I'm still wondering if the pilots of the Blackhawk were looking at flight 3130 when they said they had visual on 5342.
02Pilot said:In that airspace, I doubt there will be significant regulatory changes.
Oh I can see some changes. At a minimum I would expect that they'll hold the river helicopter traffic when any plane is at a certain point of the approach. It's pretty easy to make helicopters hover in place for 30 seconds.
In reply to VolvoHeretic :
I believe that is what is represented in the YouTube link above. In those cases it was airliners descending over these routes a bit away from the airport, and in each case there appears to be at least 400 ft separation. Still bad, but still not right off the end of the runway.
I am suspicious that since that airplane was originally intended to land on Runway 1, and was diverted to 33 (which is being said, not sure) that the controller had assumed good clearance for 1 (helicopter was to the right of the decent path and farther away), but did not consider the radically different situation of 33 (which causes it to cross the decent path).
Of course, as 02 pointed out, this may be a standard procedure (shoot for 1 then divert). Either way, a bit of a recipe for confusion. Especially if the controller is a bit over worked, and having to work two frequencies (the helicopters apparently are on another frequency). The controller was clearly aware of the situation at least a bit before it since he called for the helicopter to maneuver behind the jet, but really seems like WAY to late and probably should have called for the jet to abort (my guess).
That said, I have great confidence in the NTSB, they are insanely thurough with these investigations. I suspect this one might go a lot faster (at least the initial report) than most since most of their investigations generally require finding, then sifting though thousands of little parts looking for failures (which almost certainly has no factor here... but they will certainly still look). The black boxes will likely only be useful to show actual altitudes (and maybe indicate if the helicopter was above the required maximum height). The cockpit voice recorders might be useful in showing any distraction in either cockpit.
In reply to aircooled :
It's very common for smaller jets like CRJs and ERJs to fly up the river to RWY 01 and then be told to circle to 33. I don't recall ever seeing something bigger, like a 737 landing on 33. That's one runway you don't want to land long on, because there's water just beyond the perimeter fence.
Did the controller ever call out the helicopter traffic to the CRJ? I don't think I heard anything when I listened to the audio. It looked like the CRJ was making the left turn to final when they hit, so the CRJ crew wouldn't have been able to see the UH-60 at that point.
I don't know the naming logic for runways but I like how if you are taking off to the NW on that runway 33 and you hit a flock of geese and lose both engines and have to crash land, you either hit a power plant or the Pentagon. 
Edit: Or that fateful bridge from that other runway 1.
VolvoHeretic said:I don't know the naming logic for runways but I like how if you are taking off to the NW on that runway 33 and you hit a flock of geese and lose both engines and have to crash land, you either hit a power plant or the Pentagon.
Runways are named based on the compass heading for the direction you travel on them, divided by 10. So runway 33 is at 330 degrees (magnetic), a north-northwest heading. The same physical piece of tarmac has a different name if you're going the other direction -- add or subtract 18 from it (180 degrees) and you end up with runway 15.
As for the Pentagon, I wonder if they actually do departures in that direction? In the post-9/11 world there are flight restrictions over those sorts of buildings, so maybe they just don't use it for takeoffs (or 15 for landings).
From what I've read in various places, this is starting to sound a lot like the typical bureaucratic "normalization of deviance". They've been having near-misses between helicopters and aircraft for years, with controllers routinely scolding military pilots for busting the altitude limits. Complex, risk-prone systems like air safety are built with multiple layers of redundancy to prevent tragedy, but as limits are exceeded and nothing bad happens, people stop seeing those limits as being actually important. Do that long enough and the odds catch up with you and suddenly 60+ people are dead. NASA lost two shuttles this way.
Learjet crashed in Pa. Probably not related to any ATC shortages or anything, but might as well mention it here
https://abcnews.go.com/US/philadelphia-small-plane-crash-roosevelt-mall/story?id=118330351
A medical transport plane, carrying a child, her mother and four other people, crashed in Philadelphia Friday night near a busy mall, killing all aboard and resulting in an untold number of injuries on the ground.
The Learjet 55 crashed near the Roosevelt Mall in northeast Philadelphia around 6:30 p.m. after departing from Northeast Philadelphia Airport, according to authorities.
The exact number of the injured is not yet available, officials said.
"Many people on the ground – in parking lots, on streets, in cars and homes in the area – were injured; the number of injured is yet to be released but the information shared at this time reports that a number of people were transported to Temple University Hospital, Jeans Campus in the Northeast," the office of Mayor Cherelle Parker said Saturday.
