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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

#461

Post by lesuorac »

amazingamazing wrote: post #445
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that a strike can be illegal is, in and of itself, an erosion of worker rights.

unpopular opinion - but public workers should not be able to go on strike, and in fact shouldn't even be allowed to unionize. it's antithetical to democracy. they should simply run for office and change things, not hold taxpayers' services hostage. unions make sense for private organizations because private organizations are effectively authoritarian entities, not democracies. there is no mechanism in which you could…

Yeah, imagine if somebody at say Google made a union as opposed to just buying up 51% of the stock to vote somebody out.

Everybody makes in-groups to advocate their positions. idk why when it comes to workers people are all like "but they shouldn't". Let me know when you're against the US Chamber of Congress ...

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

#462

Post by [deleted] »

davidw wrote: post #439
r00fus wrote: post #428

I wonder if this administration's firing of many FAA civil positions and the federal worker "buyouts" are responsible.

The intelligent response would be "probably not, but we'll see what the investigation says". But imagine if the tables were turned politically. Fox News would be going off 24/7 about "DEI" or some such for weeks on end. That strategy seems to be successful, so I would expect the other side to start employing it more as well. Having a bunch of harried, overworked people stressed about their jobs and the future certain…

[deleted]

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

#463

Post by tssva »

rayiner wrote: post #98
bsder wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reagan should have been shut down for commercial use many moons ago. It will never be shut down because it's got all the exceptions so that Congresscritters don't have to be treated the same as us plebians.

Not disagreeing, but is there something particularly wrong with DCA?

DCA is just across the Potomac River from DC and thus large amounts of restricted air space. This makes take offs and landings at DCA challenging since all this restricted air space has to be avoided. DCA also has not space to expand to try to mitigate the risks. Congress has interfered over the years by attaching riders to legislation requiring the number of flights allowed in and out of DCA to be increased over the objection of the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority (MWAA) who runs both DCA and IAD (Dulles). This despite decades of warnings that the number of flights posses a significant safety risk.

Regional airport authorities which run multiple airports such as MWAA generally spread the cost of improvements out across the multiple airports by increasing gate fees at all the airports they control to cover the cost of improvements at any one airport. Congress has forbidden MWAA to do so which has limited their ability to expand and improve IAD to lure airlines to shift domestic flights from DCA to IAD. IAD remains primarily an international airport with domestic flights in and out supporting that role. This is largely due to the higher gate fees at IAD.

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

#464

Post by wat10000 »

duxup wrote: post #82

I sometimes wonder about the value of these news stories on forums and social media. It's all pretty much wild speculation with several potential causes already mentioned on this forum. News important yes, every rando with a few shreds of factoids speculating, not so much.

Here, I get ATC transcripts and learn about the helicopter flight paths. Traditional news describes an airliner with 60 people on board as a “small plane.”

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

#465

Post by GlenTheMachine »

snowwrestler wrote: post #334

DCA has two runways. The longer runway is aligned with the river’s north/south direction at that point, so planes flying the approach to this runway from the south track along the western shore of the river, leaving the eastern shore clear for other aircraft like helicopters. The vast majority of flights on approach from the south [1] use this longer runway. The secondary runway is set at a diagonal NW/SE. Planes fly…

I work at NRL, east of DCA and about 500 yards south of the crash. Can confirm that it is not unusual for flights to pass directly overhead of us, however I don’t understand the statement that this was a new flight path.

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

#466

Post by neuronexmachina »

throwaway36482 wrote: post #379
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…

Their candidate success rate would probably be higher if they weren’t rejecting the vast majority of their most-qualified applicants for reasons that are clearly pretextual: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

It's kind of odd that blog post doesn't mention that the biographical assessment it's talking about was only used between 2014 and 2018.

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

#467

Post by insane_dreamer »

ovi256 wrote: post #303
sfn42 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A coup by whom against whom ?

Well, a violent mob attacked the capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, egged on by the acting president who lost the election. It wasn't a coup, but in other countries we would call that an attempted coup.

That same politician instead of being barred from running for office again for inciting an attempted coup, was allowed to (by the justices who he had appointed to office, conveniently), and in is first act as president pardoned all those who participated in the attempted coup, sending a message that violent attempts to thwart the democratic process are ok so long as it's support of him.

So while not quite Liberia or Haiti level coup, certainly the most serious anti-democracy attempt in US history (makes Watergate look cute by comparison) and yet half the country just shrugged it off, opening the door to a fascist (self-serving politicians married with self-serving broligarchs) government.

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

#468

Post by kirtakat »

vman81 wrote: post #377

If anyone needs a palate cleanser after listening to a depressing ATC recording, I can recommend this heartwarming first time solo flying teenager dealing with her landing gear coming off after takeoff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ5q7Iv5wTM

Gods, her "OK" at 30seconds is fucking heart wrenching.

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

#469

Post by bayarearefugee »

deadbabe wrote: post #429
hammock wrote: post #421

I was a controller at DCA for 8 years and this is a normal operation with Helicopters using the Helicopter routes. The problem I see is the controller asked the Helicopter if they had the CRJ in sight, but he never said WHERE HE WAS OR WHAT HE WAS DOING! The controller should have told the Helicopter that the CRJ was circling to RWY 33. The helicopter said he had him in sight, but he really had the Jet in sight that…

The controller will not take blame. It is a blameless culture where mistakes are expected and analyzed and learned from.

[flagged]

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

#470

Post by gota »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #308
teractiveodular wrote: post #240

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…

I think Boeing specifically attracts criticism due to all the fatalities outside of the US in that time period.

And the perceived sentiment that those fatalities are directly linked to changes in the corporate culture that emphasized 'greed' and 'middle management power structures' over 'engineering focus'

Not saying these are true - or false - just that the prevalent media coverage and social media commentary (including here on HN) has been touching on these points frequently. The 'good guys' at Boeing were pushed out or silenced, the 'sleazy guys' won and didn't care about the consequences as long as they got their payday

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