Posts about: "FAA" [Posts: 275 Page: 14 of 14]¶

48 Safety Recommendations to follow (32 of them addressed to the FAA).

Those can wait until tomorrow ...

I haven't read the report yet but if this is what it concludes, it looks like it's going to be a disappointing read. Aircraft move around and it's not possible to design routes that never intersect....in an environment such as the one in question, ATC should be authorising the aircraft to follow specific routes only when the requisite separation will exist. As I mentioned much earlier in the thread, t he procedures that were applied by ATC immediately before the accident are ‘standard’ and used the world over. None are intrinsically unsafe but their application (as with all the other rules that need to be followed) needs to be appropriate. Visual separation at night is likely to be fine on a clear night with just two or three aircraft in the sky but it’s unlikely to be in any way appropriate in high traffic density environments. Just because there’s a rule that says you can do something doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea. You can have a helicopter route as close to an approach path (or any other route) just as long as you don't allow a helicopter and another aircraft to be in the same place at the same time. Whilst the other mentioned causal and contributory factors are all going to be valid up to a point, fundamentally, the FAA permitted inappropriate application of completely suitable procedures. How and why this situation was allowed to prevail is, I hope, discussed in detail in the report even if it didn't make it into the Probable Cause statement.

"The NTSB determines that the probable cause of this accident was the FAA's placement of a helicopter route in close proximity to a runway approach path."

The PC statement should be read in its entirety, and at the conscious risk of ripe cliche, context matters. The Board did not assign the probable cause to the intersecting flight routes as such. For one thing, Chair Homendy repeatedly since the early days of the Board investigation has hammered upon the fact that the vertical separation was as little as 75 feet without any procedural separation (such as the helos holding at Haines Point). And also since the start of the investigation, time and again the complexity of the DCA airspace, and the (in my strident opinion) very messed up operation of DCA with regard to - as ATC staff testified - just "making it work", have been emphasized. Plus the refusal of FAA ATO to act upon the input from the helicopter working group several years ago, plus FAA's declining to note "hot spots" on charts. And the staffing issues, and lack of fidelity to SMS on the part of FAA and to some extent the Army as well. And there were, quite obviously, many findings of fact which are necessarily part of the context for reading . . . and understanding, the PC determination.

A person need not be an aeronautical engineer, airspace architect, or civilian or military aviator to understand from the get-go that intersecting flight paths might be found across the NAS. I'll stand to be corrected but I do not think - having watched the entirety of the hearing today - that the criticism of the Probable Cause finding is a valid, fair or accurate assessment of the Board's work in this investigation.
WillowRun 6-3

I find it interesting that the actions of the crew of PSA5342 were not included as Probable Cause. How do you think this will affect the lawsuit against them?

Uh, yes, very conspicuous by its absence.

First, I have taken something posted on this thread some time ago as a deeply important article of faith. It was (I'm not quoting it exactly but from memory) "they owned the airspace of the last several hundred feet of the final approach to 3-3." The effort to paint them as negligent by the (estimable and highly successful) plaintiff lawyers frankly makes me want to puke. And I don't care one iota that some or several of those lawyers own their own aircraft and have pilot licenses. They didn't build hours, did they? And, .... it's one thing to try build a case against the airline company, but something else to assail the deceased pilots.

Relatedly, and second, I tend to think the NTSB sees this in somewhat the same way. But the NTSB really excoriated the FAA, and it richly deserved it too. This was - it cannot be said too often AFAI-am concerned - a systemic failure. So between being revolted by the effort to invade the ownership of those last few hundred feet of airspace or flight path of Bluestreak 5342 on final to 3-3 on the night of 29 January 2025, and gunning for bear in the form of a complacent, ridiculously evasive if not obstructionist if not dishonest FAA, the Board had zero-decimal-zero tolerance or inclination for assigning causal factors to two dead pilots on final to 3-3. And that's EVEN IF the airline company should have done more.

Third, and I don't know if it would be viable, but to the extent that the accountability for this accident lies mostly with FAA, and somewhat with the Army pilots and Army, then aren't the pilots victims too, rather than negilgent party-defendants? Shouldn't their estates have legal representation, as a party-intervenor in the case? That is what I meant earlier, who speaks for them? As we all know, the Board does not find fault. I somewhat think the lawyers seeking their contingency fee will probably, I guess, be talking about "fault." But the Army pilots are a bit different. It is distasteful and unseemly to criticize them, as they were in service, and just as much victims of the systemic failures as Bluestreak 5342's two pilots. And Uncle Sam, why, he's already admitted fault.

