241–250 of 738 posts
This will be the worst disaster since Colgan in 2009 which is the crash that upped the hours requirement for ATP pilots from 250 to 1500 even though both pilots had over 1500 hours. I think this is going to be a very big deal and very quickly become a political football. Regardless, this is absolutely awful and extremely unfortunate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile, San Carlos Airport (KSQL, near San Francisco) is going ATC-zero on February 1st. The tower will be unstaffed. https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/CASMATEO/bulletins/... "The FAA has awarded a new contract for air traffic services at SQL to Robinson Aviation (RVA). However, the contract does not include locality pay to account for the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a result, RVA’…
> The tower will be unstaffed. Doesn't that just mean there will be no taxi control? My understanding is that ATC isn't in the tower. The tower staff just give clearances for take-off and directions on which runway to land/take-off. In radio clips, you can hear ATC hand-off a plane to tower.
When you say ATC I believe you’re thinking of tracon controllers, a level of airspace up from towers who control approach and departures and then hand you off to/from the tower. Above them there’s yet another level, center controllers. All of these are ATC though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trains run on fixed tracks with fixed intersections, and one track might see a handful of them per day. Planes around airports come in from all directions in three dimensions, and there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour. These are vastly different scales of problem domain.
> there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour I Googled about this. London Heathrow is widely regarded as the busiest two runway airport in the world. They allow less than 50 arrival per hour. Are there any airports in the world that can have "hundreds of arrivals per hour"? Conservatively, 200 can be considered "hundreds", then you would need 8x runways operating at max capacity. That seems hard to imagine. Google al…
And then if you have people flying the planes, you have to deal with people mostly _but not always_ doing the right thing. So now you build out a plan and have to deal with consequences of that.
So at the end of the day you're still looking at funneling humans into a thing. At worst you could consider ATC as "customer support", there to press buttons on machines to actually handle a bunch of logistics because the pilots need to figure things out.
On top of all of this, airports are trying to get through a lot of flights quickly. So people can make snap judgements about whether planes can or cannot advance, what they should do, etc. No matter how well your plan is, the instant a pilot mishears something it's over.
If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. But in the meantime there's somebody not following the plan often enough.
This does lead to an interesting question for me, though: what is the biggest "human movement" system that is actually entirely hands-off logistics? I would imagine that postal service companies are doing a lot but every major person moving operation seems pretty hands-on from the outside.
To put this in perspective, this is the first fatal crash of a US commercial airliner in 16 years (Colgan Air Flight 3407 on February 12, 2009) and the first fatal commercial airliner crash in the United States in 12 years (since Asiana Airlines Flight 214 on July 6, 2013). We like to throw shade at Boeing, the FAA etc, but this is still an incredible accomplishment, especially given the explosive growth of traffic o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is "flight route 4"?
The FAA publishes supplemental charts specifically for helicopters in areas with high concentrations of helicopter activity: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/productc... Specifically the Baltimore-Washington route chart was relevant for these flights: https://aeronav.faa.gov/visual/10-31-2024/PDFs/Balt-Wash_Hel... If you find the DCA airport on that chart, you’ll find routes 1 and 4 which roughly c…
Helicopter was on Helicopter Route 4, per the map, apparently on course.
Aircraft was on approach to Runway 33, apparently on course.
That helicopter route crosses the approach to runway 33.
That's controlled airspace. How did they both have clearance to be there?
We'll know more tomorrow as all the audio and radar recordings are examined.
It’s probably really early to ask, but in case anyone here is knowledgeable and has any idea: why didn’t TCAS help avoid the accident? Isn’t it designed for such situations where 2 aircrafts collide? Do military crafts not have it or something?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
She was not rejected.
I think they're talking about her application being ignored for four years.
I just listened to the ATC recording from immediately before the collision. ATC instructs the helicopter to pass behind the CRJ. I’m fairly certain a few minutes before that, ATC instructed the helicopter to maintain visual separation, which is common. They typically ask, “do you have the aircraft in sight” and if you respond in the affirmative they rely on you to maintain safe distance. I should mention that in the…
Here is the ATC audio between the Tower and PAT-25. Helos that transition DCA's airspace use a separate VHF frequency from traffic landing and departing, but talk to the same tower controller. https://archives.broadcastify.com/44114/20250129/20250129200... * At 5:41 - 5342 is given instructions for circling to 33. * At 6:45 - PAT-25 reports Memorial * At 7:06 - tower gives PAT-25 traffic advisory about 5342 and PAT-2…