Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

> over noisy radio

I've been told the noise on the recordings is always a lot worse than in practice due to the location of the recording antenna not being ideal. I have no idea if this is correct or not. Maybe someone can enlighten this.

I got a lesson in how ATC works with helicopters up close and personal on a helicopter tour. ATC had the helo pilot hold position while an airplane was on final approach. I asked the pilot why we needed to hold as we could clearly see the aircraft and were to my lack of knowledge on the subject "plenty" far away. (It actually took me a second to locate the airplane as my sense of scale was not expecting the plane to be so small which is part of why I made the assumption we were plenty far away.) That's when the pilot told me we were not in the way of the approach but if the pilot had to declare a miss (or whatever they call it) and climb to circle around. The helo was near the path for the plane on the abort flight path. Once the plane was on the ground, ATC allowed us to continue.

It was my first experience in an aircraft seeing how ATC controlled the airspace directly. Lots of respect to the folks in ATC with a fraction of understanding in just how much they have to deal with other than the obvious take-off/landings.

There was a second American Airlirns flight only a couple miles and a thousand feet higher in altitude in the same approach course. You can actually see it in the video that’s circulating.

Is this true for the trained pilots as well?

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.

once you know to look at those two specific flights it probably gets easier, yeah. if you were looking at everything in the air at the time I think less so?

That house doesn't seem to have enough clearance vs the trees to land a helo. Note that Langley (CIA) is nearby.

Thank you!

811 Lawton St, Mc Lean, VA 22101 Name: SAUDIA ARABIA ROYAL EMBASSY OF, Mailing Address: 8500 HILLTOP RD STE 301 C/O FINANCIAL DIRECTOR FAIRFAX VA 22031 4310

The helicopter seems like it is typically stationed at Fort Belvoir. Does "out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia" strictly mean that the helicopter's flight started at Fort Belvoir, or that the helicopter itself is considered to be "out of Fort Belvoir" in a similar manner that LeBron James could be said to be "out of Akron, OH"?

What is "flight route 4"?

But does that provide any context? Military pilots perform training flights regularly - it's not necessarily indicative of an inexperienced pilot.

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Both are "Black Hawk" airframes, right? The VH-60 variant is just a UH-60 that was build/configured for VIP transport vs the normal UH-60 utility variant.

IE, other than paint, they look the same to a casual observer.

It's easy to forget how many skills and "heuristics" go into listening. I once read a scale of language proficiency that placed "Can converse over a poor phone connection" at a very high level. When a word is garbled or lost, you have to quickly think of all the possible words that could've fit the grammar and whatever sound you heard, consider them in the context, and choose one or two. Then the next part of the conversation should let you pick one. Then add the complication of not seeing body language.

I forget where I read this. I think it was from the US Department of State, but I can't find it now.

Previous experience with aviation radio comms helps a lot. Typical radio comms essentially follow a template, and it’s done in a way where you can safely approximate a LOT (…just not numbers). But the…phraseology if you will, can be approximated quite easily with experience.

Funnily enough, American ATC / pilots are, I find, a lot more frequently ‘fast and loose’ compared to other areas, even English-speaking ones. Countless recordings online of EALD pilots being befuddled by some self-identified hotshot air traffic controller using overly casual / sloppy language, sometimes resulting in near misses or worse.

That's shocking and disturbing, and is pretty much a textbook example of exactly the type of thing opponents to DEI have been referring to for how DEI and Affirmative Action result in a lowering of the bar. They explicitly structured things so that ATC hiring was pre-restricted for non-cognitive (e.g. merit) reasons, and failed out candidates that scored a perfect score on the cognitive test on the basis of their demographics (they weren't minorities).

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.

Wow.

I thought Trump instantly blaming DEI was ridiculous in this case but I’m somewhat reconsidering.

How much less of a shortage of ATCs would we have now if it wasn’t for that debacle?

Particularly not for the last reason mentioned -- declining an offered position because it's not in a place you want to live.

Isn't it a reasonable filter? I'd (naively) assume that all things being equal, a person who passes a test on the first attempt, is more likely to have a higher innate ability than one who doesn't.

Is this wrong?

The program needs to have high standards and I imagine some of the reasons for failing are related to ability under pressure.

Indeed. Imagine if prospect lawyers were prevented from retaking the bar exam.

