Chances are they had (surface) water rescue personnel there before divers. I do both water rescue & dive rescue. Our rule of thumb is one hour; after that we change from rescue to recovery mode. Cutting into that time is to get on scene, get suited up, get into a boat & motor over to the area you want to dive. I’ve just heard that they have three debris fields where they’ve found 18 bodies but that doesn’t mean that the plane is directly below that debris field, so add a couple of minutes to do a sonar search from those locations to figure out where the fuselage is. We’re now approaching three hours after the incident; realistically, any survivors have been pulled out by now.
Between the darkness, the frigid water, the river current, the scattered debris fields, the multiple boats and search teams working, I worry about the welfare of the rescue divers now. There can’t possibly be any survivors now, three hours after that horrific crash, so it’s recovery now, and is it really necessary to continue at this pace?
I don’t know either.
From a live updates page on AP.com:
A lot of aircraft in a relatively small area and some errors on the part of several parties is generally how these things occur.
TV news this morning reported the water in the Potomac are around 35 degrees, which is certainly cold enough to be fatal in a very short period of time.
Yes, otherwise on landing it would alert about the proximity of a planet about to make contact.
Thread’s over! Trump knows who caused the accident, no need to call in the NTSB, he’s got this:
The airplane was on a perfect and routine approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they say the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!
VASAviation has the ATC audio.
My very early, wild-ass speculation:
Almost certainly, the Army helicopter was in the wrong place. I’d say 60% chance the copter pilot made a mistake; 35% chance air traffic control made a mistake (in respect to the copter); and 5% chance it was actually the jet that was in the wrong place at the wrong time (due to pilot error, ATC error, or maybe possibly it suffered a prior emergency that forced it to deviate from its assigned glideslope — but I think that’s very, very unlikely).
@Broomstick I just posted more on that over in the clusterfuck continues thread in The BBQ Pit. My source is Irish Star.
Since it appears that the river route is where the collision occurred, then it implies that the helicopter was where it was normally supposed to be, which implies that the airliner wasn’t. At this point, this is just speculation on my part.
How quickly can a helicopter stop/reverse/rise/dive? Just wondering how late the helicopter crew could have spotted the plane and done something to avoid it.
Just a few separate comments up front not forming a coherent essay.
That is very busy airspace and a very busy approach for the airliner pilots as they bob and weave their way towards the runway while avoiding being over land as much as possible for noise abatement. Lots to do and lots to watch. Keeping an eye on the helo, even if they’d been warned about it may have slipped off their minds.
From the helo POV, they were asked if they saw the jet and they said “yes”. Happens dozens of times a day there and hundreds of times at many other airports too. But did they see the correct plane, or a different one? If the correct one, did they lose sight for a bit but both helo pilots thought the other one still had the jet in sight?
In either case it is very difficult to keep the lights of another aircraft reliably in sight when the background is a city full of lights. Many of which seem to be blinking or flickering as they’re occulted by one or another tree or whatever as your motion changes your look angle on them. Often the other aircraft is most visible as an airplane-shaped dark patch moving across a sea of lights. The aircraft’s own lights are lost in the flurry of other lights. Helo’s fuselages are not very large and their silhouette is unlike an airplanes and may not trigger your voice-of-experience subconscious airplane-recognizer in the same way another jet would.
And some responses to various points made by folks up thread:
Maybe. I’d bet not.
Going into the Potomac versus impacting in the very dense city definitely prevented any injuries or deaths to people on the ground. Of which there might have been many.
As to the people on the planes, water is still softer than cement or dirt. Yes, once in the very cold water, survival time is limited. But I’d bet that about half the people who were alive after the wreckage was in the water would already be dead if they’d impacted onto some building someplace.
Civil helos do. Military equippage is highly variable. If that helo was normally an aerial “staff car” for the military brass or civilian VIPs good bet it had that. If it was just a National Guard transport helo for the grunts, probably not. Whether the helo had TCAS or not, the helo would have been visible on the jet’s TCAS.
But as @Richard_Pearse said, at that very low altitude the warning functions would be disabled so all you’d have is a symbol on a screen converging on your own. By that point in DCA’s approaches, both jet pilots are mostly looking out the window at the runway and landmarks and such and glancing inside for not much more than airspeed.
