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

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Mistakes happen. Safety policies are written in blood. Things will change as a result of this crash.

Eventually, another mistake will happen, and a new policy will be made. That's just the nature of the beast.

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Unfortunately, soon people will come complaining about how there's too many policies and safety regulations in order to repeal whatever new policies will be implemented as a result of this.

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Didn’t matter. One thought 400 the other thought 300 they were supposed to be at 200 so both pilots knew they were way too high….

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Lots of Monday morning piloting up in here. In a high workload environment, where both pilots are busy trying to visually separate with aircraft coming in multiple directions you have to make choices about your attention. They were visually separating, not separating with assigned altitudes. Eyes should have been outside the cockpit. There’s no lane stripes in the sky, so looking around to avoid traffic is way higher priority. There’s a reason vertical separation is 500’ not 50’.

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To top off the bad pilot error, evidently the accuracy of the radar for the air traffic controller is poor often being more than 50' off. In this day and age, the radar readings should be perfectly accurate, but clearly the equipment is antiquated.

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Compounded by the ADS-B off on the Blackhawk.

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To top off the bad pilot error, evidently the accuracy of the radar for the air traffic controller is poor often being more than 50' off. In this day and age, the radar readings should be perfectly accurate, but clearly the equipment is antiquated.

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It is. It’s an expensive thing to do on a regular basis.

Which would you not agree gives more weight to NOT having aircraft on collision courses at similar altitudes?

The margin of error is far too small. I pointed out earlier that flying a plane is not like driving a car. Updrafts, downdrafts, gusts. You can bounce up or down a fair bit in a shorter space than you can believe if you haven’t flown.

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f 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.

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Ok. so it's literally, "I see the plane, can I get out of its way?"

I’ve been a passenger into and out of DCA - Regan National many hundreds of times in the last 20 year (I’m a retired Federal Air Marshal, former commercial pilot and a veteran).

Info about DCA (Reagan National)
- DC is separated from Virginia by the Potomac river - river is about twice as wide as the Red river b/w Shreveport and Bossier City.
- DCA is on West side of river, East side of river is Joint Base Anacostia / Bolling. Lots of DoD, scientific and Intel offices and facilities. North and West of this immediate are the rest of DC, South and East is Andrews AFB.
- There are always helicopters moving up and down the river near the Airport.
- The Runway that the plane was going to land on requires the plane to overfly JB Anacostia / Bolling. This runway is not one of the normally used DCA runways, it is used when wind direction and traffic flow make sense.

My QUESS is that the accident happened because:
- The military pilots had gotten used to flying higher than the official “hard deck” altitude in the area.
- If it was really a “training flight”, it was probably a flight so that the female White House Aid could have enough flight hours to maintain her flight pay. The other pilot may have known that he couldn’t “instruct” her too much or he would suffer for not being supportive of her enough.
- The crash was probably a “one in a thousand” (what ever the actual statistical number is) accident, but the above factors made it more likely to happen.