WASHINGTON D.C. | Commercial Jet vs Military Helicopter Over Potomac

[akham]

[akham]

Originally Posted by CombatVet

So I live less than a mile from where this occurred and I am also a licensed pilot...

Thank you for these comments and insight.

Usually the helo traffic from Bolling is instructed to quickly cross the Potomac and the responsibility is largely theirs to keep an eye on the traffic to DCA (which is why they asked if they had a visual)

The helo was following Route 1 which runs down the east side of the river. PAT25 was not following that route very accurately, at times straying somewhat to the west of it. I doubt that was a primary cause of the accident, but it may have had some relevance in a secondary way because the further east the helo is the more likely there is to be vertical separation with a/c approaching DCA.

My suspicion (it's still early into the investigation) is that we are going to find that several things came together at the wrong time but I doubt that any sort of "pilot error" is responsible.

We don't know the full story yet, but there is clear evidence of pilot error on the part of the military pilots. For a start, Route 1 has a maximum altitude of 200ft and the helo was above that (350ish ft). Plus, a bit sloppy on horizontal position as above.

The controller should have noticed that PAT25 was too high and didn't. Sounds like there may be workload issues there. A retired Blackhawk pilot has said that the controller should have been more specific about where the potentially conflicting traffic was (e.g. by specifying a direction relative to the helo), which makes sense in busy airspace.

The retired BH pilot also said that she thought that there should have been at least 4 crew (2 pilots, 2 crew chiefs) so the crew chiefs could keep a lookout on both sides of the aircraft to contribute to situational awareness. If the 2 pilots were using NVGs that would seem to be even more important.

I had 2 friends ive known most of my life on the CRJ returning from KS and am still in shock that this happened.

I'm sorry to hear that. I wish you, and their families, all the best.

And thank you for your comments.

[Roosta]

Originally Posted by kellyhound

64 people on the plane, 3 on the helicopter.

So far 19 bodies have been recovered from the River.

I'm afraid there will be no survivors.

Situational Awareness was Definitely out the Window on this one & so close to the airport too.

They say that you start to relax getting so close to home & this also applies to cars with the majority of accidents happening within 1 mile of home base.

Sad Event !

[Gore Whore]

Originally Posted by Roosta

Situational Awareness was Definitely out the Window on this one & so close to the airport too.

They say that you start to relax getting so close to home & this also applies to cars with the majority of accidents happening within 1 mile of home base.

Sad Event !

Taking off and on approach to the airport is when pilots are the least relaxed and when things are most likely to go wrong.

[Xploit Machine]

Investigators Found Black Box Of American Airlines Plane

31.01.2025 - Investigators on Thursday (Jan 30) found the black box of an American Airlines passenger plane, which collided with a Black Hawk helicopter and crashed in the Potomac River in Washington. The crash claimed 67 lives. US President Donald Trump launched a political attack by blaming the hiring policy based on ethnic diversity championed by former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama of the Democratic party as the cause of the incident.

Mr Trump's politicisation of the tragedy comes as the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it had found cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders from a Bombardier jet operated by a subsidiary of American Airlines, which collided with a Black Hawk military helicopter on Wednesday.

"The recorder is at the NTSB laboratory to (conduct) the examination," the agency said in a statement to AFP.

According to a report by the New York Times (NYT), a staff shortage occurred at the control tower at Reagan National Airport, where the plane was in the process of landing when the crash occurred. The NYT quoted an earlier report from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as saying that at the time of the tragedy, only one person, rather than the two, was operating both the flight routes of the plane and the helicopter.

A massive fire erupted in the sky and both planes crashed into the frozen Potomac River, leaving rescue teams with the difficult task of finding bodies in the dark and cold. More than 40 bodies had been recovered as of Thursday afternoon, according to American media reports. The accident was the first major crash in America since 2009 when 49 people were killed near Buffalo, New York.

Reagan National Airport is a major airport located just a short distance from downtown Washington, the White House, and the Pentagon. The airspace is very busy, with civilian and military aircraft always in its airspace. However, Biden-era Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg described Mr Trump as a vile because when the families of the victims were grieving, he should have been in the lead, not lying.

Berita asal https://berita.mediacorp.sg/dunia/pe...irlines-911231

[William May]

My only contribution to this will be to state that when flying, if you are on a collision course, the aircraft you are approaching seems to STOP MOVING relative to you. In fact, THAT is how you diagnose that you are on a collision course.

You can test this out on a regular road where cars intersect.
If you adjust your driving speed so the other car DOES NOT CHANGE POSITION RELATIVE TO YOU, you have established a collision course and will hit them when you meet.

As a result of that phenomenon, it may be that the helicopter pilots just saw lights that appeared fixed relative to them, and thus did not actually see that they were on a collision course.

If you look at the views of the airport, there are a LOT of lights visible, and it would be hard to pick just ONE of them out and know what it was in relation to the pilot viewing.

Just my two pfennigs

[akham]

Originally Posted by William May

My only contribution to this will be to state that when flying, if you are on a collision course, the aircraft you are approaching seems to STOP MOVING relative to you. In fact, THAT is how you diagnose that you are on a collision course.

The same is true for shipping of course.

Its hard to see blinky lights at night. Remember the Tokyo crash last Jan where the landing aircraft couldn't see the smaller aircraft parked on the runway....

[Myristylbenzylmorphine]

A new angle of the crash

[akham]

[Tony76]

Pretty decent quality footage on X here - https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1885303713968869514

Not sure if someone knows how to download X videos, but that is pretty remarkable footage that maybe you could consider adding to your thread, HIGHTECHDUDE.