There has been an effort spanning decades to close National Airport. But Congress loves the convenience so it stays open. It also has more flights to various areas than is proper for it’s size and location, but, again, Congress people want to fly back to their districts from there.
Maybe reduce the traffic to just governmental uses and not commercial airlines?
I’m guessing that’s what’s going to happen, it will be closed to public commercial flights and become just the government’s VIP airport.
Except the vast majority of congressmembers and senior officisls do fly commercial and as mentioned do hate the notion of landing way out in Loudon County almost in Leesburg.
The sensible place for a DC airport is where Andrews AFB is, just outside the Beltway. But decisions were made in the 1950s thinking in the ways of the 1950s.
Sorry for the delayed response to this, I went to bed last night…
The rescuers should have been in dry suits, PFDs, & helmets (& from the clips I saw being played last night, they were). With suitable base layers underneath, drysuits can be pretty comfortable in frigid water. We have wet (neoprene) gloves on our surface suits & dry gloves on our dive suits but everything except for the hands & head are enclosed in a dry suit. Even with neoprene gloves they may not have had their hands in the water that much & a (cycling) helmet liner or a running beanie are thin enough to wear under their rescue helmets
One of the shots I saw last night was across the river, of a ton or (mostly) red & blue lights; there was one longer vehicle that had a couple of green strobes/LEDs flashing on it. That was the incident command vehicle; either a bus or RV fitted out with comms (communications equip; radios, etc.), possibly some dispatcher capability & TV monitors, probably a raiseable mast with a camera on it. Depending upon the situation the monitors can display all sorts of things, feed from their own, raised camera, live stream of drone images, real-time weather radar, list of units on scene, etc. That vehicle there means they were following Incident Command System; each boat wasn’t working on their own, they would have an area of responsibility to search. Some would be at the three debris fields, some would be searching the two shore lines & downstream in case anyone made it out alive. I wouldn’t at all be surprised to hear that there was some type of rehab vehicle on scene. Dedicated vehicles like a bus or RV setup to warm / cool (in summer) those working, & either combined or separate canteen vehicle to provide them with some food & drink.
It’s also nighttime, on a river, once the initial response calmed a bit they probably had a boat go back & do a slower, more methodical secondary search after the primary search was completed.
This was also, most likely, a once-in-a-lifetime call for the first responders, you find a little extra for those calls. The physical welfare of them should have been covered in PPE & training & procedures. Any emotional toll of seeing deceased, possibly mutilated (burned, obvious trauma) can be handled later on in AAR debriefs.
It’s been a while since I was involved in military operations, but ISTR there were only two broad categories of missions: (1) combat and (2) training. The scheduled operations were listed as a training schedule unless the units involved were going into combat. Do I recall incorrrectly?
The radar track for the aircraft has been up on the news. UH-60 heading south on the Potomac and the RJ heading north making a descending turn for runway 33. The UH-60 reported the RJ in visual contact but may have been another aircraft landing on runway 1.
It’s a Twizzler feed (sorry) but it’s been up on CBS and other stations for a while.
No, it was training. All news sources make that clear.
My point, such as it was, is that no operational military unit trains for the sake of training. They’re training with a mission in mind, and support of Continuity of Government is in that aviation battalion’s mission portfolio.
I suppose this is partly to address the opinion that the helicopter had no business being there to begin with. CoG is an important mission, that airfield is an important asset in that mission, and that aviation unit participates in that mission, so their presence there is fully justified, in spite of the risk imposed by the (IMHO) inappropriate rise in civil air traffic there.
I was a kid in Annandale in '82. My friend Barbara’s Mom dropped her off at our house and disappeared for the day. My Mom was adamant that the TV stay off despite it being a snow day. We knew, as military brats do, that Something Was Wrong, but we didn’t know for sure whose Dad it was. It was Barbara’s.