Fourth and last, yes, the airline company will get raked over the coals for not having outsmarted the failures of the FAA. Jackpot justice, what a way to improve the architecture and operation of the NAS. (With apologies to a very estimable and deservedly highly well-respected airline industry attorney - a real one - who at a conference in Paris oh, a couple three years or so ago, made the point that plaintiff lawyers should not be the ones setting aviation policy through liability lawsuits.)

What good is a lawyer clodding around a pilot's forum on the internet without a rant now and again, eh?

This includes Route 5 along I-395, where helos were routinely flown at altitudes that masked them from the DCA tower and regularly flew outside the authorized route, on the east side of the Pentagon reservation, under the RWR 15 approach. Those ops were flown multiple times per day.

Shows the age of the hardware used in FAA . But using the current method is also a choice ,
The standard way to couple frequencies in ATC is what was avail in DC , you can transmit on both, listen to both simultaneously but not retransmitting on both . potentially reducing eventual blocked transmissions , or at least improves the detection of blocked transmissions .
in ATC , VHF anti blocking systems are being discussed since Tenerife ( 1977) , CONTRAN was the first one , tested but never really implanted , ,later some copies were made , introduced here and there but with a switch to disable, when traffic got too high ,. not sure what the situation is today but I doubt it changed much. ( waiting to be contradicted)
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In the air , most new 8,33 VHFs have a "dual" function , where you can listen to 2 frequency simultaneously , but when the master is receiving , the slave is blocked out , some have a replay function but useless in flight , especially when flying manual VFR at 200 ft .. I doubt this would have made any difference in this case . Plus it would not solve UHF/VHF ground coupling issue.

Whow! Legislation to force the FAA and the US military to fully implement NTSB recommendations ? That will be a first since the grand Canyon collision in 1956 if it really materialize.

I think not.

These are the guys responsible for stalling the ROTOR act that the Senate passed with bipartisan support last year.

https://www.politico.com/live-update...-bill-00764270 .
The journalists asked Homendy about it on the day of the board meeting, and she diplomatically said she'd been busy with the DCA midair documents since the board meeting and final report were coming up, but she also reiterated she wants ADS-B IN on every aircraft, so...

The NTSB has the enviable role of being able to champion safety absent any other consideration. The FAA and politics in general need to balance that with economic, business and other interests, so the outcomes are pretty much guaranteed to be compromises falling short of what we would want.

Yes, it's hard to see how it could work any other way - but it does of course mean that a proportion of NTSB Safety Recommendations will ultimately not be adopted on cost or other grounds.

For example, the FAA are now going to make 25-hour CVRs mandatory on all new-build airliners, as recommended (a while back) by the NTSB, but an accompanying SR that they should also be retrofitted to all airliners currently flying was rejected, not unreasonably, by the FAA.

There is one lawsuit pending in federal district court in Washington, D.C. - although I am fairly certain that it is a consolidation of claims arising from the accident brought by some different groupings of plaintiffs represented, in each instance, by different attorneys. This imprecision of my knowledge of the actual litigation at present, for which I am making no excuses, is another reason why I will have to shift some attention away from other pursuits and spend some time reading court filings on the Pacer U.S. court systems web portal. More on the first reason, later. (And among my other pursuits is actual legal work, and it happens to be in the aerospace domain - transactional, not litigation, however.)

I want to draw three distinctions about the lawsuit arising from the accident. First, insofar as deriding (and mocking, and disliking or worse) the legal profession in general and particular individual lawyers is concerned, I will say in advance that I will shake my head in disbelief if anyone in this forum community believes that litigation against the U.S. federal government relating to this accident is improper or just about lawyers enriching themselves. Essentially every single post here, or at the very least every line of inquiry or analysis or interpretation of the facts as they have emerged, points a very straight finger of blame at the FAA's way of doing things.

Related to that, secondly, in my reference to the advocacy by the parents of Bluestreak 5342's F/O I was not trying to highlight their grief or the grieving process. The point was - and in my mind (capable of being derided because it sometimes is a legal mind to some extent) still is - that although obviously connected to their grief, these survivors also appear to be on a quest to exonerate the F/O's conduct on the final approach in question. I suppose I could hope to have learned more aviation history and be able to recite some, maybe most, of the significant previous accidents in which survivors of aviators, when those aviators were blamed for accidents in which they were killed, sought to clear their names. I don't think the instance of 5342's F/O's parents is unique. I do think it is very relevant to the impact, the implications, of the lawsuit and the Board's report. (More on this also later.)

