Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

mediaite.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 738 posts

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

#661

Post by freen »

ty6853 wrote: post #330
freen wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, bureaucrat equals evil is an easy position to take: No one likes following the rules until they are responsible for cleaning up after the people who didn’t follow the rules.

The American people are tired of cleaning up the messes the bureaucracy has made. They've broken the rules, and it is time for the mess to be cleaned up and ejected from their jobs. Many who have more HN-like peers and communities may not realize this is the opinion of the people, but the awakening is coming when the paychecks stop.

Yeah, nothing says “order and rules” like revoking and then reinstating all federal grants over the course of what, a day or two? Less?

The order of things is that the GOP breaks everything, Democrats fix it all and get blamed for the painful process of fixing things and the sub optimality of the result, which the GOP has fought tooth and nail to remain sub-optimal because that helps their narrative and sub-optimal government enables them to win elections.

Then the GOP gets to run things again, breaks things senselessly, and we rinse and repeat.

Turns out electing people to government who think the government is the problem is a bad idea: they work to prove that their position is correct by actively breaking the government, thus can argue that they should remain in power because the government is “broken”.

“We are all trying to find the person who did this” meme. But with real human suffering.

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

#662

Post by warner25 »

alistairSH wrote: post #653
defrost wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be normal to have night vision to hand for either a training mission or for a secure VIP transport mission. It's unclear whether they were being used at the time of the crash, but it'd be part of training. The reporting to hand ATM makes statements such as: Earlier in the day, Mr. Hegseth said the crew had night vision goggles. However, it was unclear whether the crew was wearing the goggles at the time of the c…

Sure, but if they weren’t in use, why mention them? And I wouldn’t expect them to be training in them in a busy commercial airspace. But that’s just what I’d expect - not based on anything else.

As defrost said, having goggles would be normal (probably even required by local unit policy) for any night flight. Whether they are helpful or harmful will vary with conditions so, yeah, when transiting through a dense urban area with lots of ambient light you might actually flip them up (i.e. out of the way, above your line of sight) to see better.

Also as defrost said, nobody can know right now if they were actually in-use at the time of the incident. We have to wait for cockpit voice recordings.

Anyway, it's not really significant, though. I think Secretary Hegseth mentioned it because a portion of the public will equate "flying with night vision" to "flying in daylight" (even though it's not even close), so the DoD was taking all appropriate measures to be safe. Or he was just told that the crew was doing a "goggle reset" flight (because crew members need to log at least one hour of flight time with goggles every 60 days to stay current), and he jumped to a conclusion.

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

#663

Post by gomijacogeo »

Aeolun wrote: post #631
huijzer wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blancolirio (active pilot who regularly makes videos about crahses with the aim of improving safety) just released a new video on this accident: https://youtu.be/_3gD_lnBNu0 Summary: The helicopter might have been a little bit too high. The night vision goggles might have negatively affected the vision. The two aircraft were probably on different frequencies so didn’t hear each other. And the helicopter might have fo…

Wouldn’t the aircraft see the helicopter?

Unlikely; the pilots are (correctly) following the approach controller's direction. It's approach's responsibility to keep them clear of other traffic. Also they just got handed a different runway to land on that's a lot shorter and in one of the more complex airspaces of the planet; they're busy.

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

#664

Post by jacobjjacob »

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…

I don’t agree with your opinion but I think you make a great point. They are definitely very different situations which at least warrant some differences in policy.

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

#665

Post by llamaimperative »

ty6853 wrote: post #655
llamaimperative wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ATF was raiding for their purview, firearms/explosives. Well not really. That's what they had warrants for. Obviously they knew about and didn't like the whole child sex slavery thing. > As for the fires, they happened [six hours] after incendiary tear gas was deployed by the government... That's not overruled by some sketchy milk carton audio of [militant religious nutjobs inside the compound talking about spr…

Obviously the best way to save the children from Koresh is a siege, incendiary weapons, and a tank. Not taking him on his daily run, or first using the sheriff who had rapport with Koreash Even if the ATF/FBI is 0% responsible for the fire they showed an exquisite ability to exacerbate the danger the kids were in. I'm sure it was a total coincidence the same sniper at Waco shot Vicki Weaver, an innocent women with a…

Okay they arrest Koresh outside the compound… then what? Be specific please.

