Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport | Hacker News Reader

Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

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668 pointsmzmzmzm675 comments

I just listened to the ATC recording from immediately before the collision. ATC instructs the helicopter to pass behind the CRJ. I’m fairly certain a few minutes before that, ATC instructed the helicopter to maintain visual separation, which is common. They typically ask, “do you have the aircraft in sight” and if you respond in the affirmative they rely on you to maintain safe distance.

I should mention that in the recording you can only hear one side of the conversation, so I don’t know whether or not the helicopter said whether or not they had visual contact with the plane they collided with.

Either way it doesn’t seem to be the fault of ATC. Of course we’ll know more as additional information becomes available.

Do you want to post a link the recording?

it's linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874330

In the video from the webcam there's another plane which is much easier to see. Could they have asked about "the aircraft" and the helicopter pilot mistook which one they referred to? "yes I can see the plane flying much higher"

It's possible but generally there's implied context to ATC. ATC would only instruct you to watch out for possible vector interceptions. flying over an approach path, the context would be that you would look for aircraft on approach, not ones in holding or other patterns above.

That said, it's possible they mistook which aircraft to look for, but it's unlikely imho and we will likely never know for sure, as I would presume the pilots are deceased.

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.

It's pretty dang easy to misjudge distances and closing rates in a plane or helicopter, especially at night.

Is this true for the trained pilots as well?

Yes.

It's next to impossible to know at night.

The only thing you have visually is direction / angular velocity.

And if you're on a collision course the other vehicle will appear motionless, with no change in direction.

If the airliners was approaching faster than the helicopter it could have been approaching from behind. How large is the field of view of a UH-60?

"How large is the field of view of a UH-60?"

Massive, you're practically against the glass. Visibility below is more obstructed than visibility above or to the sides.

From the radar tracking, they appear to have been at least somewhat head-on.

(Also at a low altitude in a large city ... lots of lights.)

I wonder if there's a support element that would have obstructed the field of view over a narrow angle. This has been the cause of automobile accidents when cars approach at just the correct speeds to keep the other vehicle behind the pillar at the side of the windshield.

No, that aircraft (having taken off from Reagan, visible in the full not-cropped videos) is close to the Kennedy Center camera but is nowhere near where the CRJ and helicopter were.

> easier to see.

One has radars even on recreational boats. That was a military helicopter. At night. It would be hard to believe that it doesn't have nor radar nor IR cameras, and the plane would be lightened up like X-mas tree in both.

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 like to see even the friendly planes and helicopters too. Say at night over Iraq.

And even without radar - simple ADS-B receiver attached to notebook plotting onto the screen of the notebook would be a great improvement in that situation over DC or anywhere over US.

> IR cameras would be completely inappropriate for the situation ...recognise what that small dot is that you’re seeing.

in visual at night you have a sea of city lights with some low flying lights you can easily mistake for ground lights. In IR all those city lights would pretty much disappear, while the plane's engines and exhaust would be a very bright light against very dark background of the sky.

>>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.

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.

Lack of air search radar on military utility transport helicopters is only surprising to aggressively ignorant people who can't be bothered to do a few minutes of basic research. Even some tactical jets that operate over hostile territory lack air search radar, although they do have other defensive systems.

Here is the ATC audio between the Tower and PAT-25. Helos that transition DCA's airspace use a separate VHF frequency from traffic landing and departing, but talk to the same tower controller.

https://archives.broadcastify.com/44114/20250129/20250129200...

* At 5:41 - 5342 is given instructions for circling to 33.

* At 6:45 - PAT-25 reports Memorial

* At 7:06 - tower gives PAT-25 traffic advisory about 5342 and PAT-25 reports traffic in sight and requests visual separation

* At 8:12 - tower asks PAT-25 if they have the CRJ in sight and tells him to pass behind the CRJ. PAT-25 again reports traffic in sight and again requests visual separation.

* At 8:28 - crash occurs, exclamations, go arounds issued

This is wild to listen to. A) this is a busy atc channel and it's amazing how much complexity is coordinated over noisy radio. B) within minutes of the accident happening (at 11:48) the ATC controller is calmly asking helicopters in the air if they can assist in search rescue operations asking, if they have search lights and direction them. This is whilst diverting and grounding flights.

> 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.

Yes, having tried to listen to ATC with an SDR— the public recordings are made from antenna that placed near the airport, while the official recordings are made from the feeds that the ATC is listening to— and those antenna have their lobes pointed toward the sky.

Yep. Radios are much clearer in the air. VHF is mostly line of sight and planes have the benefit of altitude. Approach/center comms can get a bit scratchy at times mostly due to distance, but approach/tower is almost always perfectly clear.

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 conditions.

If your phone calls sounded that bad, you'd want to upgrade your phone or switch operator. Really not acceptable for consumer grade communication. Not even close. This is how phones sounded half a century ago. "can you hear me .... are you there ..... can you talk louder ....". My grand mother never really unlearned 1930s phone etiquette. Phone calls with her were short (cause expensive) and she'd be shouting at you because that's what you did. Be brief, loud, hang up as soon as possible. That's what pilots still do. My grand mother was born during WW I (not II) and she's been dead for nearly 20 years.