Soon after the accident, I read about two young attorneys who were passengers on Bluestreak 5342. From memory, they were mid-level associates (maybe four or five years in practice, not yet partners in the firm) in a comparatively small law firm. They were returning to D.C. from taking depositions. I realize no one (or probably no one) on this forum who qualifies for the first Papa letter in the forum title will care much about the travails of young lawyers doing the equivalent of building hours. I will just say that it is hard work, and often far more thankless than digs at the legal profession would have a reasonable person conclude. And ..... I mention these two particular victims of the accident because I could - when I read that news report soon after 29 January - largely relate to where they were in their careers. Say what you will, and say it with as much vitriol as forum rules will allow - their deaths in the accident deserve their day in court, despite digs at lawyers and the profession. Discussion of what is wrong with the court system and the legal process in the United States - well, this isn't Scotus blog or something; that's all another subject. But: I maintain strongly that the attorneys who represent accident victims' families and other survivors of those victims have as much right to attack the responsible parties in court as attorney-bashers do to make fun of their profit motive. I haven't done that kind of legal work. I have met very fine, very excellent attorneys who do, and I think it behooves aviation professionals to recognize that bringing their clients' claims forward to that ultimate day in court is honorable, and necessary work. (This is not to defend jackpot justice awards, or bad-attorney behavior, as if I need to make that clear.)

Third, and the "first reason" I'll need to start eating more time on Pacer, is that I continue to believe that the aviators of Bluestreak 5342 are being taken advantage of by an otherwise respectable legal process. If one believes that they did nothing wrong, then why is it that their estates are not represented in the courtroom in order to defend them? Aren't they implied or implicit defendants, though obviously not named as such? And as I said in an earlier post, one could argue, 'well, the Army pilots aren't there to defend themselves, and they're getting pretty seriously wrung out as having primary responsibility - in addition to the systemic factors of course - and these three deceased U.S. Army aviators, they don't have an active defense in the courtroom either, do they? So why should the airline pilots have one?" Pretty simple answer: the U.S. federal government admitted liability, so the Army pilots - admittedly indirectly - have had their possible defense as pilots waived out from under them.

But since I haven't been delving into all the various court filings which by now presumably have piled up during pre-trial discovery, it is possible that the Bluestreak 5342 aviators' estates have retained their own counsel and are seeking to intervene in the case. I'll find out. Though I should apologize for repeating myself, and while admitting that intense study of intracacies of federal procedure was something I left behind when I picked up the J.D. (after all, reading Advisory Committee Notes about amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence, it's fascinating stuff, amiright?), the gross unfairness of alleging negligence against the pilots who do not have their own legal representation in the case strikes me as an error and an injustice. And I am not a stranger to dealing with insurance carriers who want to settle, while the client wants to fight on - if the pilots' estates had separate representation, their lawyers would need to make sure their cowboy or hiking boots are on snuggly - the stuff to be thrown at them by the airline's corporate types and the insurance carrier attorneys who mostly call the shots, would seem likely to be intense.

Almost last, with mega-billions coming out of Congress for a totally new ATC system, it continues to seem obvious to yours truly that in designing it, and then doing all the many steps of implementing it, the lessons learned from the Board report will have a window of opportunity not usually present in the U.S. NAS. It should not go to the same fate of being ignored or shrugged off as so many Board reports have suffered. If the litigation - though of course separate from the Board work - creates leverage for such a beneficial outcome, I would say "Who wants it?" (with apologies to WSJ sportswriter extraordinaire, Jason Gay - about the U.S. Women's Hockey Team and the Wisconsin Badgers Women's Hockey Team as well). Or in less cryptic terms, Go fo It.

Last, Uberlingen. One of the Skyguide officials who was deeply involved with the aftermath of the accident delivered several presentations about it, most all of which went into some depth, during my academic residence at that certain Air and Space Law graduate law degree program located in Montreal, Quebec. Those presentations, as the old saying goes, "left a mark."

I suspect there are very few reading this thread who are not appalled at the suggestion of negligence on the part of the CRJ pilots.

419 pages ! , initially just read the first 30 which contains the resume of what happened ( nothing really new ) and their recommendations ( 50 of them) , the interesting part : They are hitting some nails right on the head , lots of very good points , but most of them not really feasible. Looks like a painting of paradise , but who is going to perform the actions required and who has the power to force the FAA to go in that direction ? , and at which costs ? Reducing traffic to a safe level ? That alone , while it of course makes lot of sense, will requires a stronger regulator that will be backed up by the government that will choose the NTSB recommendations against the usual lobbies .. .
Curious to see the political reactions .
As to forcing DOW to change things as recommended , I have my doubts too.

On the positive side , from the recommendations listed , it looks like a very good report overturning the right stones and telling it like it is , looking forward to read the rest of the report later.

The NTSB is aware of the costs and the "balance" is that people die vs. an extra 0.1% for the corporate bonuses.

The caption says it is from a hearing last week: