> Warrant Officer Eaves stated that it was at 300 feet and descending to 200 feet — necessary because the maximum height for its route closer to the airport had dropped to 200 feet. But even as it reached that juncture, Warrant Officer Eaves evidently felt obligated to repeat his instruction: The Black Hawk was at 300 feet, he said, and needed to descend
> Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.
> He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank. Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet. She did not turn left.
As much as the article tries to balance it out that the controllers should have done more it seems that ultimately the pilot flying was distracted and not following instructions from the instructor sitting next to them. It happened at least twice based on the captured recordings.
Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation? Otherwise they seemed qualified and flew that route a few times already.
> As much as the article tries to balance it out that the controllers should have done more it seems that ultimately the pilot flying was distracted and not following instructions from the instructor sitting next to them. It happened at least twice based on the captured recordings.
I'm a helicopter flight instructor, although I've never flown in the military. There are 5 magic words the instructor can, and I would argue is obligated to, use to fix the situation: "I have the flight controls"
Knowing they were 100 feet high and flying into the approach corridor with an aircraft on short final and not taking the controls is an enormous failure on the part of the instructor. The student was likely task-saturated and the instructor should have recognized that.
> Knowing they were 100 feet high and flying into the approach corridor with an aircraft on short final and not taking the controls is an enormous failure on the part of the instructor.
Even if they were out of the helicopter airway, based at least on radio transmissions the instructor thought they had the landing aircraft in sight and presumably thought they could stay separated from it visually. I would agree with you if staying at the exact right altitude and position was being thought of as the primary factor keeping them separated from traffic they couldn't see, but it seems different when they were operating under visual separation and thought they could see the aircraft.
That said, I fly Skyhawks not Blackhawks (or any kind of helicopter), so maybe the expectations are different in the rotary wing world. But my experience is that a 100ft altitude deviation is not an "instructors takes the controls" situation in an airplane unless you're about to run into something. Of course they were in this case, but it's not obvious the instructor knew that.
I also fly Skyhawks - it seems to me, as a helicopter outsider, that they think in hundreds of feet where we fixed wing pilots think in thousands of feet. It would be interesting to hear from a RW instructor, especially one from the army, whether a 100ft altitude deviation is more akin to a student deviation 100ft or 1000ft in the fixed wing context.
Still, very little for a fixed wing GA pilot. I know airliners use pretty low separation pretty much as a rule but they have really accurate autopilots.
| He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank.
Now, I'd love to _hear_ the actual comment/instruction here. He may have been hedging because he was trying to piece together the stepped on "pass behind" direction from ATC. But I also wonder if it's an inherent problem when the student outranks the instructor?
Seems like a lot of people have never had to deal with a higher-ranked person who might ruin the underling's career if shown up in a particularly embarrassing way. It's easy to imagine that prospect causing the instructor to hesitate just enough for disaster.
Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation? Otherwise they seemed qualified and flew that route a few times already.
Beyond her general lack of flight-time? Her primary role appeared to be some sort of liaison in DC, not flying Blackhawks.
That may be common for an Army pilot, but for somebody expected to fly during wartime, transport VIPs under stressful conditions, etc that's pretty goddam minimal.
Seems that for a FAC 1, UH-60, 48 hours is required semiannually (every 6 months) and 12hr of sim can be applied to meet those flight time minimums. For FAC 2, it's 30 over 6 months, also allowing 12 hrs of that as sim time.
This is one of those situations where common intuition doesn't match reality. I've similarly been wrong in the past where my intuition was off wrt/ to hours on industrial equipment compared to their expected life.
Yeah, I’m not claiming the hours were unusual, only that the 2 hours/weeks feels inadequate to maintain superior operational readiness. That’s not even a round of golf.
Part of the problem with that logic is your arbitrary per-week calculation. Spending 4 full days training per month, half of which is spent in the pilot’s seat flying, seems like a good level for maintenance training, with more intensive periodical training to level up.
One part of an emergency plan is making sure people can back each other up and fill in if necessary. Which in practice means some people in backup / if-needed roles will be near the low end of whatever time minimums they need to maintain, yet still need to fly sometimes.
I think there is way too much focus on the exact position of the helicopter and the article actually does a pretty good job providing additional details (which it then undermines by ending the article the way it did).
