Seeing both. If this is correct, \x93PAT25\x94 is typically a US Army VIP transport (\x93Priority Air Travel\x94), and would be a Blackhawk.

Just a quick screen cap from the adsbexchange.com site at the time of the collision. I don't know if it's meaningful but the reported altitudes on the site show a 200' difference in altitude between the aircraft.

Water depth in feet

Very Small Self-Illumination due to the position of the engines ? Are these hard to see from side .


External Lighting

Landing Lights

The position lighting in that diagram is quite inaccurate.

The helicopter’s right turn was directly over a golf course, not a residential neighborhood. It was probably done for noise abatement reasons, because it then turned left and proceeded down more directly over the river.

The golf course is on a peninsula in the river, so the helicopter was flying over water before and after it made the two turns.

The track in your image is not an accurate representation of PAT25s actual flight path. The leaked ATC radar track here and the VASAviation recreation here are more representative. There was no sharp RH turn to cross over the Potomac Park golf courses, it was a gentle RH turn to follow the published Route 1 to Route 4 helicopter transition around DCA.

For a minute there, I misread your post, and thought that Trump was the mentally handicapped diversity hire!

Hanging the ATCO on duty will not bring back the dead, and was not the cause of the problem. Having a civil aircraft flight path immediately overhead a LL RW VFR transit lane that guarantees that there is a loss of separation standards is what set this off, and that has been the case for decades. The crews, pax, ATC officers and families just happened to be the ones that got caught out by the insanity that permitted this track and procedure to exist.

Will Mr T go after the ATC guy? probably, the ATC officer doesn't own a kingdom, a corporation, in fact he is highly unlikely to have a DUI, and certainly won't be a convicted felon. So, I would rate the ATC guy as the convenient fall guy for the US Govt, the FAA who should not have permitted the operation of civil aircraft proximate to military LL traffic, and the US DOD, who will have signed off on the practice of disregarding minimum separation per \xa791.111. As far as right of way, the CRJ was landing, \xa791.113(g) applies, notwithstanding 91.113(d). The CRJ had every reasonable expectation of not sharing a cockpit on short finals to a short runway with crossing helo traffic.

• IDTEK is 1.4nm from touchdown, 490' PA
• the east bank of the river is half way to the runway, ~0.7nm, -> 245'+40' = 285'PA
• the collision occurred around mid river, ~0.3-0.4nm from T/D, or 125+40=165'

How does a 200' transit height down the east side of the river overwater provide any reasonable separation for the guys who were unfortunate last night to be the graphic example of normalisation of deviation, by the US GOVT, FAA, and US DOD.

What is particularly annoying is that the generals and other command staff, and Secretaries of Transport, Defence etc are quite happy to cashier the F-18 pilots who do a slow flypast of an arena, or the T-38 instructors who do the same over some other game, and yet, what is the chance that any general takes responsibility for their part in this sorry state of affairs. responsibility like other stuff, only goes downwards,

Its pretty easy for the guy in charge to defame the ATCO.

Glass houses.

Based on the videos there should have been no difficulty picking out the lights of the CRJ, the helo is approaching it not quite head-on but definitely in the right front quadrant. And the CRJ is above all the city lights.

It is genuinely odd how they flew directly into this thing which must literally have been lighting up the interior of their cockpit. Also, why were they above the 200ft route ceiling?

(Still from the video referenced above by ORAC.)



Helo on the left

I think the off-axis light from the plane is very diminished. I would expect near total falloff by 10\xba off the aircraft centerline, Given the closing rate, that might have only been maximum brightness in the helicopter cockpit in the last 2-3 seconds. They might have been able to see any spill of light on the fuselage from the landing lights, but it would not have been as intense as the above image suggests. Even the spill on the fuselage would normally follow specular reflection laws and also had a small divergence.

The other lights should have been visible from inside the helicopter, but they were likely looking a different direction to monitor other aircraft.

From airnav.com:



This isn\x92t UHF; just a different VHF frequency.

?.

Was there a change to the definition of VHF and UHF that we didn't get the memo on?

Our own versions of the 60 have needs for VHF along with FM, UHF and HF, secure or not. Presumably the USA doesn't use an ICOM A23 or similar when dropping in to some towns local airstrip. ARC-231"s? using a UHF freq when mixing with civil traffic would be self limiting, presumably the tapes will indicate the helo was on VHF freq not the UHF one.