TCAS itself is pretty simple and works on the idea that lateral manuevering is just too hard to compute and execute in real time with the low-res azimuth and range data it has. But it has high-res data on altitude and altitude rate from everyone’s transponders. So the general idea is
- Compute the vertical trajectory of both me and that target. If it’s predicted we’ll cross altitudes within a couple miles of each other, have somebody change their vertical rate, or even reverse it, to move the altitude crossing point away from the other aircraft. If we’re never at the same altitude while anywhere nearby, we can’t possibly collide.
Because all the maneuvering is in the vertical plane, it pretty well needs to be inhibited near the ground. It can also get fooled if somebody makes an abrupt turn, where the predicted point of altitude crossing suddenly changes from “A couple miles over at 9 o’clock; No sweat.” to “Right in front of us; Oh shit!!”
Good thinking but incorrect in this case.
The airliner routes are also, insofar as possible, directly over the rivers to minimize the noise impact on the city. DCA is tucked into a bulge on the inside edge of a large bend in the Potomac. Upstream the river is narrow and twisty, while right at that bend continuing downstream the river widens out into more of a bay or not-quite-lake then continues more or less straight for about 10 miles slowly tapering back into a river.
The general set up is to fly along the river towards the airport, zigging and zagging if over the twisty part. And then in the last mile or 2, zig or zag as necessary to align with one of the 6 runway ends, each of which is at the water’s edge.
Depending on which runway they were going towards, and I haven’t looked that up, they could / should be over the river the whole way from e.g. 5000 feet & 15 miles from the runway until 5 or 10 seconds from touchdown.
My bet is they were both where they were supposed to be in 3D space both laterally and vertically. The problem was the 4th dimension: time. They should not both have been where they were at the same time. Oops.
Depends a bunch on how fast they’re going and from what direction the faster jet is approaching. My WAG:
- 20 seconds: WTF?!? Hard left!! Crap; we’re gonna have paperwork.
- 10 seconds: Oh Shit, yank, Whew, that was too damned close!
- 5 seconds: Oh SHIIIIT!!1!. CRUNCH. Plummet.
AP is reporting likely no survivors. Terrible.
Not to make a terrible tragedy about me, but I’ve always been a nervous flyer. It hasn’t stopped me from flying in the past, but I haven’t been on a plane in over 10 years, not because I was avoiding flying, but I just had no need to fly for business, and vacations with our kids were always close enough to drive.
Now my wife and I are getting on a plane to Jamaica in less than 48 hours, on our first adult vacation in years, now that the kids are out of the house. And I had been thinking “I sure hope there’s no big horrible plane crash in the news just before we leave!”
Your post, as usual, was excellent, and I actually understood it because I am a big fan of “Air Disasters” on the Smithsonian Channel, and overcrowded air space and overwhelmed air traffic controllers can be a very big problem.
A question for you and anyone familiar with that airport and general area: Is there a way they can build another (smaller?) airport just for the military air traffic? Seems like that would have to help.
Not really. There are already several military landing facilities scattered about. And Andrews AFB is just across the river.
The problem is trying to have a pocket-sized airport downtown in a VERY noise-sensitive (and security-sensitive) big city that is full of big facilities connected by a dense network of helicopter flights. Which airport is served by a continuous dense flow of airliners.
The “right” answer is simply close DCA to all airline traffic & move that to Dulles. Leave DCA for corporate jets and helos. Then the “10 lbs of stuff in a 5lb bag all day every day something’s gotta give someday.” problem simply evaporates.
The situation at LGA is better, but not a lot.
Close both of those to airline traffic and the total daily risk budget of the US domestic airline system goes down a LOT.
Andrews AFB is less than 10 miles away from DCA.
DCA was supposed to be closed decades ago when Dulles opened but they kept it open because Congresspeople didn’t want to ride all the way out to IAD or BWI.
And they keep expanding the number of landing slots, for the same reason - the political and lobbying classes want to fly in nonstop and land 20 minutes’ ride away from Capitol Hill.
As many as 15 people on the flight may have been involved in figure skating, an unnamed source told the Reuters news agency.
Russian citizens were also on board, the Kremlin confirmed - after local media reported that ice skating coaches and former world champions Yevgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were on the plane.
Inna Volyanskaya, a former skater for the Soviet Union, was also on board the flight, according to Russian news agency Tass.
And that’s also the reason the Army helo was there: training for missions involving “continuity of government”, which means picking up VIPs at the nearest available aerodrome to evacuate them from DC before it gets erased by an incoming nuclear strike (for instance).
As terrible as this incident is, you can’t really claim the chopper wasn’t supposed to be there.