The aviation world is very conservative with new/better/any technology. They stick with "what works". Even if arguably it barely works. Like pretty much the vast majority of radio exchanges between pilots and controllers over VHF radio. Learning how to talk on the radio is the second hardest part of getting an instrument rating. The only thing that's harder is flying a plane with zero visibility ... while suffering extreme information overload because of the constant radio chatter and dealing with confused/stressed/pissed off controllers who have to juggle you and 20 other planes.

A lot of radio exchanges are routine exchanges that involve very basic information: call signs, transponder codes, codes for approaches/departures, courses, altimeter settings, altitudes, weather information, etc. And then a lot of double checking the other side heard correctly, repeating back what you heard, etc. Radio communication compensates for the lack of a more robust/sane way of exchanging information. There literally is no way for a controller to send you information in written format. Other than using their private phones. So, it all gets spelled out over low quality VHF radio.

There's no good technical reason to not do something vastly more reliable, less intrusive, and less error prone. Some might say safer. Many planes have star link connections these days. The passengers get better connectivity than the pilot. They could be having video calls with the controller with crystal clear audio from anywhere on this planet instead of yelling to them over VHF only when they are in range. They could be sending each other emails, documents, digital maps, and lots of other machine readable information, etc. Not a thing.

It's more a challenge of agreeing on what such a vastly better thing would be and then updating each and every plane and tower, airport, controller world wide with equipment that supports that. Add design by committee to the mix and the "state of the art" is something that would make any competent engineer born after 1970 blush.

> A lot of radio exchanges are routine exchanges that involve very basic information: call signs, transponder codes, codes for approaches/departures, courses, altimeter settings, altitudes, weather information, etc.

They are also in a fairly standardized format with reserved "keywords" for many important aspects of operation ("hold short", "line up and wait", "cleared to X"):

* https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/bookshelf/115.pdf

English is the lingua franca of ATC, but it is recognized it is obviously not everyone's first language.

Honestly a lot of those recordings probably do sound a lot worse than the radio audio. I rarely see YouTube recordings that are as audible as the radio is in person. Here's what seems to be the reason:

The common splitters you can buy to break out your headset connector to a recorder don't account for the signal level, which is very high on the headset connectors as aviation headsets are traditionally pretty high impedance. I've struggled with the headset audio blowing out even a fairly nice recorder (a Zoom) with the gain turned all the way down. Phones and pocket reporters don't even offer a gain adjustment and the recording can end up almost unusable. In a lot of YouTube videos of pilots, even most, it's pretty obvious that it's clipping at the recorder the whole time. Perhaps even worse, a lot of people are using like a GoPro with auto-gain, so you get the worst of both worlds: it ramps up gain until the noise is loud, and then when someone starts talking, it ramps down the gain, but a little too slowly, and it's still clipping even when it hits minimum.

It's not very common to have trouble understanding the controller when in the air. AM radio at line of sight (as is the case when you're flying) is pretty robust. Maybe the hardest thing to understand are helicopter pilots because there's often rotor noise on their end.

YouTube is not a good representation of what you hear in a headset. Half the time the mic taps aren't impedence matched and sound like shit.

Besides that, most "controlling" (i.e. instructions that require action) comms have a handshake of sorts - the pilot repeats back the instruction for the controller to confirm. They don't just bark out instructions and hope you heard it, they listen for you to read them back, and will keep doing so until successful. So, even in cases when the comms are degraded, you will go back and forth until there has been positive confirmation (readback) you heard the instruction correctly (or they'll just give you a new frequency).

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. There's mountains in the way. There's limitations to how low you can be and still be reachable, which sometimes has to be balanced against how high a GA plane can comfortably fly, or oxygen requirements for the occupants.

A better sounding "modern" system is generally going to be worse at handling those marginal situations, which would probably require building a lot more radio outposts in fairly remote areas to compensate.

But the big problem with requiring anything new is getting it into the existing fleet of thousands of decades old certified aircraft. You need a new radio stack. You probably need new antennas. Changing anything on certified aircraft needs tons of paperwork and things like Supplemental Type Certificates for each individual model of aircraft that make it cost 5-50x what you'd think it should cost. Military aircraft are probably 10x worse beyond that.

A handheld COM radio is maybe $200 from Sporty's. Take basically the same thing but package it as a basic Garmin COM radio (GTR 205) and it's now $2,300. If you want a NAV radio in it too (GNC 215) now it's $5,400. Add GPS and ADSB-Out (GNX 375) and now you're at $9,000. You can buy an entire currently airworthy (really old) plane for maybe $30,000.

For some uses you don't even have to have any radio or transponder/ADSB installed on your aircraft. Some aircraft don't even have an electrical power system to run one. Granted they're not allowed in the middle of Washington DC, but still trying to require the entire fleet gets fancy new digital radios would be a monumental challenge and fantastically expensive.

There are some existing better ways to communicate. Larger planes usually have CPDLC (Controller Pilot Data Link Communications), which is basically text messaging from ATC to the plane avionics. That's how they receive their IFR clearance at major airports. In an airliner you're not generally reading it out over the radio and scribbling out your "CRAFT" acronym on a scratchpad like you see on YouTube. (Even your 4-seat steam gauge Cessna can do this via PDC (Pre-Departure Clearance) at supported airports with something like ForeFlight on an iPad).