While the CRJ is clearly above the horizon from this point of view, it wouldn't have been quite so clearly above it from PAT25's point of view. Position relative to the horizon could in any case be irrelevant if both helo pilots were using NVG, because the night sky is packed with light sources which clutter the background when amplified: distant aircraft, satellites, planets and stars all compete for attention, while the saturation limit of the display prevents the actual nearest threat from being magnified in proportion.

Here's the more likely issue with NVG. Looking through them is often described as akin to looking through a pair of toilet roll tubes. Field of vision is radically reduced and it takes strong, conscious and fatiguing effort to conduct any kind of visual search.

At the start of the radar recording posted to YouTube by AvHerald, AAL3130 is 10 degrees right of the CRJ from PAT25's point of view, and at a similar elevation angle. Its landing lights would be prominent in NVG and if PAT25's pilots were fixated upon it, they would not have seen the CRJ further left unless actively moving their heads to look for it. PAT25 gradually changes heading by 2 degrees right during the course of the radar clip, almost exactly following the bearing to AAL3130, and this makes it even clearer to me that PAT25 was mistakenly holding visual on it.

Given the ground lights and landing lights, my NVGs would be one big blob of blooming lights and pretty much useless. I am sure mine cost about 1% of what the Army ones do, but still they all have technical limitations. A clear night with a bunch of bright lights is not what they are good at!

With respect, I was flying an A-10 on a bright, sunny day, 40 years ago. A separate A-10 struck me at a geometry and height very similar to this collision. Sun was a factor. The geometry was plotted out at Wright-Pat. The Board set up a flight to confirm the findings of the AF lab. Until the fourth set up, nether pilot, squirming in their seats despite safety zones established before they got sight of each other. What looks obvious to you, most likely did not in the cockpits. At night, it is would far harder to spot each other, lots of stray lights, darkness, attention focused on landing by the CRJ crew, on spotting and tracking the plane they had agreed to visual separation. Trying to maintain visual separation requires constant focus on the plane you’re supposed to maintain separation with.

I have ZERO doubt that either crew had a slightest idea of what was about to happen. I can fill 30 minutes explaining my next 10 seconds but suffice to say, a complete surprise. “WTF was that” will be the short version.

From the radar pics below might the helo pilots have their attention outside of the cockpit searching for the traffic, with no one minding the store (instrument scan break down) they unwittingly climb a 100 feet from their previous 200 feet. Also they are not tracking the helo lane on the rivers east bank. There are times when an auto pilot can earn its keep (altitude maintenance whilst attention is diverted).

Have to ask, why the use of goggles in basically night CAVOK and a densely light city area.

It hasn't necessarily climbed 100 feet. sinc display resolution is only 100ft it could be that it climbed from 240 to 260ft between these two screens. Besides this it also shows how ludicrous this 100ft vertical separation in this case was. Even the ATC screens resolution do not really support this level of separation. 245ft would still have shown as 002 and if in the middle of the Potomac the 3\xb0 G/S would be already lower than this.

The CRJ was undertaking a CVP to RWY01, and was asked to take RWY 33 by ATC. That is kind of messy at that point, the aircraft is changed by inference from the CVP to a visual approach. There is a GPS approach that effectively overlays the CVP, and gives a reasonable intercept of the center-line of RWY33. The crew flew a track that is not far away from this, but it was not required to be followed, then again, there's a fair amount of incentive to not busting airspace in DC. Not required, helpful, but also puts a pilot head down in terminal airspace that the guys have fair landmarks to nav by visually. Whatever they did, they got to finals accurately (a dct to or by visual nav) and on a descent path that is as reqd.

About 80% of all IATA operators would be discomforted by such changes, outside of the USA visual approaches at night have a litany of requirements to adhere to for the purposes of terrain separation, vs Texas big sky rules that do work in the US. In the end, taht didn't cause the accident, it is one of those things that goes with the freedom of flight in the USA.







...

Interesting and fairly well researched NY Times article (the failing kind...)

My thoughts:
I continue to see this as:

• a failure of imagination by command;
• a system failure by command to monitor performance against expected system behaviour;
• an information system failure, the evidence has been in front of those that are charged with having safe systems such as the govt, regulator, DOD, airlines;
• The crew and the the ATC controller, and certainly the passengers are not high in the systemic failures that occur here, I would contend that the crew and the ATC officer are victims of the systemic failures.