For me the most consequential factor is that the helicopter pilots (technically the instructor, but I assume both were in agreement) requested visual separation based on their obviously incorrect visual sighting of the landing aircraft, which the controller granted. While perfect adherence to the routes by both helicopter and airplane might have avoided a collision, the margin is so incredibly slim (75 ft) that it seems unlikely the intent was that it would serve as the primary way to separate traffic. Properly executed visual separation would have kept everyone safe, but it seems pretty likely that neither helicopter pilot actually has eyes on the jet, maybe at any point or maybe just prior to the crash.
I also think it's hasty to discount the controller's role. At least based on the article, it's not clear the controller provided enough information that the helicopter pilots could have determined if they had visually identified the right aircraft. Given how busy the airspace is, making sure the helicopter was tracking the right landing aircraft is pretty critical. And while it's the pilots' job, the controller can certainly give them every advantage.
I think the statement in the article about many things going wrong all at the same time is likely the right one, although of course we should wait for the final NTSB report to say for certain. I feel like people want the satisfaction of identifying one single primary cause, but most aircraft accidents don't really work like that. And we should want to understand all the factors to plug as many holes in the swiss cheese as we can going forward.
> the margin is so incredibly slim (75 ft) that it seems unlikely the intent was that it would serve as the primary way to separate traffic.
At that level a few hundred feet (since the helicopter is already supposed to be flying 200 or so feet above the ground) can make all the difference.
> I think the statement in the article about many things going wrong all at the same time is likely the right one, although of course we should wait for the final NTSB report to say for certain. I feel like people want the satisfaction of identifying one single primary cause, but most aircraft accidents don't really work like that. And we should want to understand all the factors to plug as many holes in the swiss cheese as we can going forward.
There can be contributing factors but the just because there are many factors doesn't mean they are equally weighted. At least with the pilot with have at least two indications they were confused. The instructor next to them tried to correct them a few times already.
> At least based on the article, it's not clear the controller provided enough information that the helicopter pilots could have determined if they had visually identified the right aircraft. Given how busy the airspace is, making sure the helicopter was tracking the right landing aircraft is pretty critical.
I think at least the non-flying pilot, the instructor, had understood and directed the pilot to avoid the collision, but the pilot didn't listen. The ATC in a busy airspace like don't have the time to have a long discussion with pilots ensuring they are good pilots and know what aircraft they are seeing "do you see 3 lights on it, one is red?", "how many engines do you see?". That just not very likely. They assume a helicopter pilot on that kind of an airspace configuration will know what they are doing. If they request visual separation they assume a hefty responsibility.
The warrant officer was the instructor and was training her. Few times doesn't make someone qualified. I think it was because of military egos and ranks, the warrant officer didn't force corrected the Captain.
Also why is training happening in such dangerous path where even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart.
Coincidentally, Nathan Fielder is currently doing an entire season of The Rehearsal based on the premise that a number of flight crashes occurred after the co-pilot failed to contradict or take controls from the pilot.
> Nathan Fielder studies airliner black box transcripts in which the first officer feels too intimidated to challenge the captain, leading to fatal crashes due to pilot error. He discusses this with John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member, who had once recommended roleplay simulation to improve pilot communication.
> I think it was because of military egos and ranks, the warrant officer didn't force corrected the Captain.
I'd be shocked if the US military didn't provide crew resource management training for their aviators. This is exactly the kind of situation CRM is designed to prevent.
> Also why is training happening in such dangerous path where even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart.
Forget training, why is this happening under any circumstances ever? If a military transport mission is ever so critical that you're willing to fly it within 30 meters of a civilian airlines it seems to me that you should just close the airspace to civil air traffic at that point.
While I can’t speak to their individual temperaments, this is not an issue in the Army. Warrant officers are probably the least likely to worry about rank being confused with authority. They have the military experience from serving in the enlisted ranks as an NCO, with the protection of being officers that are above enlisted but still fall outside the commissioned officer ranks. They aren't untouchable but are highly insulated from petty tyrants.
I don’t know why the instructor didn’t take a more forceful/active role leading up to the crash, but I don’t think rank was a contributing factor.
