I think apportioning blame to one of the three parties is taking a far too shallow view of the incident. The whole concept of visual separation at night is deeply flawed as is having transit corridors in very close proximity to the final approach path.
When asked to sight and pass behind an aircraft at night, there is no information the helicopter crew could have gained from any set of lights that would positively identify the aircraft type or that it’s the aircraft they’re supposed to be finding.
I hope that all parties are seen to have done the best they could with the tools and procedures they had available to them and that it’s those tools and procedures that get the majority of the investigation’s attention.
If the accident boils down to “the helicopter pilots ballsed up” then it WILL happen again.
I would like a controller to chime in on what information is available in the tower. Transponders are feeding plane ID on radar along with it’s altitude. Is radar software alerting the controllers to dangerous situations?
And a commercial pilot has stated that TCAS is not useful under 900 feet but that’s a software issue. It should be able to tell the difference between an airplane on the ground going 15 mph and one moving at 150 mph in the air.
I don’t know if ADS-B has the same issue but again, the detail is in the software.
It still wouldn’t matter because TCAS can only issue climb or descend commands. The system decides as the incident occurs which aircraft will climb and which will descend. Once the aircraft are too close to the ground, it takes away half of the system’s power to resolve the incident. I suppose we could imagine a system that would work differently, but that wouldn’t be TCAS and its associated hardware anymore, but some follow-on system that does not yet exist. One that would have to be a lot smarter with better hardware than what’s installed today.
TBH in a congested area like the approach to National, the thing would be going off all the time even in OK situations.
I get that. I’ve had ADS-B alerts go off and it was a quick look at the display to see if I needed to react to it. But if I’m on short final and I see something at or near my altitude then it’s a significant piece of useful information. There was a go-around the day before this crash at the same airport involving helicopters that were too close.
Local rumors are (sorry, no cite yet) that the training flight was to practice evacuating VIPs in an emergency. Further, that the pilot was using night vision equipment.
That would pretty much explain it. Night vision in a light-congested environment would have been more of a distraction than a help. The bright on-coming plane (taking off toward them) might have drowned out the duller crossing-at-an-angle plane that they hit. Night vision equipment also messes with your depth perception.
Definitely supports the the theory that when they said “we see it” they meant the plane taking off. The landing plane could have been invisible to them - like a huge semi in your blind spot.
I’ve never flown, or worn night-vision equipment, but I would think that it would be the helicopter equivalent of turning on the inside light of a moving car after dark.
The three people aboard the helicopter have been identified - two men whose names have been released, and a woman whose family says they do not want her identity or theirs made public.
The helicopter crew has been described as highly skilled. I think the highest time pilot had 1500 hrs. The pilot in training had 500 hrs. If those are cumulative hrs they are on the low side.
Holding altitude is a big deal in aviation and the crew collectively failed to do this.
So to speak. (Sorry – of course I know this is tragic and serious.)
Anyway…If the main culprit turns out to be the night vision goggles (though this may be hard to determine), an easy but effective fix might be simply to not do night vision goggle training within a certain distance of National Airport. (Yes, there might be some real-life crisis someday where an Army pilot has to use them there, but the cost-benefit ratio – that specific bit of practice, vs. the lives of hundreds of civilians – surely favors banning it.)
Or do night training in that area after DCA shuts down for the night. As I recall, planes aren’t allowed after a certain hour, for noise abatement.
Or shut the airport down, for safety and security reasons. Best idea I’ve seen for the land is a new stadium. It’s a terribly small plot of land for a major airport. It’s a huge plot of land for a stadium. The roads, transit, and parking lots are already there.
Changes should have been made some time ago. Hopefully now the FAA will make improvements at Reagan National Airport before there’s another tragic accident.
Crap on a cracker. I completely missed that. Not my intention to use the word as a pun.
I’ve only seen night vision in a cockpit from videos. If the system’s used by the military are anything along the lines of an aviation FLIR system it’s all in the software. A FLIR system will not blind the user and is specifically designed to translate visual information into a compressed range that evens out the highs and lows so that more objects are visible. Imagine flying into the Sun on a hazy day. The bright sunlight is greatly reduced so that an aircraft near you is visible.
Instrument gauges should be highly visible so that the primary task of flying is maintained. If this was a training run than there are 3 pilots involved. All three of them should be invested in the flight of the aircraft. If the trainee was physically controlling the helicopter the instructor should be scanning the gauges to ensure the flight is on track.
I found this a very informative video, particularly its 3D visualization of the helicopter route relative to the approach to the runway. I do think it paints a “good” (bad) picture of ATC failing to proactively convey important information to the accident aircraft. Whether that should make ATC primarily responsible for the incident, IDK, but I do think an intelligent consideration of the geometry involved would have said that allowing the helicopter to maintain visual separation (with no positional information provided on how to identify the aircraft of concern) under those circumstances was a bad idea.
