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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Great pilot analysis. He seems fairly confident the Helo simply had the wrong airplane in sight. Literally did not see the other plane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfgllf1L9_4[/quote]

If true it's really hard to understand how they don't see the airplane right in front of them, both on radar and visually. Like I understand what this guy is saying and I assume he knows more than I do about what it's like in the air, but when you look at the radar and see the video footage, it's hard to make sense of because the plane is *right there.*

What is the reason they might not be looking at radar to see the closer plane? There are two pilots and a crew chief on the helicopter. Surely one of them would be in charge of checking radar especially while flying through that particular corridor knowing there will be planes taking off and landing from National. I don't get it.

It also raises the question of whether the night vision goggles they were wearing for training purposes obscured their vision to the degree that it made it more likely they would not see the closer jet and would think the area closer to them was clear. If that's the case, I'm sorry, but this is 100% on the DoD for permitting that kind of training flight near a very busy urban airport. Like completely unacceptable. I understand why an Army pilot would need training with night vision goggles but there is no reason why that should be done in an area where it could jeopardize civilian lives in that way.

So if this is the explanation, it honestly raises more questions than it answers. IMO.[/quote]

I see what you are saying. But the Helo pilot acknowledges at least twice (maybe 3 times?) that he sses the aircraft and assumes responsibility for visual separation. So he's either a terrible judge of distance and incorrectly thought he would clear the plane, OR was focuses on creating visual deparation from a completely different plane. [/quote]

It’s confirmation bias. When your brain thinks you’ve seen “the thing” it stops looking for other things, even if your eyes are on the sky/screen/whathaveyou.

We teach our residents “what do you look for after you see a fracture?” (on X-ray or CT, whatever). The answer is “the second fracture”.

I’ve seen people miss some crazy sh!t bc their eyes and brain are looking at what they think the pathology is, and they’re completely blind to the other issue that’s literally right there.

We take a lot of our error reduction education from the aviation industry, or at least try to. Pilots are better than we are at acknowledging the propensity for human error (probably bc a lot of us doctors are @ssholes).

We cleared our incoming space last night for a mass casualty event in prep for what we hoped were survivors. Awful when no one came. 
[/quote]

This might make sense if there was one pilot on the helicopter. There were two plus a crew chief. You're telling me that three people collectively assumed the CRJ they were told was there by air traffic control was the one *behind* the jet they were about to run into, and not one of them at any point looked at the radar or just out the front of the helicopter and said 'whoa actually there's a plane right in front of us'?

It strains credulity.[/quote]

MD from upthread. I’m not telling you anything about why this particular tragedy happened. I’m saying I also work in a high stress profession with lives on the line and have two decades of experience. And in that time I’ve seen the wrong side operated on, the wrong family informed their loved one was dead, the wrong med given (to fatal effect).

People really want to believe in the infallibility of both systems, and themselves. And truthfully, it’s a wonder things go as right as they do, as often as they do. Because when they go wrong, they go really wrong, as evidenced here.[/quote]

+1. Another MD. If you have a less exigent profession, think about the number of times you have forgotten to send an email, printed out the wrong document, sent a text to the wrong person. Now imagine that it results in death. For those of you who say, well, people in those type of jobs shouldn’t be trying to do two things at once, they should be focused because lives are at stake, that is true. But when every moment is “on”, it’s genuinely impossible for a human being to maintain perfect focus for 60-80 hours a week.

I have also seen many medical mistakes that you wouldn’t think an 6th grader capable of, and the bottom line for the study of iatrogenesis is that you can never count on perfect human decision making. You have to design systems that guide humans to make good decisions and implement redundancies that protect patients and their caretakers. And even then, there is always a leak. And you run up against the harm of delay and inefficiency. In the air, there are fewer people to ask for help and time is short.

I can see that some posters know a lot about aviation, and I am not one of them. I do know that it is far more complicated and nuanced than I can imagine. I don’t think we can overestimate how disorienting it is to be in 3d space. And how unreliable your depth perception is without landmarks like trees and landforms. Planes have collided into mountains, they have stalled out and dropped into the ocean despite warnings of “stall stall stall” being broadcast at the pilots. Read some aviation and military forums and you will see a type of attitude that you also see in medicine - Sh&t happened. Someone messed up. We will study the causes, but it won’t be the last tragedy. [/quote]

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