I agree with everything you said, just want to point out that there's a "street to seat" program for Army aviators, so the warrant may have never served as an enlisted soldier. I still don't think a reluctance to act based on rank was the issue, like at all. Aviation is different from the rest of the military, there is generally a culture of safety that supersedes the rank structure.
I don’t know if the US shares a great deal with UK armed forces, but an officer ignoring a senior NCO, especially one training them, does so very much at their own peril.
It is far more likely to be something like cognitive overload rather than a clash or personalities - you don’t get to be in that position in the first place if you have a tendency to disregard instructors.
I've personally never met a warrant officer afraid of (or even the least bit timid about) correcting a commissioned company-grade officer (O-3 in this case).
> I think it was because of military egos and ranks, the warrant officer didn't force corrected the Captain.
I think they should prohibit such type of flights when ranks are reversed. Let's imagine he would have yanked the controls and avoided the crash. Now the Captain could have said "you're insubordinate and tanked my qualification flight, there will be a price to pay".
Sorry, I am trying to follow, but it's a bit ambiguous. It is laughable that the instructor would take controls away, or laughable that they wouldn't, or that in a military subordinate structure there can be retaliations.
I am up for a good laugh, just not sure which one you meant we'd be laughing at.
> Also why is training happening in such dangerous path where even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart.
I'm not sure that's a correct understanding of how the approach path to the runway and the helicopter route are supposed to interact. So far as I understand, the intent was never that a helicopter and airplane were supposed to be able to happily barrel along their respective paths within worrying about running into each other. That kind of thing happens a lot in aviation, but the separation distance is much, much larger.
Instead, one was supposed to see the other and use their eyes to visually stay away (ideally by much more than 100 ft). That's what was supposed to happen here, and what the instructor pilot in the helicopter said they were doing. Visual separation is also used a lot in aviation, often in places where there are no narrowly defined paths at all, but it carries the risk of aircraft not seeing or misidentifying each other, which could be what happened here.
That's actually the crux of the matter - not only shouldn't they have done training (at night, with night vision goggles) in conditions where aircraft could be only 30 m apart, this construct of a helicopter flight corridor being within an altimeter's tolerance of the glide path for an airport runway shouldn't have been allowed to happen at all! It's unfortunate that the article focuses on who made what missteps and doesn't mention this systemic issue.
even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart
This doesn't match with how I understood the ATC's instructions. The helicopter was instructed to "pass behind" the landing airliner, not pass below. I think the controller's intention was for the helicopter to hold short of passing the runway 33 flight path, and not to enter that space until the plane had crossed the river.
With regards to training for high tolerance situations. Places and times where a small error can have large consequences.
Yes you ease into it, the first level of training is done in a safe environment, however as the person gains competence the training moves into the domain in question, the person gains experience at doing the thing in question while being supervised. Or to put it another way.
What? You expect that their first flight through that tight corridor at night should be done alone?
In conclusion, I think it is fine in general that they were doing training on that flight path. However the fact that the both pilot and the trainer erred so badly indicates the need for better low level training and a reevaluation of the need for such a tight flight path in a civilian zone.
Update: unrelated thought, I could not decide if low or high tolerance was the term i wanted, after waffling a bit I went with high tolerance. as that is the correct engineering meaning, but really the term is ambiguous and means the different things in different domains, he has a high tolerance for alcohol means the opposite of he made a high tolerance part.
It seems like both the pilot and instructor misidentified the plane they were supposed to be separated from, otherwise the instructor would have taken the controls and performed the maneuver himself if he knew a collision was imminent.
Maybe visual flight separation is a bad idea when there are a bunch of lights from the ground and a busy airspace. A plane on a collision course with you will just look like a static light, like many many other lights in the area.
> It seems like both the pilot and instructor misidentified the plane they were supposed to be separated from, otherwise the instructor would have taken the controls and performed the maneuver himself if he knew a collision was imminent.
I think eventually they figured out and instructed the pilot to avoid but the pilot didn't listen. But that was the second mishap of the flight. The pilot was failing to maintain a proper altitude before that.
> Maybe visual flight separation is a bad idea when there are a bunch of lights from the ground and a busy airspace. A plane on a collision course with you will just look like a static light, like many many other lights in the area.