CPDLC can also be used in the air to communicate less time-sensitive things like altitude changes and reroutes, talking to the operations department of the airline, etc. There's no reason you couldn't put this in smaller GA planes and towers, other than cost.

Airliners that do transatlantic and -pacific routes also have satellite communications instead of using old-school HF radios (which are even worse than VHF).

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...

> This is how phones sounded half a century ago. "can you hear me .... are you there ..... can you talk louder ...."

No, landlines in 1975 sounded outstanding. I didn’t hear the phrase “can you hear me now” until I got my first oki (1992?)

Local ones yes. International connections were a lot less nice.

>>>They could be having video calls with the controller with crystal clear audio from anywhere on this planet instead of yelling to them over VHF only when they are in range.

Your forgetting about latency, which matters when you are trying to land an airplane. Also who cares if you could talk to the aircraft from anywhere in the world with different technology? The only thing that matters is there is a low latency audio connection between the traffic controller and all the planes coming in. Direct line of site VHF communications is better in every conceivable metric then any alternative. It has nothing to do with old technology or design by committee.

I think the crash was at 8:22 or 8:21, you can hear sudden commotion at that time.

The common mistake with this is seeing a plane, reporting "traffic in sight" but looking at a different plane than the one the controller meant. Especially at night where distance is near impossible the estimate and you can't see differences in types of planes.

I have no extra information on this incident so this is only generic input.

It wasn't a police chopper, it was a military VH-60, also known as a "White Hawk" [1]. It's a VIP transport helicopter, the same type that is used to transport the president.

~The flight track of the helicopter [2] starts at a property in McLean, VA (edited to remove likely inaccurate info)~

The chopper was based out of Fort Belvoir, and based on similar past flight tracks, looks like it probably took off from there too. CNN is reporting that there were 3 soldiers onboard, and no VIPs.

1: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_VH-60N_White_Hawk

2: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae313d&lat=38.952&lon=-...

[2] shows the helicopter taking off 2 miles away from the old saudi embassy in McLean marked “permanently closed” on google maps. (The current embassy is in DC proper, directly across the river from DCA airport)

I don’t think thats strong evidence that it took off from the old Saudi Embassy - thats pretty far away even given your caveat about accuracy.

Edit: it looks to me like the black hawk was coming from somewhere else with its ADS-B turned off entirely, and then turned on ADS-B once it reached the potomac to approach DCA. The first two datapoints of that flight already show it going 110mph, which its unlikely to be able to accelerate to in just 0.2miles after take off.

Edit 2: The route also looks very similar to this flight from 11 days earlier (but reversed in direction): https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/PAT25 This shows the Blackhawk at 300 feet passing by DCA on what seems like a routine or training flight? I don't know how to look up historical flights to see if this is a commonly-flown route. On that flight, the Black Hawk flew past DCA at 300 feet of altitude, and the last FlightAware data for the American Eagle passenger flight showed 400 feet of altitude.

I didn't say it took off from the old embassy. The flight track starts at the backyard of a house that is currently owned by the embassy. You can see the owner of that property by searching that address here (the site doesn't support a direct link): https://icare.fairfaxcounty.gov/ffxcare/search/commonsearch....

Thank you!

Regarding your edit: that's a good point, but the vertical ascent rate of the chopper at those first few data points shows 400-800 feet per minute, which is consistent with a chopper taking off...'

edit: your second edit makes me think you're right though, tonight's flight track was pretty consistent with the past flight track where it looks like it both took off from and landed at Fort Belvoir.

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

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

CNN is reporting the helicopter came from Fort Belvoir.

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/plane-crash-dca-potomac-was...

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"?

Military flights do not fly ADB hot outside of the DC FRZ. It was also clearly exactly following flight route 4.

There are a few locations in that area it could have been coming from. Anything else would have made no sense flying through the FRZ from/to Belvoir.

What is "flight route 4"?

The FAA publishes supplemental charts specifically for helicopters in areas with high concentrations of helicopter activity: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/productc...

Specifically the Baltimore-Washington route chart was relevant for these flights: https://aeronav.faa.gov/visual/10-31-2024/PDFs/Balt-Wash_Hel...

If you find the DCA airport on that chart, you’ll find routes 1 and 4 which roughly correspond to the helicopter’s flight path.

Right.

Helicopter was on Helicopter Route 4, per the map, apparently on course.

Aircraft was on approach to Runway 33, apparently on course.

That helicopter route crosses the approach to runway 33.

That's controlled airspace. How did they both have clearance to be there?

We'll know more tomorrow as all the audio and radar recordings are examined.

They were almost certainly both cleared to maintain visual separation.

> They were almost certainly both cleared to maintain visual separation.

DCA TWR: PAT25, traffic just south of the Woodrow Bridge, a CRJ, it's 1200 feet setting up for runway 33.

PAT25: PAT25 has the traffic in sight, request visual separation.

DCA TWR: Visual separation approved.

Audio of MID-AIR CRASH into Potomac River: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiOybe-NJHk

This comment was written by a US Coast Guard helicopter pilot. It gives a lot of information on how the two aircraft should have been able to share the space and some speculation on what went wrong:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1idba8i/comment/m...

