re: Looks like a plane hit a Helicopter at DCA airport

Press conference:


Substantive remarks began at 16:00 mark

Biden really gutted our military. 4 years of nonsense and Dei instead of mission readiness leads to tragic events like this.

Pete going to probably have to ground night flights in that area.

Stipulate: Not a pilot or particularly knowledgeable about aviation matters.

Regardless, it is confounding that the potentiality of this sort of accident would be allowed - at all, by anyone?!?…

It could be that as well. The previous admin did a lot to undermine mission readiness of every aspect.

It seems unnecessarily risky to have night helicopter flights going out across an active runway. Especially non emergency ones, sadly this tragedy was probably easily avoidable.

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Unless it had special clearance for an emergency

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Yeah, it’s possible ATC is responsible, but even in that case, both sets of pilots are at fault, because they were in VMC (not in clouds), and regardless of the fight rules, pilots in VMC are responsible for maintaining separation from other aircraft.

In this case,however, the lion’s share of the blame would be on the controllers. This is the least likely scenario, though. More likely is a mistake by the helicopter pilots, and a little blame on the airline pilots for not seeing the helicopter (I’s sympathize with them, though, because when on a glideslope your going through checklists).

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Regardless, it is confounding that the potentiality of this sort of accident would be allowed - at all, by anyone?!?…

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Yeah, I'm going to have to plead ignorance on this one. But it does seem strange, even unnecessary, that the helicopter's path would intersect the landing vector of a commercial airline so closely. At that point in the landing, the plane is basically committed and would have zero maneuverability, so it would be entirely on the helicopter. I mean, if the plane had veered, it's probably not hitting the runway, and you wonder if it can regain enough airspeed and altitude to avoid coming down anyway.

... and yet, they seemed ok in ATC with it, it was intended that the chopper just slip behind a couple seconds after the plane passed?

I get that it's a crowded airspace. As I said, I don't know- are things supposed to be THAT tight?

Once everyone is out we probably will need to weigh the time saving of shuttling people across active runways at night vs is there a better way.

Good for President Trump in being a genuine advocate for these victims’ families. You think their family members don’t want our Commander-in-chief pissed off and demanding answers?! That’s what he did in his unpolished, authentic way.

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Why the frick are they doing a training flight in the approach path of DCA?



Will be interesting to see whether this was the Trainer/Trainee error or ATC. You would think the former, but after the last few years and all the close calls, it may have been ATC.

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This is probably going to end up being one of those tragedies where there are multiple people at fault...military supervisors who scheduled an obviously non essential flight on a dangerous path, helicopter pilot error, and failure by ATC to notify the AA pilot of oncoming traffic in his area.

I'm not a pilot either. But probably like many of you, I've listened to those recordings on YouTube of conversations between pilots and towers. Can't tell you how many times I've heard ATC warn pilots of traffic near them.