To me, at least in this case, it seems the pilot was not adequately prepared. They were either distracted or rusty. The instructor should have taken controls and flown back at the first sign of not being able to maintain a proper altitude. However, the pilot outranked the instructor; taking controls away and failing the qualification / training flight could have resulted in some retribution or more hassles. Also, I think they should instead let pilots do this kind of qualification in similar but more remote or less busy area, longer, until they get more hours under their belt and not allow rank reversals to train like that. They should have found someone outranking her who wouldn't have though twice about grabbing the control.
> Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation?
Why do you focus on that and not many other possibilities for distraction - cognitive overload, lack of sleep, an injury, other distractions in the cockpit, etc.
> Why do you focus on that and not many other possibilities for distraction
Why shouldn't I focus on those? I guess just by asking the question you haven't quite shown why your guess are better. I guess I don't how lack of sleep is a better explainer than, I don't know, a family member dying?
I guess which one would the investigator be able to figure out? They can read the obituary of the grandmother but how would they figure she didn't sleep well the night before.
> I'm not guessing one or the other; I don't see why anyone would.
Well you just did above:
> and not many other possibilities for distraction - cognitive overload, lack of sleep, an injury, other distractions in the cockpit, etc.
Yeah it could be all of those and we should wait for investigation. But seems my particular guess bothered you for some reason and you suggested better guess, and I am just wondering what about my guess bothered you.
I can see if you just say "ok, let's not guess and wait for the investigation", I can agree with that.
I did not guess any; I listed possibilities in addition to the one you hypothesized about.
Your attachment to reality seems a little weak: You make up a reason the helicopter pilot was (possibly) distracted, you make up my motivations. The way we intelligently distinguish fantasy from reality is evidence.
> I can see if you just say "ok, let's not guess and wait for the investigation", I can agree with that.
> Your attachment to reality seems a little weak
> you make up my motivations
I simply asked you why you thought your guess were better. I was expecting, say link with statistics about "well these are the top factor contributing to the pilot error..."
> The way we intelligently distinguish fantasy from reality is evidence.
Sure, that's why my guess was something that can be validated. Your guesses are "cognitive overload" or "distractions in the cockpit". How do we prove those in this case.
> I thought you might have some evidence.
This is not a court case or scientific work, it's a discussion forum. You're fully allowed to guess, have "what if" scenarios, "wonder", complement people, talk about the weather, or the what you feel and like. That's perfectly ok. If you don't like what someone is saying or don't agree, it's best to offer an alternative, which you did but then when asked further you accused me of losing ties with reality. If you're not feeling ok, you simply don't have to reply. That's fine too.
A hundred feet in aviation unfortunately just isn't that much. It's the equivalent of driving 3 miles over the speed limit on the highway. I am not sure about rotorcraft but if you are flying a traditional Cessna for training, a bit of wind shear or updraft can easily change your altitude by hundreds of feet.
> A hundred feet in aviation unfortunately just isn't that much. It's the equivalent of driving 3 miles over the speed limit on the highway. I am not sure about rotorcraft but if you are flying a traditional Cessna for training, a bit of wind shear or updraft can easily change your altitude by hundreds of feet.
I would agree in general, but in that particular environment around DC with the restricted WH fly zone, the busy airport, the river and the bridges and the ADSB switched off it can make a huge difference.
Yeah, I find the report to be more of a morning after quarterback situation. For general plane to plane vertical separation, you are supposed to maintain a minimum of hundreds of feet. A hundred feet shouldn't make a difference.
idiotic comment. This is literally a training mission - not following an order is not disobeying this is clearly failure of instructor who was not ready to take over. This is a common pattern in like almost any other training situation.
I mean maybe instead of patholigizing to that level we maybe need to accept that there is a temporal normal distribution to human attention spans and design our systems around it.
It feels like semi-autonomous ATC and flight controls were possible as of 5 years ago. Has FAA even started writing initial reports on this?
Yeah, that one has been around as long as there have been computers. It's sort of like the flying car of the ATC world - it's always 5 years away.
> temporal normal distribution to human attention spans
Tn this case we had both the ATC and the instructor tell the pilot to do something different and they didn't listen. Not sure if that's an attention span issue, it may be, but it's not clear it's definitely what it is.