Last night was a rough one for me. I saw the reports just as I was heading off to bed. And even though I finally succeeded in tearing myself away from the coverage it still played in my head all night. So many young people gone. It’s heartbreaking. And the rescuers in that icy water - the danger is visceral.
It’s the passenger jets that have no business being there. In the early 90’s I worked at NAVSEA and the Capt. I worked for was an aviator. He was involved in meetings advocating for DCA to be closed. We all know everything that is wrong with it. We knew the danger of planes being used as bombs long before 911. We knew then that runways were too short, and planes have only gotten bigger. And we knew that military flights in the area needed the air space more than passengers do. But Congresscritters find it convenient, so it stayed open. The GOP donors invested a ton of money and renamed it after St. Ronnie so that nobody would dare to oppose them. It’s an obvious danger, an anachronism in todays world of huge jets, and a health risk to the densely populated area surrounding it.
Just another outrageous GOP monument to ignorance and entitlement.
(Thoughts from the cesspool of Trump-brain)
If only Mayor Pete liked women then this whole tragedy could have been averted.
One the one hand it feels a bit less than optimal that current/future ATCs may only have a high school diploma. OTOH, I believe there is a serious shortage of controllers currently and eliminating the college degree pre-requisite might be necessary in order to recruit enough ATCs.
There are three basic types of flights. Real world missions, maintenance flights and training. Anything that isn’t the first two is training. That includes getting in your flight hours by practicing flying in traffic. I’ve done a couple of hundred hours just flying around with a pilot practicing various aspect of flight. It’s really impossible to say exactly what they were doing.
The fastest and most instinctive is to dump collective and dive. From the video it’s really hard to tell if any evasive maneuvers happened. I doesn’t appear that there were any but with what’s available now we don’t know
I just saw the mod note above about keeping politics out. Sorry about that. Too late to edit. Mea culpa. I hadn’t read that far down in the thread yet.
Surely anything military of that sort in Washington DC must be training? Hard to fathom a combat situation in the CONUS unless it were something like scrambling fighters to interdict a 9/11 scenario.
(Well, I suppose Air Force One itself must be “combat” or whatever - “real life operational”)
I’m not familiar with “dump collective”. Can you explain?
The collective lever, to the pilot’s left, collectively changes the pitch of the rotor blades by the same amount (and, as you can tell from the name, at the same time) and makes the helicopter go up and down. (And other things, as any change in one control affects the others.) The cyclic control (‘joystick’) changes the pitch of the blades independently of each other so as to maneuver.
To ‘dump collective’ means to push the collective to the bottom, reducing the pitch of the rotor blades, which reduces lift, and you go down.
Can the blades be pitched so much that they produce downforce?
Not exactly but pushing the collective down rapidly and pushing the cyclic forward will have the effect of speeding up the downward flight.
In the recent thread about brushes with death I recounted a story of a near mid air collision I had many decades ago outside of Fort Rucker.
No. That would be unsafe. The fuselage is suspended below the rotor system. To create a downforce would be to allow the fuselage to go off in any direction. Here is a simulation of the likely outcome.
ETA: My favourite part of the Robinson R22 Pilot’s Operating Handbook. This is about low rotor RPM, but anyway it says [emphasis mine] ‘The resulting boom chop, however, is academic, as the aircraft and its occupants are already doomed by the stalled rotor before the chop occurs.’
Military mission types …
As @Loach said, there’s “real world missions” and training missions. if you’re carrying troops from here to there, those troops may be going to a training event, but the pilots are flying a real world mission. Even though there’s no combat involved.
In the context of aviation in general, and military aviation in specific, “training” means the aircrew is conducting training or being trained for their own benefit.
Conversely, flying some brass from e.g. Fort Belvoir to e.g. the Pentagon is not training. The brass are riding and the aircrew are providing a real world mission.
For sure, the parts of the military whose job is logistical transportation, whether by truck, ship, or aircraft, have more “real world non-combat” missions than do the more violence-oriented sections of the military.
Great post. Thanks for the detailed and relevant information.