Washington, DC: Commercial Jet Collides With Blackhawk Helicopter Near Reagan Airport

Black boxes have been recovered.
Unfortunately at this point it’s a recovery operation. The wreckage is only 8 feet deep,but the dive team is cutting their wet suits on the wreckage. As you can imagine,they’re traumatized by finding the victims in the wreckage (and understandably so). 12 people remain missing.
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/plane-crash-washington-dc-trump-01-31-25/index.html

 

So here's the description of Route 4 the Blackhawk was following.



That's designed to keep them below glidepath. So it's really a simple question that's going to be really really hard to find the answer to, is why was the Blackhawk significantly above 200 MSL.

 

Based on a news report I saw this morning, the ATC facility normally has a dedicated controller who handles military flights in the area. In this case, one controller was handling all of the traffic, including that chopper. I am starting to think this was a series of errors starting with the chopper not being at the proper altitude and an overworked controller not catching it in time. I have heard that there are no flight or instrument recorders on the Blackhawk, so most likely we will never know what was happening on board. Once the PSA recorders are opened and the NTSB has a chance to hear the ####pit voice recorder we will know what was happening at the time of the crash.

I am going to steer clear of the politics of this tragedy. I suspect there is enough blame to go around.

I will say this, though, about ATC staffing. If the FAA does not want to keep these towers, TRACON Facilities, and the en route control facilities properly staffed, then they need to stop allowing flights that cause the controllers to become overworked. I still sometimes just stand in amazement that the Tower Controllers at the LA Airport (LAX) let a large aircraft land on top of a smaller regional aircraft! There is a YouTube channel called VASAviation which I watch a lot. Over the last several years they have posted recorded ATC radar and voice communications. Many of these posts are about near collisions and runway incursions.

Now I want to change gears and address a concern I have had for decades about ATC controllers. I wonder how many ATC controllers are currently RIGHT NOW on the job all across the USA who are going through problems. Like a bad marriage, problems with their kids, debts etc. Or sadly like this controller.

 

Seems that they didn’t want anymore white straight ATC’s

 

I flew rotary wing in the navy and it's been a while but I remember having to do training online before even attempting the DC airspace after 9/11...you had to know exactly who to be talking to and when, you couldn't just wing it up there.

I was in NORVA at the time and planning on doing the DC low level and first flight down in NC as a last hurrah...sadly an unscheduled deployment got in the way of that.

 

People could sit there and say what they want about you know who getting rid of this DEI especially in the FAA… The problem with the DEI is it doesn’t target the most qualified person for the job and when it comes to air traffic controller. I don’t care what race they are what gender they are etc. it needs to be the most qualified person for the job, especially when it comes to safety sensitive functions like an aircraft controller is responsible for… this garbage that people think they should be able to allow to have jobs just because they want a certain job whether they’re qualified or not needs to cease… And getting rid of DEI is a start… Let’s get back to having some proper standards for certain safety sensitive positions, no matter what

 

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That exact specific area is considered the most secure and regulated airspace in the entire world. Which really creates more mystery as to how this could’ve happened. But as with most of these tragedies involving air disaster, it’s usually a sequence of events that leads up to the event. And if anyone of those sequence of events didn’t happen then the disaster wouldn’t have happened. What I find odd about this is now they’re reporting that earlier in the same day there was another near miss involving a Blackhawk helicopter and an airline. So one has to really wonder what is going on over there.