Posts by user "canigida" [Posts: 12 Total up-votes: 18 Page: 1 of 1]¶

no, all the local noise abatement procs are viewable online and that's not list that's. Hanes Point golf is not a gated course community or anything it's a muni golf course on national park land that's both run-down and charmingly relaxed place, but there's no residences, or anything living thing at night- just a big empty parking lot around there, and to the east is DoD property

good lord, from your pontification, you'd think that this was an exec airport for the ruling class. Tens of millions of people use it every year. Including me. It's revenues actually subside KIAD, and is the preferred airport for many, including me. I would prefer it remain open. "buy what about the children"... etc. etc. well, realistically you have a better chance of getting abducted by aliens than dying at KDCA. No, I am not in cahoots with the government elite
I have flown into KDCA , and traversed the inner FRZ Potomac TRACON airspace more than a thousand hours. It's an intense place (go listen to liveATC tower freq , every day it's "AA123, traffic on 36 inch final, cleared to takeoff rwy 1, NO DELAY, EXPEDITE!", but its not some cowboy wild west. Everybody keeps it together, even the GA folks are sharp. When I've flown out of Ft. Meade and you stay gotta keep your head under the B shelf because there's SWA fights a couple of hundred feet above. You can literally see SW pax in their window seat. On departing KCGS, I've been maybe 20 seconds delayed switching from CTAF to Potomac Approach checkin, and they told me they were panicking and just about to pick up The Red Phone to send me oblivion.
From friends, I know of three separate DC area military units doing fixed wing VIP transports, and I guess the Army also does helo VIP. They have done this for decades, there's an enormous amount of flights. It all seems to work well enough.
And for folks saying "they shouldn't have been doing training", well I can assure you it was not an initial training event. I've flown in Marathon KS, next to the Army blackhawk flight school, and that and their other two schools is where you go to train - wide open spaces. I know someone who was Marine 1 and they do sim training to the WH s. lawn, and then they obviously do a real checkout (without the POTUS) at the real thing.

Everytime there's a crash, this place is flooded with knee jerked, all ill considered. I bike past the KDCA all the time and I'm pretty sure there's no Berm of Satan, but I'm sure the mob will latch on to some new 'smoking gun'

good lord, I live here, I am a nobody, and I use the airport and I prefer it's kept open. My logbooks claim I've flown into there and spent thousands of hours in the Potomac Tracon Class B and inner DC FRZ and it's no Cowboy wild west or accident waiting to happen. I know several of the controllers in my sector personally, they are the real deal.
I know exactly where the congressional parking lot is (it's under the elevated metro tracks - it's easy to identify since it's the only lot with American cars in it) It's not that great of a location. I went to the U DC A&P school and as a student, I literally had better parking spot.
This seems to be a lot of stuff pouring from people's heads totally unrelated to the actual event

I've conducted "training flights" where my "Student" is a carrier-qualified F/A-18 commander, or a 11,000 hr tripple-7 captain, or an one star USAF general. It's a pretty useless description, since these folks were all better pilots than me and I wasn't 'training' them, we were doing a recurrent, required function. The Army is not doing simple training in the DC FRZ. They have lots of open space in Ft. Reiley and other places for actual flight training. This crew was likely not some newbies, they we likely picked as the best performers from their unit and doing recurring or standardization 'training' . My neighbor does Marine 1 and he got picked outta 100 pilots and they have a sim and a training card for 30 scenarios, but they still have to do real "training" airwork in the FRZ, including on the WH S. lawn. This is not some cowboy airspace or deathtrap that you would not want to "risk" a "training flight"

There's no reason to keep DCA open other than the people like me who lived here found it a convenient and useful airport. That's enough reason. I don't care what you and the other 10 people grasping at straws feel about keeping it open or not. If you don't want to fly here, don't. MYOB.
No, DCA not a miserable experience. IAD, with it's peoplemover (a 60 year old giant bus that you have to board after an 11 hour flight), however is most certainly pure misery.
The reason that KIAD has "plenty of room" is that it's landing and other fees are exorbitant which causing airlines to loathe it, leading to poor flight options and ridiculous prices. Up until 2024, DCA had been literally subsidizing Dulles for decades from their revenue (they're both in the same airport and both are in Virginia.) since customers prefer it. Without the subsidy, prices are just going to get worst.
The operation of DCA is a decision for Virginians (there are no 'DC' airports) It's not some grand political trick to keep it open.
Getting kinda bored with this whole "this whole airspace and DCA facility is a deathtrap" meme. I've been in and out of KDCA and flown at least a thousand hours in the DC FRZ and it's no wild west death trap. stop with the nonsense, please.

"It's difficult to see aircraft at night against a backdrop of a city with thousands of lights." - DC isn't actually that big of a city or that brightly lit, and it seems the UH-60 was heading south west, well away from DC toward a not very dense part of suburban N. Virginia. Mostly they would see a very wide part of the Potomac river ahead, and in the distance on the western shore is a Daingerfield island (US park service land and mostly unlit), the GW parkway going N/S for a couple hundred meters (all the parkways are dangerously unlit IMO) followed by some low level typical suburb condos of a couple stories towards Potomac Yard, which other than street lights or the sign from Target is not very bright. I kayak there all the time and there's nothing much to see looking westward. I've been out of KVKX at night and can see that area and it's not dazzling.