________________________

Criss-Crossing Routes in D.C. Airspace Leave Little Room for Error

By Elena Shao , Leanne Abraham , Eli Murray and Lazaro Gamio


The pictures are out of order, the tracks are for "1-Week" of data. The latest NOTAM is a good start, the helo fleet operators may want to revisit the concept of the flyways.

A deadly midair collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and a U.S. Army helicopter near Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington highlights the complexity of navigating an airspace with many civilian and military aircraft.

The airport has three runways that intersect, but only one is used for nearly all of its hundreds of daily flights. With the routes of aircraft routinely criss-crossing one another, there is little room for error as planes descend onto the runways. To stay out of the way of commercial jets, helicopters in this area are supposed to fly along a route designated by the Federal Aviation Administration at an altitude no higher than 200 feet.

Air traffic data from the past week shows that helicopters flying along the Potomac River must navigate amid the takeoffs and landings of hundreds of planes daily. While they are advised by the F.A.A. to stick to a tight air corridor above the eastern bank of the river, data shows that in reality, helicopters can be spotted across the width of the river.

One week of air traffic at Reagan National

Dots show positions of planes during their takeoffs and landings at Reagan National Airport, as well as the positions of helicopters as they traversed the area from Jan. 23 to Jan. 30.
The American Airlines flight was cleared to land on Runway 1 before being instructed by an air traffic controller shortly before the collision to pivot its landing route to the intersecting Runway 33.

The last-minute request to switch runways at Reagan National is “very common,” said Shawn Pruchnicki, a former airline pilot and an assistant professor at the Center for Aviation Studies at Ohio State University, who said he has piloted aircraft into the airport more than a hundred times.

Skies were clear on Wednesday night when the two aircraft collided. But, in case of low visibility, like in poor weather, the F.A.A. has designed “instrument approaches,” or descents that involve a series of steps pilots must follow to maneuver down to the runway safely.

The instrument approach for Runway 1 calls for a descending plane to cross over the helicopter corridor while the plane is at a much higher altitude, somewhere from 620 to 1,700 feet and more than a minute from landing. The approach for Runway 33, however, calls for a plane to cross over the helicopter corridor at a much lower altitude, because a plane is seconds from landing. The clearance between a helicopter in the corridor and a descending plane may be from 100 to 300 feet, which can result in close calls if there are severe fluctuations in the altitude of either aircraft.

Sources: Helicopter route and instrument approach data from the Federal Aviation Administration

Note: An instrument approach is a descent that involves a series of scripted flight maneuvers, with pilots using navigation aids and instruments to reach the runway safely when visibility is low, such as in poor weather.

The [failing] New York Times
Given the clear nighttime weather, the plane’s pilots would not have been expected to initiate an instrument approach to aid their landing, Mr. Pruchnicki said, and instead could have used their vision to guide their descent to the runway. Data on the aircraft’s positions indicates that the pilots’ route was very similar to the one outlined in an instrument approach. For example, the plane maintained roughly the recommended altitude when it made a leftward turn toward Runway 33.

In this case, the Army Black Hawk requested permission to use the route designated for helicopters, meaning that it would keep to the eastern bank of the Potomac and stay under 200 feet in altitude. But the helicopter was at least a half-mile off of the approved route when it collided with the jet, according to four people briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak publicly. The helicopter was also flying above 300 feet, not below 200, the people said.

The crash also renewed questions about the safety of intersecting runways, which the F.A.A. has sought to eliminate or close in recent years in places like Chicago and Dallas because of concerns over congestion on the ground. The setup can increase the workload of the air traffic controller, especially if the two runways are getting used simultaneously for takeoff and landing, said Cyriel Kronenburg, a former air traffic controller and pilot.

An internal preliminary report from the F.A.A., which was reviewed by The New York Times , said that a supervisor allowed an air traffic controller to leave early, sometime before the crash. This left one air traffic controller to manage the dual roles of handling helicopters in the airport’s vicinity and also instructing planes that were landing and departing from runways, according to a person briefed on the matter. While it is within the supervisor’s discretion to combine the duties, that staffing configuration “was not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” the F.A.A. report said.

A Times investigation in 2023 found that the nation’s air traffic control facilities are chronically understaffed , contributing to an alarming number of close calls in the skies and on the runways across the country. Before the plane crash on Wednesday night, there were at least 10 close calls at Reagan National in the last three years that were documented in government records reviewed by The Times.
Additional research by Riley Mellen.
See more on: Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...smid=url-share