That makes sense.

A helicopter instructor suggests that possibly the helicopter pilots, who were told to go behind an aircraft that was landing, were looking at the previous aircraft that was landing.[1] That's just speculation at this point.

[1] https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2025/01/29/reagan-national...

They could use the car autopilot solution: simply negotiate your coordinates with nearby traffic instead of trying to parse malformed visual data.

That was clearly a training flight

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

Not really. I wasn't a pilot, just a lowly ABF in the Navy. But when we deployed, on an LHD, most of our flights were what you could probably "classify" as training. We ran flight ops every day because pilots have to maintain hours. We flew every day for 7 months and only 2-3 of those months were we in the gulf. And even in the gulf, not all flights were missions, I would say less than half were. That also isn't counting 4-6 months prior to deployment of work ups where we would go out to sea for a week and come back, everyday pilots flew training missions off our deck. All in all, all in the military probably spend most of their air time training then actually flying missions.

I also recall, even experienced pilots, would rotate out to training units as their "shore" (break from a deploy able unit) duty.

This wasn't a Navy aircraft, but I imagine a lot of that is the same regardless of branch.

Note that that track is not ADS-B at all. It’s triangulated from mode S pings (“MLAT”, https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/mlat/). I don’t know how accurate these are.

The current embassy is indeed in DC proper, but it isn't directly across the river from DCA.

It's about a mile upriver, near the Watergate.

It's a "Gold Top", callsign PAT25

https://helicoptersofdc.com/helicopters/5-us-army-12th-aviat...

BBC is reporting that the Army has confirmed that it was a UH-60, not a VH-60, ie: not a VIP transport: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cy7kxx74yxlt?post=asset%3A62b9...

Although it's early on and these communications are often chaotic/inaccurate.

I thought it was a VH-60 given that it was callsign PAT25 (PAT is Priority Air Transport and they use the VH-60 for those flights), but if this was a training flight, they may have still used the PAT callsign while flying a UH-60.

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.

> The flight track of the helicopter starts at a property in McLean, VA

that's almost certainly not where the flight started, due to intricacies of how this sort of flight tracking works.

if you look at [0] it has tracks of both flights. toggle the right-hand sidebar, if it's not open already, and you'll see a table containing both planes. the helicopter (PAT25) is yellow, the plane (JIA5342) is blue. the legend right below that explains the color-coding - the plane's data came from ADS-B, while the helicopter's data came from multilateration (MLAT).

MLAT [1, 2] works by having multiple ADS-B feeder stations cooperate in real-time and deduce an aircraft's position based on timestamps of when the signal is received. it allows tracking aircraft that only broadcast the more limited Mode S data, instead of the newer and more detailed ADS-B.

because it requires multiple cooperating receivers, the start of the track in suburban McLean does not mean it took off from there. it just means that was the point in its flight where it became visible to enough receivers that MLAT was able to pin down a position.

you can also see this difference just by looking at the tracks - the plane is broadcasting its own position continuously, so its track is nice and smooth. meanwhile the helicopter's flight looks "jagged" in a way that does not match what its actual flight path would have been. this is an artifact of the small errors introduced by MLAT.

0: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae313d,a97753

1: https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/mlat/

2: https://adsbx.discourse.group/t/multilateration-mlat-how-it-...

And just to be clear, the POTUS/super-special VIP transport is run by the USMC out of Quantico[1], a bit further to the south along the Potomac. Belvoir is US Army, and does have VIP heelicopters (obviously), but it's not the same group that lands at the White House.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMX-1 They have some Ospreys and other things as well, but HMX-1 is the most famous and recognizable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-30/washingto... | https://archive.today/n1ark

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/plane-crash-dca-potomac-was... (CNN live updates)

https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1idbkyd/crash_at_dc...

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1idba8i/plane_cra...

https://x.com/aletweetsnews/status/1884789306645983319

https://archive.liveatc.net/kdca/KDCA1-Twr-Jan-30-2025-0130Z... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250130025411/https://archive.l... (event starts at 17:25)

BBC live updates: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cy7kxx74yxlt

https://archives.broadcastify.com/44114/20250129/20250129200... contains the ATC feed in addition to the PAT-25 (helo) radio.

~5:41 mark 5342 is given instructions for circling to 33. ~6:45 mark PAT-25 reports Memorial ~7:06 mark tower gives PAT-25 traffic advisory about 5342 and PAT-25 reports traffic in sight and requests visual separation ~8:12 mark tower asks PAT-25 if they have the CRJ in sight. PAT-25 again reports traffic in sight and again requests visual separation. ~8:21 mark, crash occurs, exclamations, go arounds issued

I'm impressed by your, and their, hearing comprehension here! Granted, English isn't my native language but even with concentration I struggle to hear what they say.

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.

Any takeaways from this? ATC not responding with separation but Blackhawk continuing anyway?

Obviously it will take some time for the full accident analysis but there have been quite a few near misses lately due to air traffic controller errors. Flight volume has been growing, airspace near airports is more congested, and controllers are overworked. Eventually all of the "Swiss cheese" holes line up. We're going to need to hire more controllers.