"Radar useless as the aircraft are too low." - It seems there's valid radar returns from both aircraft. the FAA has a good diagram of the Potomac TRACON radar sites, about 10 different radars, and having visited the TRACON several times, they readily explain there's another nearly facility that is a duplicate of their radar feed, but for national security. I assume there's coverage till the river service for security to prevent someone from sneaking up the river with bad ideas

"Radio situational awareness compromised as chopper on UHF, airliner on VHF. " - I fly in the area and in my experience everyone is on the same VHF, they might be also duped to UHF and can hear everybody on my handheld. You hear AF-1 all the time on freq.

"The chopper is under VFR, stooging along a river at 200 ft and avoiding traffic" - Most of the area NE of the airfield in a prohibited area, and there's a lot of military installations within 5 miles of DC that they are shuttling around, so that path seems perfectly acceptable given the numerous constraints. there's nothing wrong with a helo corridor as long as you stay within it and maintain the prescribed altitude. Also, it's not like KDCA is some secret place, the flight paths are pretty well known if that's where you work. It's popular to sit in parks on both ends and watch the planes, there's literally millions of local people that know exactly the planes are coming and going on both directions. so if you're a helo there, you know where the hot spots are. Likewise, its not just any helo in that area, everyone is vetted, fingerprinted in the inner FRZ.

" on approach to Reagan by visual clues alone" - The UH-60 was not going to DCA, the assumption was it was using the helo route 4 corridor. All the UH-60Ls I've seen have full glass with moving map and I'm assuming a magenta line for the helo corridor.

Fun Fact - Calling it "Reagan" will get you tarred and feathered in the area. Folks refuse to utter the name and for years (decades) the Metro refused to rename the station until legally forced.

uh your 'no' is to what - explain are you contradicting me - when/where did I say MWAA or either facility was owned by the state of Va?
I've had SIDA badges at both (and my cred is current for IAD with the all MWAA blah blah on the reverse - bonus: 10% off overpriced airport food!!!) and i've have sat through every one of MWAA's horrible annual training videos, etc., so I'd like to think I know how the airport auth works pretty well by now after I've been in every crappy admin corner of both facilities in the last 14 years .
Thanks for going through all the hard work to c/p wikipedia, but no, unless the people of N. Va (who have most if the votes in Va.) want to close DCA, it's never happening. It's a local decision. This evening, the local news station asked a bunch of people at the DCA "does this change anything for you flying out of here" and every one of them said "nope, not a bit" - they were not members of congress, they were a very cross section of the very diverse local pop
Last I heard, DC doesn't have a vote in congress, and to my knowledge, all the changes at DCA in the past 60 years have been the result of a line item change in the 5-year FAA reauth, not from the board. The board MWAA minutes are online, go see for yourself all the power they're throwing down, making their will known /s

I don't think any armchair airspace designer on this forum is going to have any impact on this. I can't remember seeing any of them when I worked at MITRE, but I guess they're the experts now . I'm hearing a lot of uninformed people saying 'this was an accident waiting to happen' - well, no it wasn't. Not unless you think all the other helo corridors like Hudson River are. It's a hectic place but no deathtrap. a lot of non-PP nonsense here.

sorry if I was not clear. What I am saying is that what you are saying makes zero sense to me. PAT25 was evidently following southbound on helo route 4 midway down the hains point, and then you are saying for some reason they cross over the peninsula a 1/3 mile before it ends, the traverse the peninsula east to west and you claim the turn " was probably done for noise abatement reasons" , . That makes no sense at all. Why would you cross a peninsula to abate noise if you're already over water? Listening to the tower and previous Potomac sector recording they were handed off from, I don't hear any atc instruction to turn/ deviate. . And there's nobody living on the other east side of the river to protect from the noise, it's also military (ft. mcnair, Nat'l War College, etc.) . there's not really anyone living in that part of the District south of SE waterfront.
And it's pretty clear there's no turn at all in the first place, and that since there's no ads-b, this data point is an interpolation error. there's several other PAT ATC tracks from a the last few weeks doing the same training loop and the are all keeping in the rt4 and keeping 300ft msl

yes yes, of course, you are right! - some mysterious powerful force other than the state that the airport is actually located in (Va); the state in which the overwhelming majority of the population consider it useful and convenient; and safe (other than an Army helo (evidently) running into a CRJ cleared to land); and overwhelmingly want to keep it open; which has operated well for a lifetime, etc. etc. - despite all of this, there will somehow be an external force from ( perhaps inspired by these fine well-reasoned non-pp posters) which will decide to close this "deathtrap" of an airport real soon. Hmm, ok.

