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Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

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Re: Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

#151
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It is so incredibly tiring that you dweebs try to blame every single bad outcome in the world on cough minorities cough "DEI", with zero evidence. In fact, literally when you posted this comment there were already ATC recordings floating around of the controller telling the helicopter pilot to maintain separation from the exact airliner they crashed into. Take a look in the mirror.

At least DEI can't be blamed for much longer.

Re: Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

#152

I know that everyone crosses all altitudes during landing. But why don't ATC / FAA stratify aircraft type and use by altitude. Like all commercial traffic is put in even thousands altitudes. And the Military / EMS gets the odd thousands. Its crazy to have things colliding like this.

Helicopter flies at 200ft. Planes landing have to traverse through 200ft. Therefore vertical separation impossible.

Re: Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

#153
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition, the White House has put a hiring freeze in place, prohibiting the replacement of open government positions or the creation of new ones while the administration evaluates reductions in the workforce. The White House plans to release a memorandum with further guidance within 90 days. This has drawn criticism from lawmakers as the FAA has been ramping up controller hiring. https://www.ainonline.com/aviati…

In fairness to the current administration, while the hiring freeze may have impacted ATC hiring, that is not causal here. No one hired last week would have been running things today (if they were hit with the freeze).

> not causal here

but it does illustrate the type of future incident that it _could_ be causal of

Re: Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fatal crash But yes, you're right to point that out.

[flagged]

This might have been a better approach: It wasn't a crash, but there was a fatality on a Southwest flight in 2018.

Re: Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

#155

It wasn't a police chopper, it was a military VH-60, also known as a "White Hawk" [1]. It's a VIP transport helicopter, the same type that is used to transport the president. ~The flight track of the helicopter [2] starts at a property in McLean, VA (edited to remove likely inaccurate info)~ The chopper was based out of Fort Belvoir, and based on similar past flight tracks, looks like it probably took off from there…

[2] shows the helicopter taking off 2 miles away from the old saudi embassy in McLean marked “permanently closed” on google maps. (The current embassy is in DC proper, directly across the river from DCA airport) I don’t think thats strong evidence that it took off from the old Saudi Embassy - thats pretty far away even given your caveat about accuracy. Edit: it looks to me like the black hawk was coming from somewher…

Military flights do not fly ADB hot outside of the DC FRZ. It was also clearly exactly following flight route 4.

There are a few locations in that area it could have been coming from. Anything else would have made no sense flying through the FRZ from/to Belvoir.

Re: Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

#156
post #135
post #7

Obviously it will take some time for the full accident analysis but there have been quite a few near misses lately due to air traffic controller errors. Flight volume has been growing, airspace near airports is more congested, and controllers are overworked. Eventually all of the "Swiss cheese" holes line up. We're going to need to hire more controllers. Also, it appears that one of the aircraft was a military (not p…

Hiring controllers is not easy. A friend's daughter just went through the hiring process. She graduated from college with an appropriate degree right as COVID hit. Her FAA application wasn't accepted for four years. This past summer she did the four-week interactive online courses. Applicants must pass this and may not re-enter the program if they do not. After that she did the six-week courses in Oklahoma City. Agai…

[flagged]

Re: Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

#157

I know that everyone crosses all altitudes during landing. But why don't ATC / FAA stratify aircraft type and use by altitude. Like all commercial traffic is put in even thousands altitudes. And the Military / EMS gets the odd thousands. Its crazy to have things colliding like this.

Route 4 (the helicopter route along the river) has a maximum altitude of 200 feet for helicopter. From the crash it seemed like the helicopter pilot wasn't strictly following the ceiling.

Re: Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem space is too broad. E.g. On 9/11 ATC had to land almost 3000 planes in 1 hour. I'm not sure if that sort of national coordinated grounding is part of ATC training, but it's certainly not something I'd want to leave to some code that has never needed to run in production before.

It just seems like software could pretty easily compute non-intersecting flight paths for all planes and assign them accordingly. As well it could real time monitor all trajectories and continue to give out the updated flight paths. I don't see why you also couldn't run a trillion tests using real and simulated flight data to make sure it works well.

Because right now airplanes are flown by humans. A large part of atcs jobs is dealing with humans. Not every pilot will be able to fly the optimum flight path.

Re: Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

#160

It wasn't a police chopper, it was a military VH-60, also known as a "White Hawk" [1]. It's a VIP transport helicopter, the same type that is used to transport the president. ~The flight track of the helicopter [2] starts at a property in McLean, VA (edited to remove likely inaccurate info)~ The chopper was based out of Fort Belvoir, and based on similar past flight tracks, looks like it probably took off from there…

[2] shows the helicopter taking off 2 miles away from the old saudi embassy in McLean marked “permanently closed” on google maps. (The current embassy is in DC proper, directly across the river from DCA airport) I don’t think thats strong evidence that it took off from the old Saudi Embassy - thats pretty far away even given your caveat about accuracy. Edit: it looks to me like the black hawk was coming from somewher…

That was clearly a training flight
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