors at play to make a determination of blame. I assume you are not a Blackhawk pilot. Because even the Blackhawk pilots out there are saying to wait until we have all the evidence. I suggest we follow their advice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Trump isn’t to blame, Biden isn’t to blame. Neither is ATC. They followed protocol, even if short staffed, they still did exactly what they should have done. I don’t see how the finger can be pointed anywhere other than directly at the helicopter at this point.

It can absolutely be pointed at the powers that be that allowed the ATC towers to be half staffed; those that have pressed for DCA to be so overloaded with flights; and the military geniuses that decided that the busiest hour at DCA is the time to do night training exercises that cross the flight path (rather than waiting until midnight when there are no flights).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Came out last night that the sidestep to 33 was because ATC had put multiple jets on final for 1 too close. The whole event started long before, with at least one plane refusing to switch to 33. Still primarily the helicopter fault but having 1 tower ATC was a large contributing factor. Many of us in the aviation community have felt this is the exact scenario the multiple near collisions over the last 24 months would bring.

Runway 33 is perfect for regional jets.

200 seaters can’t use it.

Not a big deal. Usually.

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.

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.

Disobeying the command from ATC to wait until the plane passed in front of them was probably the bigger failure.

Ok. I stand corrected. Two major violations on the part of military helicopter.

Reduced staffing of the ATC tower.

Conflicting air traffic patterns that regularly require deconflicting were the norm.

Reduced staffing of the ATC tower.

The staff did exactly what it was supposed to do, so reduced or not, that is not the problem. Red herring.

Conflicting air traffic patterns that regularly require deconflicting were the norm.

For future improved safety, good point. For this situation: red herring. ATC was on top of the situation and gave instructions to avoid collision. Helicopter confirmed.

It's all part of the swiss cheese model. All the failures need to line up.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I landed at this forum after Googling my question. I apologize if this is not an acceptable means for joining in:

From the helo pilot’s point of view, if you are traveling in a direction nearly head-on with an approaching plane whose path is slowly curving to the plane’s left towards an assigned runway, isn’t a request to "pass behind the plane" dangerously ambiguous relative to whether turning left or right is a safe maneuver? If at the time of the “pass request” the approaching plane is in-sight but is headed slight left of the current path of the helo, then the helo pilot steers his craft to his right. But within a few seconds, the approaching plane’s left-curve path has crossed the old projected path of the helo and is now to the right of the helo’s path, and the helo has tried to avoid the plane’s near head-on path by choosing the wrong path to “pass behind”.

This is a great point. I do feel like ATC lacked urgency and clear direction, given the couple recordings I’ve read.

From what I have read, the tower usually reduces by one ATC at 9:30pm and then a reamining ATC manages both helicopters and planes but on this night, the other ATC left an hour early - at 8:30. It seems maybe the crash happened during this shift turnover when the ATC was still doing his job and taking over for the ATC leaving early that night.

But ATC did communicate with the helicopter a couple times. But it gave the vague direction to “go behind” the plane. But given they were flying straight on, saying go behind assumes the helicopter knew the plane was about to make a hard turn to the runway. That seems obvious- but when given directions to flying planes it seems like protocol would be to use specific direction, not behind. The helicopter and the plane aren’t on the same frequency and couldn’t communicate.

There’s a lot of trust with pilots, each other and ATC.
When they say they see it and further request “visual separation” they are taking responsibility.

3+ terrible mistakes happened here in the helicopter part.

It is terrible that the jet didn’t look down and right, see the dark black hawk and abort landing/pull up.

Terrible that ATC didn’t explicitly order the help to drop altitude and bank left immediately.

And super terrible that the help didn’t understand where a RJ landing on 33 would be coming in from.

The regional jet pilit's line of sight over the nose and underneath is basically non existent

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.

Yes if you watch the YouTube expert someone linked up thread, helo made sudden changes at last second. It was flying at 200 feet before but then suddenly rose to 350-400. It also turned sharply right.