You seem to be pretty sure of that! Well, you know what's so great about the internet gambling boom? , you can get someone to escrow any wager with full faith of both parties ensured? The agreement completely transparent, bonded, and binding. Since your clear that the will of the people of Virginia will be overridden and this is this is going to be shut down as a deathtrap in the next few years, how much do you want to bet that KDCA will remain open in 5 years and operating at the essentially the same capacity ? does US$50k work for you? You're pretty confident that someone is going to ignore what the people who live there want, but just to sweeten it, I'll give you 2:1 odds. Seems like easy money!

yeah, just as a PSA to nix the conspiracy nutjobs in the bud with actual facts that there's no grand deep state acting to quash this info
DoD Instruction 1300.18 - Jan. 8, 2008

4.4.3. In cases where Service members or DoD civilian employees have been reported
DUSTWUN , EAWUN, or missing under potentially hostile situations, casualty information will
not be released to the media or the general public until 72 hours after the NOK has been notified
or the combatant commander clears the information for release.

[note, according to the news page on army.mil, the soldiers' status is DUSTWUN ]
https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/D...di/130018p.pdf

there's no non-local civil traffic within the FRZ per 93.341 without a TSA waiver but the DoD has can fly who they deem fit. I find it hard to believe that at least the IP was not very familiar with the landmarks and route. It appears that CWO Eaves was the IP overseeing the currency check for Pilot2. I assume IP knew that area very well to conduct that assessment. From a couple weeks earlier, it seems there's a training route loop https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/map/PAT25 for a previous PAT25 . I would think it reasonable that this is the training card (or some similar route) that they briefed and were meant to be following. IMO there's a reasonable chance CWO Eaves was also IP on that prior .

I fly in the DC FRZ and you hear the helo folks on freq all day, ( a lot of Coast Guard, various DoD, various fed LEO, some medivac and lifeguard) and they all know every inch of the area . Also surprising to listen to is that helo pilots through the FRZ are pretty much self-directed and entrusted with self sufficiency that fixed wing traffic is not . They've all been vetted, fingerprinted, have their own squawks etc and so ATC gives them a lot of respect. They announce intentions to 'fly route X' or 'request direct Andrews', and ATC is able to understand their intentions and clears a path and approves - and then you don't hear a peep from them until they reach the endpoint - then they announce next intention like "Field in sight'" -> "contact Andrews tower on..., Freq change approved" -> "good day" and the whole 20 minutes had a total of three radio calls. .

They seem to all know what they're doing and it's nobody's giving off the vibe that it's any kind of initial training for anything - you don't hear ATC having to telling them to 'say altitude' or 'turn left 10 degrees' or really anything, and you don't hear the pilots giving half arsed requests. [This level of trust might have had consequences, but I'll defer my judgement]

For all helo pilots local knowledge is a survival. Lots of civi helos in DC are based out of KFME, and the ones I know every inch of territory, every local landmark, overpass, bridge, body of water within the DC beltway like the back of their hand - one guy knows off the top of his head if every single road is asphalt or concrete, light or unlight, etc. Similar experience when I met news chopper folks based in the Valley - they knew hundreds of places in greater Los Angeles that I never even heard of.

Landmarks in DC are hard to miss, basically every one knows where the WW bridge, Hanes Point, the route of the Potomac, etc.. DCA is strangely popular for plane watching (there's rec areas to view at each end) so an absurdly large number of non-av people in the area are familiar with how the traffic flow works. I kayak right below the crash area and when wind is out of North, you can see landing lights of 7+ sequenced arrivals coming up the Potomac, it's basically impossible to miss the incoming landing parade and even non-av people get the concept. The WW bridge would seem to me a good point of reference for a callout, everybody knows where to immediately look. It's hard to think that the IP didn't understand local reference of the ATC traffic advisory.

Not necessarily disagreeing that it's not the most ideal operation, but I am not sure if operators consider it messy. This is extremely common. With winds from N in VFR, there's usually just the one sequenced traffic flow coming north up the river, and then on final ATC is giving clearance to landing visual or ILS RWY1, or depending on timing, sidestepping some RJ traffic over to a visual RWY33. You can look on Flightaware for the that airframe and a week or so ago prior to mishap, they landed 33 not once but twice (once in dark) the same day.

Having coffee this morning with my friend (my old CFI) who's a FO for one of the other American Eagle providers based at DCA, his opinion was that since that 5,200 ft on RWY33 is sufficient for an RJ, the primary reason he gets sidestepped to 33 about half the time is that it ends very close to the American's regional jet terminal and that using RWY33 saves wasting a couple hundred bucks to taxi for no reason which adds up with their large amount of activity. I don't fly there but as pax I on an RJ, with those winds in VFR, in my experience we landed 33 maybe 40% of the time.

My friend doesn't speak for all the RJ pilots obviously, but he didn't consider this sidestep to 31 to be at all unexpected or in his mind adding any significant risk and mentioned it was part of his localization checkout (his company has specific ground and line training required for the airfield). Most tellingly, he literally said it was not on his Top Ten gripes about DCA (he likes to complain a bit &#128512