AFAICT the technologies been around for a while (esp assistance). It's the regulation and the minefield of a roll-out plan that the FAA would rather not take on. Nobody gets fired for doing nothing and continuing to play whack-a-mole with human frailties.
> AFAICT the technologies been around for a while (esp assistance)
Yeah, agree. There is even mention of a collision alarm at the tower going off
> Nobody gets fired for doing nothing and continuing to play whack-a-mole with human frailties.
That seems like it. It kind of feels something should have been worked out by now, but nobody wants to put a system in place, that would could due to a glitch direct a bunch of flight to crash into a mountain or into each other.
Woah, you're claiming the presence of a vagina contributed to the accident? I'd love to hear how you think that's a problem? You do realize women have been flying professionally for (albeit not in) the US military since at least 1942 (establishment of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron)?
The grammar is fine. Saying "the pilot did not listen to the instructor sitting next to them" is perfectly fine in English and has been so since at least the '90s when I first learned the language as a child.
Singular they has always been valid in modern English, going back to before Shakespeare (he used it a couple of times). The idea that it isn't comes from contrarian mid-18th-century prescriptivists who wanted to actively change the language people were already using.
a Wikipedia link means nothing, especially in the context of politically charged grammar. You can't link most conservative papers on Wikipedia, and some of the founders regularly acknowledge the site is heavily biased.
I mean that article claims singular they was common through the 19th and 20th century, but we see that's not true through any dictionary lookup https://www.websters1913.com/words/They
They (thā), pron. pl.; poss. Theirs; obj. Them. [Icel. þeir they, properly nom. pl. masc. of sā, sū, þat, a demonstrative pronoun, akin to the English definite article, AS. sē, seó, ðæt, nom. pl. ðā. See That.] The plural of he, she, or it. They is never used adjectively, but always as a pronoun proper, and sometimes refers to persons without an antecedent expressed.
Using they to refer to someone when you don't want to acknowledge their gender is a very recent thing, only done by the politically motivated.
Doesn't this prove my point? Using singular "they" is a recent, political change. Old dictionaries, like I've linked, don't include its use. A small selection of new, left-wing "dictionaries" are the only place you see it.
Well it proves that “singular they” is acknowledged by the OED, pretty much the authority of the English language, as being in common use from circa 1300. If you think Websters is older or more authoritative than the OED (or that the OED is new and left-wing) then I suppose we just have to agree to disagree but at that point I would suggest that perhaps you are rejecting any source that doesn’t support your claims and personal beliefs.
I would not call them the authority on the english language lol, but what are you talking about? The idea of being transgender was invented in the 1970's by John Money, there were no 1300 nonbinary people.
The relevant section of your definition is this:
I.2.c Used with reference to a person whose sense of personal identity does not correspond to conventional sex and gender distinctions, and who has typically asked to be referred to as they (rather than as he or she).
This was a recent addition. It did not exist in any older dictionary, or more moderate new dictionaries. I showed you this in an earlier comment, this revisionist history claiming they was always used in a singular fashion to avoid gendering people is insane, it literally couldn't have existed before the 70's because the concept hadn't been invented yet.
The word "they" being used in a singular manner is not something invented by transgender people. It has existed for a long time in natural conversation when talking about someone indeterminate. You can see it in examples like "Has anyone forgotten their coat?" or "Someone who's bought their own house would know." Activists couldn't hope to make people talk that way if they didn't already.
You can see it randomly used in old writing, too. For example, I just found this example of the word they being used in a singular fashion in Jane Eyre.
I observed when any one entered or left the apartment: I could even tell who they were; I could understand what was said when the speaker stood near to me; but I could not answer; to open my lips or move my limbs was equally impossible.
It was not uncontested, however; 19th century grammarians prescribed that people use "he" for indeterminate persons, and you will see this a lot in old writing, too.
Finally, I will say that transgender people have existed for longer than the 1970s. For trivial evidence, you can see how Christine Jorgensen got a sex change in 1954, making headlines as "Former G.I. Becomes Blonde Beauty" in a newspaper.
> Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.
> He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank. Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet. She did not turn left.
As much as the article tries to balance it out that the controllers should have done more it seems that ultimately the pilot flying was distracted and not following instructions from the instructor sitting next to them. It happened at least twice based on the captured recordings.
Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation? Otherwise they seemed qualified and flew that route a few times already.