I definitely have questions about those last second maneuvers by the helicopter. Assuming that the helicopter did not realize the plane was right on top of them and were actually tracking the plane further south headed for runway 1 (still a screwup on their part because I believe the ATC had specifically said the plan was headed to runway 33 and in any case they should have seen it on radar), it is still confusing why they climbed and turned at that specific moment in time.

Both choices (the altitude change and the turn) are technically violations of the prescribed route the helicopter was on, which directs helicopters to stick as close as they can to the eastern shore of the Potomac and to stay at or below 200ft until they get to the Woodrow Wilson bridge. Both directives exist explicitly to keep helicopters out of National's air traffic. But helicopters through that corridor like to violate both directives. They prefer to fly down the middle of the river because it's easier and keeps them away from trees, power lines, and other low level obstructions (it also looks cool when you are in a helicopter and have the river centered). And the also like to climb over 200ft in that area, though I don't actually know why this is -- perhaps just difficult to maintain the lower altitude and they get sloppy? I actually don't know, but they do it all the time.

But the fact that this helicopter did both things at the same time right as it was passing one of National's runways is so baffling to me. Note that if there had been a plane landing on runway 1 at that moment, these choices still make no sense and could have potentially caused a collision. At that specific point in space, it is particularly important for the helicopter to be lower and further east. So why on earth choose that moment to lift and turn west?

Perhaps we'll never know but it's so frustrating to see it happen and just not understand why it's happening. Even if they had misunderstood where the plane was. The maneuvers still baffle me. Maybe there was some kind of obstacle, like a flock of birds or a drone? I don't know.

I agree there seems to be some pivotal info missing. The helo's maneuver's make no sense. Even if helo thought ATC was referring to the next plane down south, the maneuvers make no sense. They were still trying to cut in front of that plane when the explicit direction was to go behind. And i'm no longer buying that they had the wrong plane in sight, partly because their maneuvers make no sense but also because when ATC first informs them to watch for the AA plane, there was quite a distance between the two and imo there was no way to miss the AA at that point. So the helo would have had to identify the right target then, and then totally forgot where that plane went, which seems impossible to me. These are experienced pilots. they would have known that the AA plane would be much closer to them at the time of second ATC communication.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Trump isn’t to blame, Biden isn’t to blame. Neither is ATC. They followed protocol, even if short staffed, they still did exactly what they should have done. I don’t see how the finger can be pointed anywhere other than directly at the helicopter at this point.

Put aside blame, Trump’s reaction to this crash has been immoral and unconscionable. There are nearly 70 dead Americans, including 3 soldiers (he doesn’t even seem to realize what Commander-in-Chief actually means, he just thinks it sounds cool I guess) and his impulse is to place blame on everyone else and somehow imply that if only we could hire white men all the time, none of this would have happened.

He is a soulless monster, and an incredibly stupid person.

+1 His immediate response was to deflect blame from himself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Trump isn’t to blame, Biden isn’t to blame. Neither is ATC. They followed protocol, even if short staffed, they still did exactly what they should have done. I don’t see how the finger can be pointed anywhere other than directly at the helicopter at this point.

It can absolutely be pointed at the powers that be that allowed the ATC towers to be half staffed; those that have pressed for DCA to be so overloaded with flights; and the military geniuses that decided that the busiest hour at DCA is the time to do night training exercises that cross the flight path (rather than waiting until midnight when there are no flights).

But is the “training exercises” thing just a canard? This helicopter had dropped off a VIP someplace (likely Langley) and had to get back to its base. So they call the return flight a training exercise, even though it’s completely unnecessary - essentially some VIP’s desire to avoid traffic and sit in a black SUV for a few minutes longer led to the deaths of 70 people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Trump isn’t to blame, Biden isn’t to blame. Neither is ATC. They followed protocol, even if short staffed, they still did exactly what they should have done. I don’t see how the finger can be pointed anywhere other than directly at the helicopter at this point.

