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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

#261

Post by peblos »

mvdtnz wrote: post #220
NaOH wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Requirements are strict in other countries as well. It comes with the nature of the job.

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

#262

Post by kristjansson »

ekianjo wrote: post #57
ghc wrote: 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…

Is there an actual reason why the control tower work can't be fully automated? For train control lights we almost don't rely on human operators anywhere.

Positive Train Control has been a big fight too.

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

#263

Post by hluska »

Animats wrote: post #246
matheweis wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right. 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.

This comment was written by a US Coast Guard helicopter pilot. It gives a lot of information on how the two aircraft should have been able to share the space and some speculation on what went wrong:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1idba8i/comment/m...

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

#264

Post by consp »

fblp wrote: post #250
blantonl wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is wild to listen to. A) this is a busy atc channel and it's amazing how much complexity is coordinated over noisy radio. B) within minutes of the accident happening (at 11:48) the ATC controller is calmly asking helicopters in the air if they can assist in search rescue operations asking, if they have search lights and direction them. This is whilst diverting and grounding flights.

> over noisy radio

I've been told the noise on the recordings is always a lot worse than in practice due to the location of the recording antenna not being ideal. I have no idea if this is correct or not. Maybe someone can enlighten this.

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

#265

Post by bobthepanda »

jonathanlb wrote: post #33
joezydeco wrote: post #29

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’…

Honest question: are air traffic controllers at risk for being replaced with AI systems? My initial thought is no, there is too much complexity, but AI could help ease the load. I'm not really informed about air traffic systems, just curious.

The SOTA is augmented ATC displays and digital towers, which basically use object recognition to label planes on cameras, and the controllers sit somewhere else.

Usually this is done for rural airports, where you have one controller potentially managing multiple low traffic airports, and it’s tough to get ATC willing to move to remote locations. The only busy airport doing this kind of thing is London City Airport, but that has 3M passengers a year and DCA has 25M. That was motivated by the lack of space at London City Airport, so they demolished the traditional tower to reallocate space.

London City implementation: https://www.nats.aero/news/london-city-is-first-major-airpor...

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

#266

Post by kristjansson »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #126
stouset wrote: post #86

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…

The happy path is easy, as you imagine. It’s all the other imaginable and unimaginable paths, each unhappy in their own way…

Oh and thousands of lives hang in the literal balance

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

#267

Post by kristjansson »

refulgentis wrote: post #175
throwaway2037 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan. Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe it is a more modern phenomena, enabled by a steady diet of 30 second videos. Either way, I'm quite disturbed, regularly,…

We’ve built good enough systems that lots of people have never had engage with the complexity of reality?

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

#268

Post by Brybry »

sarcasmatwork wrote: post #232
SenHeng wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because Trump just offered an 8month severance package to all fed workers. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvqe3le3z4o > US President Donald Trump has offered federal workers the option to resign and receive pay for eight months, in a major effort to shrink and reform the US government.

[flagged]

Trump's written order threatening the jobs of FAA employees does exist.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/keep...

And this is in the context of a Republican argument that DEI hiring at the FAA for Air Traffic Controllers is a big problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240308145022/https://ag.ks.gov...

I don't believe the environment Mary Schiavo experienced in the 1990s was the same as today's environment.

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

#269

Post by NaOH »

kristjansson wrote: post #258
NaOH wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In her case it was a Bachelors in Aviation and Aerospace Science with an Air Traffic Control Concentration. There may be other programs or concentrations which are acceptable.

> Bachelors in Aviation and Aerospace Science with an Air Traffic Control Concentration I’m not that far removed from my time in college, but I’m shocked by the specificity of that.

Here's the FAA overview of what the agency calls the Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) Program:

https://www.faa.gov/jobs/students/schools

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

#270

Post by consp »

peblos wrote: post #261
mvdtnz wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Requirements are strict in other countries as well. It comes with the nature of the job.

A friend of mine found out he is color blind that way. Not the most common one which you can detect by the tests which are in every biology book here but a rarer variant which is immediately disqualifying. He had to go through weeks of testing as well if that was not the case. Though here you'd be place within 300km of your home so less issues of closeness to family.
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