Also, it appears that one of the aircraft was a military (not police) H-60 Blackhawk helicopter.

> In addition, the White House has put a hiring freeze in place, prohibiting the replacement of open government positions or the creation of new ones while the administration evaluates reductions in the workforce. The White House plans to release a memorandum with further guidance within 90 days. This has drawn criticism from lawmakers as the FAA has been ramping up controller hiring.

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2025-0...

To quote the order itself:

> This order does not apply to military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.

ATC surely falls under public safety. Additionally, the ATC issues stretch well back into the Biden term, and you can find plenty of articles discussing the controversy elsewhere.

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...

That article is propaganda from the same people who brought you the Iraq War. That’s exactly the sort of funding spigot we should be stopping so we can figure out what the hell is going on. Why the hell are we paying for prison guards in Syria? At one point CIA backed militias in Syria were fighting DOD backed militias: https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-...

Everyone obviously wants to use critical services as a shield to avoid scrutiny on them. But by all indications the administration was ready to go on day 1, and insofar as stuff is being cut or halted a decision was made to allow that to happen.

So the LA Times is not part of the propaganda that brought us the Iraq War? And the US must, must at all cost, stop paying for prison guards to figure it out?

There's no other way to just ... figure it out? You know, by studying the situation?

I’m begging you to read Manufacturing Consent.

And when has “studying the situation” ever worked to make the government stop wasting money destroying the Middle East? Obama promised to change this stuff, and he couldn’t do it, because he innately trusted the same people who made the mistakes to “study” how to fix them.

I can't believe you agree with the premise of Manufacturing Consent and the goals of the administration.

They're manufacturing consent to a massive power grab from Congress. The consent to an American King is being manufactured in front of our very eyes.

I don't know what was going on with Syria, sounds real bad, but your claim about the administration having clear plans they're executing from day 1 is clearly false. This is sourced reporting, not analysis:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/omb-whi...

"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?

Meanwhile, San Carlos Airport (KSQL, near San Francisco) is going ATC-zero on February 1st. The tower will be unstaffed.

https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/CASMATEO/bulletins/...

"The FAA has awarded a new contract for air traffic services at SQL to Robinson Aviation (RVA). However, the contract does not include locality pay to account for the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a result, RVA’s employment offers to current SQL controllers were significantly lower than their current compensation under SERCO. Understandably, all current controllers have declined RVA’s offers."

"Given that the FAA is ultimately responsible for ensuring air traffic services at SQL, we requested temporary FAA staffing for the tower—a solution currently being implemented at Eagle Airport in Colorado during its transition from SERCO to RVA. However, the FAA informed us this morning that they will not provide temporary personnel for SQL"

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.

The FAA adopts new technologies at a glacial pace, for good reason. But AI has been mentioned in the planning of the next generation of ATC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Wide_Information_Manage...

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/atiec/me...

Perhaps some day, I would hope that we make a lot of progress before we look towards the current form of AI in such a critical spot.

What kind of ai are you talking about? The non deterministic black box LLMs we have now?

Of course not LLMs, but approaches using mixed integer programming, genetic algorithms, and/or simulated annealing.

Are these new products from Rockwell automation?

Oh, algorithms, they should have thought of those.

The kind that could land an atomic-powered vehicle on Mars, eight light-minutes from human contact? In 2012?

It's utterly ridiculous to expect humans to do this job for much longer. It's what computers are for.

Gosh, you'd think someone would've thought of this already.

Oh you mean the kind that has no conflicting traffic in 0.5 to 2.5 AU?

Really? There were 3 aircraft involved. Game AI in the 1980s was good enough to handle the amount of "conflicting traffic" involved here. You're arguing in favor of automation, not against it.

For that matter, next time you visit the Bay Area, drop by the CHM in Mountain View and take a look at what SAGE could already do in the 1960s.

Yeah no it wasn’t just three, actually listen to the ATC auto between PAT25 calls into the controller and the crash — not to mention it’s still far more than a single aircraft on a remote planet

> ATC please advise, I'm about crash

> Thanks for reaching out! As you probably know, crashing an aeroplane is not generally recommended. There are many factors that may contribute to a crash, such as weather, technical malfunction or human error. Appropriate training, regular maintenance and flight planning are some of the best practices which help minimise the likelihood of a crash. I recommend revisiting these factors. Is there anything else I can help you with today?

No. We use some deterministic automation on the backend for helping with traffic management and rerouting flight paths, but the communication with aircraft is mostly done via voice. Everything happens too fast to insert a keyboard in the middle (*), and voice recognition would be too error prone for something safety critical.

(* CPDLC does allow ATC to send texts to/from larger aircraft, but this is only used for things that aren't time sensitive. Voice is still the primary method of control.)

Why would it need to even be AI? Why not just regular software? Couldn't airplanes just send a message that they want to land and the Air Traffic Control software sees where they are and what other aircraft are around and sends everyone the appropriate messages?

The human ATC system is very good at handling exceptions, including various kinds of emergencies, pilot errors, and reasons to prioritize one plane over another. The human controllers also typically have a good understanding of the details of airspace, regulations, policies, aviation customs, and the capabilities of various kinds of aircraft.