They still use 33 for departures. You fly runway heading, so you pass almost right over the Pentagon and fly up the river. I thought they used to have an ILS to 15, but it looks like it's just an RNAV/GPS approach.
It will be interesting to learn what happened with the Learjet. On the audio, everything sounded normal and they went in right after tower told them to switch to departure frequency. It looked like they went straight in.
My heart goes out to all of the people in these crashes. I've seen a fatal crash and have lost friends in crashes, so every time I read about another one, the room gets a little dusty.
I'm not instrument rated, never flown in DC airspace, never been an ATC, and certainly never flown a military helicopter. So, my opinion is worth very very little, my knowledge of the factors at play are shallow, at best, and I recognize that I only know what I know about this from secondary sources.
But man, it sure seems like a helicopter was on an assigned route, that if adhered to, would have provided vertical separation (if only barely), and the same helicopter explicitly requested visual separation, and twice indicated traffic in sight. How is this not on the helicopter?
Spearfishin said:But man, it sure seems like a helicopter was on an assigned route, that if adhered to, would have provided vertical separation (if only barely), and the same helicopter explicitly requested visual separation, and twice indicated traffic in sight. How is this not on the helicopter?
Aviation accident investigations are not as simple as "whose fault is it". They talk about the "swiss cheese theory" because the safety system is designed to try to prevent single screwups from killing people, and as a result it usually takes multiple screwups that happen to align with each other. The objective of an NTSB investigation is not to assign blame but to learn about everything that happened and identify ways to improve things so that it doesn't happen again.
So in this case they will be looking at not just whether the pilot was too high, but also things like why was the helicopter route situated that close to the approach patterns, why was he unable to maintain the separation visually, whether the ATC staffing was adequate, was there more the controller could have done to prevent it, whether or not the automated collision avoidance system could be improved to handle cases like this, and probably a dozen other things we're not aware of right now.
I wanted to back Cordus up on the fact that these reports are more about Factors that lead to this crash, not really blame, especially considering that most all crashed result from multiple factors. E.g. one factor will very likely be failure to maintain visual separation by both pilots, but you can hardly put as much expectation on the jet since it was on a final for landing and had it's landing lights on. Also consideration that the helicopter pilot likely thought they were maintaining separation, by seeing the other aircraft approaching from ahead, not the one to their left.
Another factor will almost certainly be the helicopter not maintaining altitude maximums, but it should also be understood, that staying spot on an altitude when under manual controls is not as easy as you may think under most conditions. When that condition is flying low, at night, while trying to look out for traffic, wandering off an altitude can be very easy (still a factor, but not a hard blame). Because of these "understandable" variations from perfection, that is where the (sometimes rather large) "buffers" in the regulations come from, and why the concept that a few hundred feet of separation would in anyway be considered reasonable is so absurd to me (not saying it is, just that I would be amazed if it was).
In reply to aircooled :
I think there's some semantics being focused on. My CFI liked to use NTSB final reports as learning tools. Most of them in "probable cause and findings" start with "PIC of ABC's failure to do XYZ". Call that "blame" or call it "probable cause".
Doesn't make it malicious, nor does it mean it was the only factor; indeed there's gotta be a lot of holes lined up to use the Swiss cheese analogy, but ultimately there tends to be a primary responsibility assigned after these things and then a bunch of contributing factors.
Spearfishin said:Doesn't make it malicious, nor does it mean it was the only factor; indeed there's gotta be a lot of holes lined up to use the Swiss cheese analogy, but ultimately there tends to be a primary responsibility assigned after these things and then a bunch of contributing factors.
This is more than just semantics. NTSB reports are not about "responsibility" or "blame", and in fact the conclusions drawn by these investigations are not admissible in court. The investigations are about identifying lessons to be learned to improve safety for the future.
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
Understood. I think maybe I'm just not quite speaking the same language, or coming at this from the same perspective.
I was just offering my barely informed $0.02, as I would to any gathering of friends when discussing current events. Mean no harm or offense. Purely an opinion on what I've seen so far in the news.
In reply to Spearfishin :
You're good. The aviation mindset is hard to explain. I guess the best example is when I had a pilot threaten me when I grounded his A-10 for what I felt was a safety issue. He didn't agree. I wasn't willing to allow him the 1% chance of crashing. I won. Would he have been ok? Probably, but that one factor in his flight was something under my name and I did what I was supposed to do.
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