No college degree is officially required. Candidates with aviation related degrees probably have a better chance of making it through. But there are plenty of working controllers who have only a high school diploma or learned the job as enlisted military personnel.

"Have either one year of general work experience or four years of education leading to a bachelor’s degree, or a combination of both"

https://www.faa.gov/be-atc

In her case it was a Bachelors in Aviation and Aerospace Science with an Air Traffic Control Concentration. There may be other programs or concentrations which are acceptable.

Then why is there an ATC union if, apparently, it can't affect any change?

Paid

I've been working towards my private pilot license at San Carlos and I don't know what's going to happen if they can't find someone to do this job. The airport can get very busy sometimes and it seems like it could be dangerous to have nobody working the tower.

I sympathize with the ATC workers though. It's ridiculous that they can't pay them a decent wage for the area, there's only two of them as far as I know.

The SQL tower service provided by SERCO already had a poor recent reputation among Bay Area small aircraft pilots, with controller(s) who are obviously overworked/underpaid. You can find plenty of threads about it on forums and on YouTube.

Now they want to go with an even bottomer-of-the-barrel contractor? That's not going to work at all.

> The tower will be unstaffed.

Doesn't that just mean there will be no taxi control? My understanding is that ATC isn't in the tower. The tower staff just give clearances for take-off and directions on which runway to land/take-off. In radio clips, you can hear ATC hand-off a plane to tower.

Surely the FAA would just shut the airport down in that eventuality, no?

Seems tenable for a GA airport in rural Wyoming but that is far too close to a major hub.

Honest question: are air traffic controllers at risk for being replaced with AI systems? My initial thought is no, there is too much complexity, but AI could help ease the load. I'm not really informed about air traffic systems, just curious.

Someone that was hired weeks or months ago, but scheduled to start last week, could* have been included in the hiring freeze. There's examples here of rescinded offers after doing irs on-boarding: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2025/jan/executive... (Not that there's information that suggests this caused the incident)

> not causal here

but it does illustrate the type of future incident that it _could_ be causal of

They were replying to a comment that said "We're going to need to hire more controllers."

So I took their comment to be forward-looking.

It's worth adding that Elon Musk's email that had the supposed "buyout" went to ATC folks -- however management was telling them they'd need to work through their resignation date, regardless, removing the point of it. Then again, Musk denied the buyout will work this way, that agencies can just do whatever they want on this and OPM seems to agree, so who knows.

> For train control lights we almost don't rely on human operators anywhere.

Trains are on tracks. They basically move in one dimension. And the tracks can have (near) contact-based sensors along the way where the exact distance is known. (And in the US, there still is human conducting in a lot of the US)

That’s a very different problem space than the three dimension, unattached, space that air traffic moves in.

Because things can go from routine to multiple simultaneous life-threatening failures very quickly. Something like one flight declaring a mayday while another one just lost communication, all while the radar just started glitching in a weird way. Human intuition and common sense can sort it out. Deterministic algorithms would not.

The problem space is too broad.

E.g. On 9/11 ATC had to land almost 3000 planes in 1 hour. I'm not sure if that sort of national coordinated grounding is part of ATC training, but it's certainly not something I'd want to leave to some code that has never needed to run in production before.

Trains run on fixed tracks with fixed intersections, and one track might see a handful of them per day.

Planes around airports come in from all directions in three dimensions, and there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour.

These are vastly different scales of problem domain.

How would you deal with all sorts of emergencies involving human pilots? For unmanned aircraft(aka drones) it’s a lot easier to implement unmanned traffic management (UTM).

Weather. How often do weather events change the entire traffic flow into a train station?

I’ve heard ATC swap landing and takeoff directions in the space of 10 minutes because of weather

I mean this sincerely. What is more likely: that we've spent several decades ignoring very real automation solutions to this problem, or that it's a really, really hard problem that could get people killed?

Not an expert but I can't imagine that would go very well. Trains have a single axis of movement that sometimes cross or combines with others. Aircraft have three axes of movement all under human control.

Sure can if they make the right offer to the people that were working there just before they quit due to being lowballed!

I get a strong sense that they don't actually know what they cut as they stopped paying to guard ISIL prisoners. I could very easily see ATC getting hit by accident. Generally this administration neither thinks nor plans before acting

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily...