So for example, a plane can have a "missed approach and go around" when trying to land. I was once on a plane that did that because of extremely high winds. In that case, the plane that was supposed to be on the ground is suddenly climbing again and is going to need to turn in order to repeat the approach.

A plane can have a medical emergency onboard, so it needs to land at an unexpected airport, possibly faster than a normal landing, or starting from a somewhat atypical position. I was once on a plane that did that because someone onboard had a seizure.

A plane can have damage or equipment failures that the pilots find it hard to assess directly, so it needs to fly around for a while to give the pilots time to "run checklists" or perform various tests, or sometimes to let a ground-based observer report on something about the plane (!), or just to develop their intuition about how functional the plane is. It might then need to land at an unintended airport or return unexpectedly to its takeoff airport. I was once on a plane that did that because of bird strikes during departure, where the plane was damaged but the pilots were unsure how seriously.

A pilot might misunderstand something or disobey regulations, and that pilot or another pilot might be told to take some unexpected evasive action to avoid a collision. (This is one area that has been productively automated in some cases via TCAS, where the aircraft themselves can sometimes figure out what an appropriate maneuver would be before a controller tells them one.) I haven't personally experienced that.

There might be another kind of emergency where a runway is closed and a large number of planes need to be diverted (like right after this collision where DCA was abruptly closed).

There might be negotiations with an uncooperative or mentally ill pilot (like the tragic story of Richard Russell in 2018, but also a number of incidents that had happier endings).

Pilots might also negotiate more cooperatively with ATC related to diversions and priority in situations like bad weather, where the airport has less capacity than originally expected and the pilots need to determine whether they will divert to a different airport. In this case the air traffic controllers may talk to different pilots about their fuel levels and other factors that make them better and worse candidates for changing flight plans. En-route (ARTCC/ACC) controllers will also negotiate with pilots about changing altitude to reduce or avoid turbulence.

There are occasionally cases where a pilot is incapacitated and someone with less training and experience needs to be advised remotely on how to land a plane. (This is mostly very small planes but ATC will still ultimately deal with these emergencies.) In that case other planes also need to be kept away from the incident aircraft and maybe diverted elsewhere.

Specifically for takeoff and landing, there are often multiple planes using the same runway (for takeoff, landing, or both) in relatively quick succession, or possibly using runways that cross each other. In this case, a controller needs to keep an eye on how quickly pilots have (or haven't) complied with specific clearances, e.g. to cross a runway on the ground, because the clearances may need to be revoked or modified if they aren't used quickly enough (because of the presence of other aircraft that have also received clearances that will soon start to conflict with the older clearances). This also includes checking whether planes that have landed have vacated the runway expeditiously (since if they haven't done so, for whatever reason, other planes may soon need to be told to go around).

There are also cases where military or law enforcement authorities may ask or demand to modify normal ATC procedures or clearances because of some special operation or problem. The simplest case is that they might ask to prioritize a government aircraft over civilian flights for some reason, or ask certain other operations to stop e.g. during a takeoff or landing of Air Force One. (I just watched this a few days ago with an Air Force One departure from Las Vegas, where other departures and landings were temporarily but briefly suspended. So that had to be planned and communicated to various pilots, some of whom then had follow-up questions about what they were or weren't allowed to do.)

Pilots are also considered to have ultimate responsibility for the safety of their flights and passengers, and they can also refuse some ATC instructions, or deviate from some normal procedures, in emergencies. So for example, a controller might believe it's safe to land in certain weather conditions and might give a pilot a certain clearance, but the pilot might not feel up to completing the landing and might then refuse to do so. The controller will have to understand the pilot's intentions as best as possible, and deal with the consequences of those intentions (e.g., once again, keeping other planes out of the way, or trying to find a new routing that the pilot will be willing to accept).

ATC is also responsible for passing some kinds of information to and from other parties, like in case of an emergency landing communicating with emergency responders so that they understand the nature of the emergency and whatever facts will help them respond more effectively. And they have to tell other ATC facilities about problems and situations that will affect them, like in-flight emergencies, closed airspace, closed runways, closed airport, etc.

Many of these things can and should be more automated than they are, but humans in these jobs are doing enormous amounts of reasoning, improvisation, and even social negotiation.

(I'm not a pilot or air traffic controller, just a former frequent flyer who liked listening to ATC communications and sometimes listens to liveatc.net when friends' flights are arriving or departing, or watches video recaps of various aviation incidents.)

Edit: Another case that I thought of: during an emergency landing, a pilot might be given either a shorter (more direct) or longer (more indirect) route than usual, in response to the pilot's assessment of which would be safer. The pilot could also be given a longer route than usual in order to have time to "work checklists" in preparation for the landing, or in order to burn off fuel so that the plane will weigh less (and be less likely to cause a huge fire) upon landing.

If some navigation equipment is broken, the ATC facility could help with navigation or with diagnosing the problem (by describing visual landmarks, or by estimating the plane's current speed and heading based on ATC radar).

Because it pays half of Hacker News's salaries.

Another system could hypothetically exist, but for practical use it is a huge migration issue. There are just too many planes in use that only support voice. The average airplane in general aviation usage is 50 years old.

There's no good excuse, other than cost and training and equipment integration (which are massive costs, i know) for not having some kind of learning or at a minimum high levels of automation in 2025.