Put aside blame, Trump’s reaction to this crash has been immoral and unconscionable. There are nearly 70 dead Americans, including 3 soldiers (he doesn’t even seem to realize what Commander-in-Chief actually means, he just thinks it sounds cool I guess) and his impulse is to place blame on everyone else and somehow imply that if only we could hire white men all the time, none of this would have happened.

He is a soulless monster, and an incredibly stupid person.

+1 the depressing thing is his reaction is completely in line with who he has told us he is since long before his first term. So the people who voted for him are cool with this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Trump spent two minutes on plane crash and condolences and 38 minutes blaming Obama and Biden!

And then Fox News spent most of its discussion afterwards praising Trump’s empathy and saying he was in “Consoler-in-Chief” mode and performing magnificently. It’s why the Trump/MAGA fan’s Shield of Stupidity is impenetrable. They feed themselves nothing but lies, and then demand that those of us with functioning brains and eyes call it the truth.

Were they watching a different press conference? There's no way you could have watched it and said he was in any way a Consoler-in-Chief. It was the opposite.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Came out last night that the sidestep to 33 was because ATC had put multiple jets on final for 1 too close. The whole event started long before, with at least one plane refusing to switch to 33. Still primarily the helicopter fault but having 1 tower ATC was a large contributing factor. Many of us in the aviation community have felt this is the exact scenario the multiple near collisions over the last 24 months would bring.

Runway 33 is perfect for regional jets.

200 seaters can’t use it.

Not a big deal. Usually.

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.

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.

A later poster brings up a great point - how often do helicopters violate the 200’ altitude rule in this situation? If the answer is “never”, then yes, I think we can consider it a major transgression. But we don’t know that answer yet. Perhaps, as the later poster said, there was an obstacle to avoid, like a flock of birds. Perhaps the 200’ feet rule was not adhered to all the time, much like most of us don’t adhere to the 55 mph rule on the highway.

The point is, there are too many factors at play to make a determination of blame. I assume you are not a Blackhawk pilot. Because even the Blackhawk pilots out there are saying to wait until we have all the evidence. I suggest we follow their advice.

Actually the Blackhawk pilot in the video on CNN lays the blame primarily on the helicopter. The one thing she says about ATC is that they could/should have confirmed the location of the plane to avoid confusion with any other planes. But she says this AFTER pointing out 1) the Black Hawk should have had two people in back not one and 2) it was at the wrong altitude.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Came out last night that the sidestep to 33 was because ATC had put multiple jets on final for 1 too close. The whole event started long before, with at least one plane refusing to switch to 33. Still primarily the helicopter fault but having 1 tower ATC was a large contributing factor. Many of us in the aviation community have felt this is the exact scenario the multiple near collisions over the last 24 months would bring.

Runway 33 is perfect for regional jets.

200 seaters can’t use it.

Not a big deal. Usually.

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.

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.

Disobeying the command from ATC to wait until the plane passed in front of them was probably the bigger failure.

Ok. I stand corrected. Two major violations on the part of military helicopter.

Reduced staffing of the ATC tower.

Conflicting air traffic patterns that regularly require deconflicting were the norm.

Reduced staffing of the ATC tower.

The staff did exactly what it was supposed to do, so reduced or not, that is not the problem. Red herring.

Conflicting air traffic patterns that regularly require deconflicting were the norm.

For future improved safety, good point. For this situation: red herring. ATC was on top of the situation and gave instructions to avoid collision. Helicopter confirmed.

It's all part of the swiss cheese model. All the failures need to line up.

I don't follow your logic. There weren't holes here. The system worked.

[Anonymous]

One interesting, mostly crazy rumor is that this was a test of self-flying technology - think Waymo but for helicopters. The human crew was there as safeguards. Yes, it’s wild and seemingly far-fetched, but it would at least explain the currently inexplicable maneuvers made by the chopper right before impact. Ever seen a self-driving car trying to handle conflicting data?