"Surely"? This is only a few days after a change of administration along with sweeping government changes. Don't you think it's worth asking questions a little more deeply than this?

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> They likely misjudged the plane due to assuming it was a large jet but it was a regional jet

Maybe this is possible, but it seems implausible given that ATC explicitly refers to the jet as a "CRJ".

It could be that the right call was for ATC to deny the request for visual separation and for them to do the deconflicting themselves. Not saying that's the case, I don't know, but that's one way it could be (partially) ATC's fault.

Do you have a link to the recording?

That's the best theory I've seen so far, but it's still really really bad.

It's very common for civilian ATC to instruct pilots to maintain visual separation, especially when they're both in the approach pattern. For airliners, TCAS gives an extra level of safety to guard against pilot errors. But I think many military aircraft lack TCAS.

I was trying to say: some people will reflexively try to put some blame on dei initiative in addition to overwork etc but (2nd paragraph) not sure why.

There are some good replies so I I'm not going to delete my (now obviously) poorly written comment.

At least DEI can't be blamed for much longer.

Why don’t you identify all these easily found regulations then?

There’s a whole YIMBY movement, for example, that has identified specific regulations that are no longer valid and have made tremendous strides in proving and changing these regulations for almost universally better outcomes.

So where are all these specific regulations that are so terrible and the evidence that they are indeed net negatives.

I absolutely believe such regulations exist. But that’s not what these people care about. They simply care about trashing the govt to make it easier to drown, otherwise they would actually act like the YIMBY movement and identify specific regulations and work on changing those.

FAA is however an agency that regularly tangles with SpaceX and could be seen as slowing them down. Seems like a conflict of interest for the guy tasked with government efficiency.

That's entirely true. Thank you for the correction. I spoke overly broadly.

If everyone writing regulations were as rigorous as the FAA people wouldn’t be clamoring to reduce regulations.

Ooh… which ones?

Classic Edgerton’s Fence: If you don’t know why someone put up a fence, don’t take it down.

The latter is how you get a workforce qualified to write the former, rather than a bunch of hacks who know nothing about aviation safety.

This would, if the system is working, be the blood that future regulations are written in. That these kinds of things happen so rarely came to us at a cost of past lives.

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.

DCA is open to the public. But it has lots of ways for Congressmen to avoid the inconveniences that you and I have to endure.

The other airports in the area do not have those.

DCA is great to fly in and out of (I live in DC proper), as it's close, isn't hard to get to, and has a Metro (our subway) station right in front of the terminal, and the airport is fairly easy to navigate once you're in. Dulles now has a Metro station, but it's still far away from the terminal and it's hard to navigate, with gates very far away from the terminal; other than the Saarinen architecture, everything else about Dulles is awful. BWI is even further from most parts of DC; there's an AmTrak station where you can catch a bus, but pretty much you're driving an hour+ and it's in the middle of exurban hell.

DCA is challenging for flights, though, as the approach from upriver over the Potomac requires a sudden bank to the right just before landing and the runway's a bit short (tonight's flight was coming in from the southern approach). The Potomac also has a lot of helicopter traffic, between the military (including POTUS/VPOTUS), US Park Police, DC Police, and civilian flights. DCA's natural advantages have put the screws to Dulles the last 20 years, and Dulles's inability to not suck hasn't helped. As a result, people (including Members of Congress) want more flights out of DCA, so flight traffic has steadily increased. There were two near-misses last spring: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/faa-investigating-colli....

Tonight's crash seems like a colossal screwup by the helicopter. DCA is too popular for flight traffic to cease, but I wouldn't be surprised by further restricting the flight corridors and helicopter traffic, more funding/staffing for ATC, and maybe a small reduction in flights.

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.

It's in the middle of a city, with lots of restricted airspace just _seconds_ of flight time from it.

From what I've heard, it's a challenging airport to land at, particularly because one of the approaches has two sharp turns in it, and I think the main winds tend to be annoying crosswinds for the main runway. Also, the airport is surrounded by lots of restricted airspace because, you know, seat of federal government and all that.

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Arguably we have that with the current US executive branch.

We had a hubub about the right way to power an aircraft carrier catapult for a while the first go around with these fools ...

Better a near miss than a catastrophic incident.

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