Replaced, no. ATC, at least while we still have human pilots, is a system for instructing, organizing, and responding to humans, with all their flexibility and foible.

Now a copilot e.g. ATC audio parsed by an LLM into intended tracks, requests from traffic, integrated into the scope with projections for future separation etc…

The SOTA is augmented ATC displays and digital towers, which basically use object recognition to label planes on cameras, and the controllers sit somewhere else.

Usually this is done for rural airports, where you have one controller potentially managing multiple low traffic airports, and it’s tough to get ATC willing to move to remote locations. The only busy airport doing this kind of thing is London City Airport, but that has 3M passengers a year and DCA has 25M. That was motivated by the lack of space at London City Airport, so they demolished the traditional tower to reallocate space.

London City implementation: https://www.nats.aero/news/london-city-is-first-major-airpor...

Ages ago, I watched a documentary about ATC that showed a drill involving ATC work under power failure (mains and generator). I'm probably misremembering some details but there were battery-operated radios and little tablets being passed around with scribbled information.

I guess AI can work while the lights are on, but if this is your backstop scenario, you still need the meat ATC controllers, and they really need to know their stuff.

Tower systems are the last place in the world you would want a 97% accurate large language model, and the very last place we would culturally tolerate this sort of thing. Innate conservatism is what happens when deviations from perfection lead to collisions, and for the most part "AI" success remains a stochastic matter, gigabyte to terabyte sized tensors that are not human-intelligible. A black box which cannot be readily, safely validated in the real world.

With that said - algorithmic, automated, and digital systems for collision avoidance at the very minimum have and could continue to make ATC jobs significantly easier. The radio voice channel is a particularly low fidelity, low bandwidth way to mete out information and directives.

There will be a list of scenarios competing for that "last place".

Operating rooms, certain military/police situations and self driving cars come to mind. A shared characteristic here is that errors lead to fatal outcomes exacerbated by unclear accountability.

Self driving cars are already operating no problem.

Yes, but, as with collision avoidance systems... Years ago a VA thoracic surgeon was trying to find someone to build them a tool to listen in an OR for surgeon commands and team member acks, and if it saw a command without an ack, to nudge. Context is surgeons are both team managers and individual specialists, and when heads down as specialist, the managerial role gets load shed. So a dropped command may not be caught before bad things happen. The VA does OR pickup teams, so there isn't the polished but idiosyncratic load sharing of long-standing teams. And the acks are more formal. He was fine with a high false negative rate (catching anything is good), and a moderate false positive (nudges are low cost). That seems now plausible. Aside from tech maturity, the biggest challenge then envisioned was willingness to be recorded. Though perhaps the real fix is staffing the team management role, but that was above his pay grade.

The speculation on pilot Youtube is that the helicopter in this incident observed a light in the sky, one of several in the closely spaced train of landing jets on approach to National Airport.

The helicopter pilot asked multiple times for permission to assume liability for visually avoiding the plane in the approach path, and the tower warned about the plane, and he confirmed he could see it. Several times, he insisted he had it in his sights, and it was not on a collision course, and requested and was granted permission to continue through the flight path on that basis. And he did successfully avoid that dot in the sky.

He was looking at the dot in the sky that was about 60 seconds behind the plane that he ultimately collided with.

If that is the case, there is certainly a chance that an automated warning signal from an automated tracking network (not "you're within five miles of another aircraft on the map, watch out" but "your current 3d trajectory is within ten seconds of collision with another aircraft") may have averted this. That isn't AI, it's just having the plane keep secondary track of ADS-B inside the cockpit. And it sounds from a cursory search like it's already standard for commercial planes to have an ADS-B receiver and a Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), just maybe not 1980's military helicopters.

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.

> 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.

No, ATC here refers to ground and tower controllers. They give taxi, takeoff, landing, and close in maneuvering instructions.

When you say ATC I believe you’re thinking of tracon controllers, a level of airspace up from towers who control approach and departures and then hand you off to/from the tower. Above them there’s yet another level, center controllers. All of these are ATC though.

The "ground" controller manages taxing around the "movement areas" (i.e. taxiways) on the ground. This notably does not include the runways. And it depends how much of the actual ramp and parking area they control (those are sometimes non-movement area and it's the pilots job to not hit anything).

The "tower" controller manages the actual runways, and the airspace within several miles of the airport laterally and a few thousand feet vertically (varying at each airport). This includes sequencing all the planes that want to take off of land there, and everybody maneuvering around that immediate area.

For the large airports that mostly big airliner flights, that sequencing is largely worked out by the approach controllers dozens or hundreds of miles ahead of time. So there's a steady stream of planes following standardized approach procedures at just the right distance apart.

Outside of the ~30 busiest airports in the country though, there is also a lot of general aviation in small planes. They want to transition through that airspace, or do a dozen laps around the "pattern" to practice landings, etc. Even at fairly major airports, there's plenty of GA activity. For example at Burbank, Ontario, John Wayne, Long Beach, San Jose, Oakland, etc in California. It's only really SFO and LAX where that doesn't really happen, because they set fees to shoo the peons away.