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

#666

Post by UltraSane »

RandomBacon wrote: post #519
UltraSane wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if they only let people take the bar exam once.

While missing a comma can have great impact, it isn't the same as missing traffic, and ATC doesn't have the luxury of rough drafts.

How does not letting people retry even once produce more competent air traffic controllers?

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

#668

Post by ty6853 »

llamaimperative wrote: post #665
ty6853 wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the best way to save the children from Koresh is a siege, incendiary weapons, and a tank. Not taking him on his daily run, or first using the sheriff who had rapport with Koreash Even if the ATF/FBI is 0% responsible for the fire they showed an exquisite ability to exacerbate the danger the kids were in. I'm sure it was a total coincidence the same sniper at Waco shot Vicki Weaver, an innocent women with a…

Okay they arrest Koresh outside the compound… then what? Be specific please.

Your specific concern was Koresh having sex with children. Are you moving the goal posts, or was that not your concern? How does he have sex with kids in adult jail?

Or do you mean what should happen when someone doesn't pay $200 for an NFA stamp ( in this case i beleive for alleged machine guns or destructive devices), which is another crime they were accused of. In that case I'd say asset or wage garnishment is a better way to dealing with unpaid taxes.

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

#669

Post by gamblor956 »

tristor wrote: post #613
gamblor956 wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you read a link that says people suing the FAA claim the FAA didn't hire qualified candidates on diversity. Except that none of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit actually bothered to apply for jobs with the FAA (see this blog post from their own legal team crowing about winning a procedural matter over whether they had standing to sue given that they never applied for a job and thus were never actually rejected by th…

Perhaps I misunderstood something, but it seems those claims were supported by the evidence of multiple internal memos retrieved via discovery. Another commenter points out that this practice ended in 2018 due to Congress making it illegal, but prior that the FAA had been issuing a biographical assessment as a basis for hiring decisions, exactly as stated in the article. Your own link has the court opinion confirming…

The fact they won the case on procedural grounds is not relevant

You're misreading both links. They didn't win the case, it's still going. They won a procedural issue that prevented them from automatically losing the case, and recast not losing as true victory. And the importance of my link was that it proves my point not yours: that the plaintiffs were not actually affected by the alleged FAA diversity hiring practices because...again...they never applied for a job in the first place.

Everybody railing against the assessment fundamentally misunderstood the test. There are no DEI questions. The test does not ask you what your ethnicity is, or your sex. It's basically just a personality test with biographical data: what is your preferred learning method? how do you respond to high-stress situations? what have you studied? what is your relevant flying/airport experience? how did you learn about the ATCS role?

The experience questions alone can get you a of a "passing" score (answers are not weighted equally, but despite popular claims online, all questions are worth at least some points...there are no purely informational questions https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/ATC%20Hiring%20R...). The OIG report also states the Biographical Assessment was tested on existing controllers to validate the scoring rubric and refined accordingly, meaning that nobody actually employed as an ATC could fail the BA. And importantly: the validation cohort was overwhelmingly white and male... (And the report also notes that in the 3 years that the BA was in use, there was no change in the ethnic or gender makeup of new ATCS hires.)

The plaintiff in the original post you linked supposedly got a 100% on the original test but somehow managed to "fail" a biography test in which more than half of the questions are about their experience in the field or relevant education. If they were being honest about their qualifications, they should have gotten a passing score with plenty of points to spare. Because again...the scoring rubric was validated by testing it on the existing staff of overwhelmingly white male employees...who all passed...

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

#670

Post by gedy »

junaru wrote: post #321
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…

Why is this being framed as airliners fault to begin with. When a fishingboat gets rammed by an cruise ship it's not "cruise ship collides with fishingboat", its the reverse. One is a big civilian aircraft thats being tracked and has no way of making sharp course adjustments the other is a 'VIP' with potentially ADS-B off. Heads should fly at whatever military branch the hellicopter was operated at... but they wont.

From what I've seen, military leaders can and do get fired and blamed for their unit failings, at least more frequently than equivalent corporate leaders do.
Post reply on HN