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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

#671

Post by trhway »

bigiain wrote: post #658
trhway wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Marine radar is trivial compared to air-to-air radar. like in the case of a boat, the air-to-air radar is still peanuts compare to the cost of the plane/helicopter >The Black Hawk, like most aircraft, does not have an air-to-air radar. Pretty surprising for the military. You'd like to know when an enemy fighter or a missile coming for you. And military frequently operates in the territories without any ATC, so you'd…

>>The Black Hawk, like most aircraft, does not have an air-to-air radar. >Pretty surprising for the military. You'd like to know when an enemy fighter or a missile coming for you. I'd guess the answer to "when is an enemy missile heading towards me" would usually be "shortly after you turn on your radar transmitter and reveal your location"...

>turn on your radar transmitter and reveal your location".

That was in the past. Even if you don't turn your radar on, in IR cameras widespread today your engines are visible from tens of kilometers, and without your radar on the missile comes to you without you being aware of it.

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

#672

Post by dumah »

trhway wrote: post #615
jahewson wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marine radar is trivial compared to air-to-air radar. The Black Hawk, like most aircraft, does not have an air-to-air radar. IR cameras would be completely inappropriate for the situation but night vision goggles are a possibility I guess - though still have all the same drawbacks as using your eyes - you have to look in the right direction and recognise what that small dot is that you’re seeing.

>Marine radar is trivial compared to air-to-air radar. like in the case of a boat, the air-to-air radar is still peanuts compare to the cost of the plane/helicopter >The Black Hawk, like most aircraft, does not have an air-to-air radar. Pretty surprising for the military. You'd like to know when an enemy fighter or a missile coming for you. And military frequently operates in the territories without any ATC, so you'd…

The air-to-air radar is not necessarily peanuts compared to the helicopter. A recent sale of blackhawks to Greece was priced at 1.95B for 35 helos. A past sale of 36 Apache Longbow radars and support to Korea was priced at 3.6B.

A helo is a sitting duck for a fighter so what would it do anyways. AEW will tell the helicopter about a fighter and vector them to safety. An active military radar will only be lit when necessary.

I do agree that an iPad with flight radar should have been able to help avoid this incident, much less the engineered solution that is warranted in a combat aircraft.

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

#673

Post by dumah »

trhway wrote: post #671
bigiain wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The Black Hawk, like most aircraft, does not have an air-to-air radar. >Pretty surprising for the military. You'd like to know when an enemy fighter or a missile coming for you. I'd guess the answer to "when is an enemy missile heading towards me" would usually be "shortly after you turn on your radar transmitter and reveal your location"...

>turn on your radar transmitter and reveal your location". That was in the past. Even if you don't turn your radar on, in IR cameras widespread today your engines are visible from tens of kilometers, and without your radar on the missile comes to you without you being aware of it.

Missile approach warning systems don’t need radar. Most use IR sensing and lasers.

Even in radar-based MAW systems, they are not multipurpose and do not detect aircraft by design.

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

#674

Post by immibis »

recursive wrote: post #473
bayarearefugee wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Where did that come from? There are some things in life that don't revolve around identity politics, and I'd venture to say, ATC is one of them.

It came from the new regime, which has a vendetta against certain things and tries to pin everything bad on them.

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

#675

Post by HideousKojima »

gamblor956 wrote: post #669
tristor wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 practi…

>Everybody railing against the assessment fundamentally misunderstood the test. There are no DEI questions.

The issue is the correct answers were intentionally leaked to a black ATC union

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

#676

Post by watersb »

V99 wrote: post #586
jillesvangurp wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch a lot of pilots on Youtube. Most of them use some kind of audio splitter to record sound. You hear what the pilot hears. But minus the plane noise, vibrations, etc (unless that's mixed in via some open microphone). So, it's actually better. So, it really is that bad. Especially when flying low, on the edge of the range of the radios, etc. VHF radio is ancient technology. It's not great even under ideal condit…

Besides the "we already have it everywhere" bit, the big advantage of analog AM over UHF/VHF is that it degrades fairly gracefully. As you're getting too far away the signal gets harder to pick out from the noise, but it's not an all-or-nothing digital signal. That doesn't matter much over Washington DC, but when you get out towards the western half of the country the transmitters are a lot more widely spread out. Th…

The ADS-B Transponder requirement for non-commercial aviation took decades.

And oh, how we howl at the expense! $2500 so your airplane pings out its position and heading.

I stopped flying right about then, mid-2000s, so I never had more than a hand-held GPS to go along with the usual radio stack.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveill...

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

#677

Post by rexpop »

okvariation2323 wrote: post #530
Yeul wrote: post #483

"Trump blames diversity rules under his predecessors, saying he believes people were hired for air traffic control roles who were not qualified - but offers no evidence for this" From the BBC. I swear to god they made 4chan president of America.

There is some evidence for this, unfortunately https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

Thank you for this.

I'm still convinced that evidence of DEI is not evidence of its culpability. The real "affirmative action" is the coddling of white men from birth to job placement, while women and POC are deprived of equal opportunities.

These assessment discrepancies are negligible. DEI is a red herring.

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

#678

Post by watersb »

dboreham wrote: post #492
axus wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On "Truth Social" last night, Donald Trump was explicitly questioning the actions of the ATC. And during this morning's press briefing, he blamed "the crash on Barack Obama, Joe Biden, former Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, DEI and people with disabilities." I'm waiting for the transcript on that one.

Contrast this with the on-screen appearance by American Airlines CEO last night. Watching it, I wondered: why can't we have a guy like this as president?

> why can't we have a guy like this as president?

Running for office has become survival combat reality TV.

Who wants to put the family through something like that?

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

#679

Post by palmfacehn »

ModernMech wrote: post #577
mrandish wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think they really do want to hollow out the federal government, and we should expect things like planes falling out of the sky as part of that. I am no fan of Trump but it is possible that 1) The Federal government has grown far too large and is bloated in many areas. And 2) The size of the Federal government can be reduced while maintaining safety and essential services. I don't know if the current administratio…

I think that would be a reasonable take if the people implementing this plan (Musk, Thiel, Vance) weren't literally citing Curtis "a government is just a corporation that owns a country" Yarvin as a thought leader. Although you are right they're trying to do what Musk did with Twitter, but the thing is that didn't go very smoothly, and he thinks it went great. At Twitter it meant downtime and also making users feel u…

I'm not as familiar with Yarvin as I am with partisan media narratives. My problem with these kinds of insinuations, is that one quote or citation of Yarvin is easily spun into the conclusion that the incoming administration is following all of Yarvin's writings, no matter how obscure.

Partisan journalists are incentivized to selectively quote Yarvin's works to scare their partisan audience. The wildest and most fearful conclusions gain the most clicks and views.

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

#680

Post by gniv »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #540
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 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 was landing on RWY 1. I think you're only listening to a selected part of the recording. > Tower: "PAT25 traffic…

Yes, exactly. You can hear it in this transcribed video, around 1:35: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiOybe-NJHk
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