Posts about: "NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy" [Posts: 27 Page: 2 of 2]¶

As a non-lawyer and non-American, can I just clarify my understanding of this situation:

• Following the accident, the NTSB recommended that military helo flights not fly that route while 15/33 was in use;
• The FAA concurred, and this was implemented on a temporary basis;
• Section 373 of a bill that has already passed the House would allow military helo flights to resume, as prior to the accident, with 'waivers' to let them fly there as they like;
• The waivers could be granted by many military personnel at different levels of seniority, meaning the waivers would be effectively permanent;
• The NTSB had recommended that military flights in DCA airspace should use ADS-B Out, so that military flights could be detected above 900ft in a busy airspace. The FAA and DoD agreed.
• Section 373 takes away the requirement for ADS-B Out, reducing safety.
• Section 373 gets round the ADS-B Out requirement by specifying that military aircraft should only be required to be able to trigger to TCAS alerts.
• TCAS does not activate at low altitudes, such as when landing, so is useless on the route the helos use to pass DCA.
• Therefore the only reasonable safety measure is not to let military flights onto that route while 15/33 is in use. Section 373 reverses that safety measure.
• 'Someone' sneaked Section 373 into the bill, and nobody knows who or when.
• The bill passed without anybody noticing Section 373.
• So unless the Senate challenges, this legislation will go through
• The legislation would make it harder for families to blame the military/government for the DCA accident, by confirming the correctness of protocols at the time
• Chair Homendy is furious.

If I've got this wrong, can you correct me?

I'm absolutely staggered that something this important could have been 'slipped' into a major piece of legislation, without a final read-through of changes since the last version. Surely there's an audit trail of changes and who submitted or entered them?

Looks basically correct, though I would add some points.

- The bill mandates a "risk assessment", but does not explain what that entails, or how the person making that assessment should be qualifed. A simple check box on the waiver form, "I assessed the risk to civil aviation", would presumably suffice.

- The civil aviation authorities (DOT, FAA, airlines) have no input on these assessments. This is why Homendy calls it a "whitewash", because it sounds like someone cares about risk, but there's no actual assurance the risk would be managed.

- Because these and other important provisions are so poorly defined, Homendy called the section badly written, and she's right. You need to know what the bill is talking about, or the ambiguity leads to court cases.

- we have seen a legislative effort to mandate ADS-B IN, which may be ongoing behind the scenes, and possibly scheduled to a push with the release of the final report. However, ADS-B IN is useless (in this context) if the military doesn't send ADS-B. I think that explains Homendy's level of anger.

I believe, without this provision, the Army needs to fix their ADS-B gear, and go to the FAA if they need a waiver for those top secret missions.

The Senate has passed the legislation with the controversial Section 373 still included. According to The Wall Street Journal, the bill now goes to the President for signature into law. (Also, I should have checked my knowledge of legislative process more thoroughly - my previous post stating a House-Senate conference would follow Senate passage was incorrect.)

But there is other action regarding Section 373. Excerpt from the WSJ article:
________________
"The bill passed despite concern from federal officials and senators over an airport-related measure in the 3,086-page package. Lawmakers said it was unclear how the provision ended up in the final version, and senators quickly approved a bill that would overrule it. That measure still needs to be passed by the House.
......... [ paragraphs with background re: accident omitted ]......

"Anger at Section 373
Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) led a bipartisan effort to remove Section 373 and replace it with the ROTOR Act, which would require aircraft in controlled airspace to be equipped with ADS-B and would impose stricter oversight of military flights in the area. At a press conference Monday, Cruz, Cantwell and families of victims from the collision denounced the section.

\x93There\x92s no reason to have this language in the National Defense Authorization Act unless you\x92re somebody who wants to continue to see letting the military do whatever they want to do in a congested airspace,\x94 Cantwell said.

Trump administration officials have also criticized the measure. \x93It\x92s a safety whitewash,\x94 said Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, last week. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that regardless of any legislation passed by Congress, he will ensure that there is no cross traffic between planes and helicopters.

After the vote Wednesday on the NDAA, Cruz took to the floor and passed the ROTOR Act by unanimous consent, a shortcut to quickly approve legislation when no senator objects. A spokesman for the Defense Department said the Pentagon supports the bill."
________________________

The Board Chair certainly has not pulled her punches in scoring FAA's responsiveness to the investigators' requests for information.

At the same time, Chair Homendy had strong praise for DoT Sec'y Duffy.

This makes for some interesting "political" tensions, doesn't it? A totally restructured, redesigned and reengineered ATC system - really, an almost entirely new Air Traffic Management architecture and all the facilities and technology by which it will operate - is touted by the White House as a project to be completed before the next presidential inauguration day. I think a person can, at the same time, (i) have some empathy for the Secretary who so very early in his service at DoT was confronted with this (except for its reality) unimaginable accident; (ii) have some admiration for the high-wire act of carrying the administration's water but not diverging too far or too obviously from the reality of what an entirely new or almost entirely new ATM architecture in the U.S. will entail; and (iii) have some, if not sympathy, then at least recognition of the challenge of leading (through the office of FAA Administrator, of course) an agency which has had its failures quite so starkly revealed and documented. This is going to be some Report.

A bit off-topic, but nothing I heard today makes it any less interesting to contemplate the question: in the continuing lawsuit, who speaks for the Bluestreak 5342 pilots? They're blamed by the plaintiffs for what they did and what they didn't do, but they are every bit as much victims of this systemic breakdown as the passengers and flight attendants. I would also ask, who speaks for the Army aviators? who also are victims of the systemic breakdown. It all makes me kind of wish Chair Homendy was in the legal profession, tbh.

That's about to be partly answered, with the caveat that it's never in the NTSB's remit to assign blame to individuals. Currently at around #20 of 71 Findings, which will presumably be followed by the Probable Cause statements.

There will follow a raft of Safety Recommendations (I haven't been keeping count of how many have been referred to), though it's not clear whether they will be explicitly listed during the hearing.

"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?