re: NTSB info from Blackhawk helicopter’s black box recordings from the deadly DC crash

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This isn't a new flight path. Anyone who has ever come into Reagan at night knows that's a tight approach, making following flight directives more important than the vast majority of airports.

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Exactly.

And would you describe the flight directives from the ATC as good? Without giving a vector to an aircraft, that was descending to land in an environment which would have made it difficult to spot at the very least?

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This is on her.

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Partially.

Having an aircraft pass 100 feet over the top of another, at night, on converging courses is so insane I still cannot believe not only did they do it, they nearly had the same thing happen the previous night.

I don’t absolve the pilot, the IP, or the crew chief. They are also contributing factors to the crash.

I’m astonished however the consistent ignorance of whose job is NOT to put aircraft into conflict. That when the warning goes off fails to give clear direction to the aircraft to avoid it. The ATC made the assumption the copter could see the aircraft they meant. That assumption was incorrect and fatal.

So there are 3 contributing factors I see.

Primary - ATC, what’s their job
Contributor - Copter crew, primarily the pilot there
Contributor - Protocol where copters allowed “Visual separation” that has obviously been in place given the near miss from the night before between the military and the tower. That numerous near misses as we know now had happened previously that protocol should have been trashed. It created a situation that sooner or later would have yielded this result.

Can you explain what "Visual Seperation" is, exactly?

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PS. I worked on hundreds of Blackhawks and the altimeters will be off by a small amount but they zero them out.

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Are the altimeters off by a percentage or just feet. So if you are 100 ft off at 300 ft, does that mean you are 33% off always? Or does that just mean 100ft off, so if you are then at 1000 ft you maybe at 900ft?

If their true altitude was 278 ft and the one was 300 and one was 400, how far off was that really?

Blackhawk Avionics are from Collins Aerospace, via their acquisition of Rockwell-Collins. I imagine if there's passive fault here, it's with them if the altimeter and gauges weren't calibrating.

Just about what was expected. The helicopter fricked up big time.

Jbird
In Bidenville with EthanL
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Posted on 2/9/25 at 11:32 am to RogerTheShrubber
I wonder if they had altimeter barometric pressure set incorrectly? I guess in a few months we will know.

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Can you explain what "Visual Seperation" is, exactly?

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If you listen to the tapes, for both the previous nights near misses you hear the helicopter “request visual separation”. That is the helicopter requesting to avoid the incoming plane by visually acquiring it, then steering around it.

That tells me that practice is commonplace between military aircraft and the tower. If other tapes are out there of previous near misses, I expect the same request will come from the copter crew.

In this case the copter requests it, says they have aircraft into sight. What gets lost, continually in this is which aircraft did they see? Without a vector given by the ATC, there is no way to determine which one the copter crew thought they saw.

I can possibly see, in daylight, with a proper vector to the incoming plane for this to be possible to work safely. At night, with no vector and flying at low altitude. It was a recipe for disaster.

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I still can't get around how they turned into the jet's path and gained altitude into the jet. I guess they panicked and maybe tried to fly over the jet at the last second (speculating if they were assuming they could do this based on false altimeter reading). They were over the middle of the Potomac and not within the "avenue" that hugs the eastern bank according to the maps.

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Nah, almost every account seems to assume they never saw the airliner. Likely they had night vision on.

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This was more on whoever planned and authorized this training mission than on anyone in the copter imo

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From what I understand, this was a very common and relatively easy training mission. Nothing about this was out of the ordinary from a mission perspective. The big thing was the faulty altimeter keeping them from staying in the flight envelope.