SQL is a small but very busy airport that is almost exclusively GA. There are several flight schools there with multiple planes each, and it's sandwiched in complicated airspace between SFO, SJC, OAK, and open bay.

The tower at this kind of airport is doing a delicate dance keeping multiple planes buzzing around in a rectangular pattern all day every day. Some of which are faster than others. Less frequently a larger much faster plane wants to get in or out and they're getting handed off from approach. Helicopters are doing tours and wanting to cross through. And a lot of the people flying are students that are new at this, don't know how to talk or listen on the radio right yet, make mistakes following directions, etc.

With the tower closed, all those people have to coordinate on a party-line radio with each other about where they are, what they're doing, etc to hopefully not hit anyone. So yeah... it's possible, but it's going to be a mess, and that's why tiny airports like this with virtually no commercial passenger service have a tower.

Also if you're leaving the immediate area, someone at the airport (ground, tower, or "clearance delivery", depending) normally will coordinate putting your destination (for visual/VFR flight following) or full route (for IFR/instruemnt) into the ATC systems before you takeoff so that you can talk to the approach controllers once you leave and they can provide you traffic advisories, etc.

With nobody at the tower to do that, you have to "cold call" approach once already airborne. Or if your route allows, just not get flight following at all (and then ATC has no way to reach you). So SQL tower closing will also add to the workload for the SFO/OAK approach area.

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.

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.

In fairness to the current administration, while the hiring freeze may have impacted ATC hiring, that is not causal here. No one hired last week would have been running things today (if they were hit with the freeze).

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.

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)

That's not what the hiring freeze EO would have done:

https://www.opm.gov/media/zkebfxow/omb-opm-federal-civilian-...

If someone in your scenario had accepted the offer and was going to start last week, they would not have been included in the hiring freeze and would have been able to start.

> Job offers made prior to noon on January 20, 2025, for which the individual has accepted the position and has a designated start date on or before February 8, 2025. Those individuals should report to work according to their respective designated start date.

> not causal here

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

Sure, I didn't say otherwise.

But we don’t know what the future of the policy is either.

Wow, a controller can be hired and on the job in less than a week?

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

Is there an actual reason why the control tower work can't be fully automated? For train control lights we almost don't rely on human operators anywhere.

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.

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).

Direct them to land in the best location and make sure all other aircraft are on non-intersecting flight paths. What exactly is ATC doing that software isn't able to?

How many options are there for handling emergencies with aircraft now? You pretty much just have either land ASAP or circle to burn fuel and then land.

Obviously you’re not a pilot. It might be helpful for you to listen to a few ATC transcripts of emergency situations.

It does seem like the routine could be automated more, no?

"You pretty much just..."

Ah, there it is. "How hard could coordinating takeoff and landing for thousands of flights be? You just..."

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.

Four Dimensional Navigation, actually! X, Y, Z, plus Time. By incorporating strict time constraints, air traffic controllers can schedule and merge arriving aircraft more precisely, reducing holding patterns and optimizing fuel usage.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19750022064/downloads/19...

>4D AREA NAVIGATION SYSTEM DESCRIPTION AND FLIGHT TEST RESULTS

>A 4D area navigation system was designed to guide aircraft along a prespecified flight path (reference path) such that the aircraft would arrive at the approach gate at a time specified by the ATC controller. Key components to achieve this requirement were:

>(1) stored reference trajectories;

>(2) a continuously recomputed capture trajectory to a selected waypoint on the reference trajectory so as to achieve the desired time of arrival;

>(3) electronic situation displays; and (4) a control system to follow the overall trajectory in space and time.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19750015477

>Four-dimensional guidance algorithms for aircraft in an air traffic control environment

>Theoretical development and computer implementation of three guidance algorithms are presented. From a small set of input parameters the algorithms generate the ground track, altitude profile, and speed profile required to implement an experimental 4-D guidance system. Given a sequence of waypoints that define a nominal flight path, the first algorithm generates a realistic, flyable ground track consisting of a sequence of straight line segments and circular arcs. Each circular turn is constrained by the minimum turning radius of the aircraft. The ground track and the specified waypoint altitudes are used as inputs to the second algorithm which generates the altitude profile. The altitude profile consists of piecewise constant flight path angle segments, each segment lying within specified upper and lower bounds. The third algorithm generates a feasible speed profile subject to constraints on the rate of change in speed, permissible speed ranges, and effects of wind. Flight path parameters are then combined into a chronological sequence to form the 4-D guidance vectors. These vectors can be used to drive the autopilot/autothrottle of the aircraft so that a 4-D flight path could be tracked completely automatically; or these vectors may be used to drive the flight director and other cockpit displays, thereby enabling the pilot to track a 4-D flight path manually.

https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2020-12-4d-tbo-a-...

>4D-TBO: a new approach to aircraft trajectory prediction

>How four-dimensional trajectory data could contribute to aviation decarbonisation targets

>The real-time transmission of four-dimensional trajectory data has the incredible potential to greatly improve an aircraft’s trajectory prediction. By reducing the inaccuracy of current air traffic management (ATM) prediction models by approximately 30-40%, the Trajectory Based Operations in 4 Dimensions (4D-TBO) project is helping to pave the way to a more sustainable management of tomorrow’s air traffic.

https://skybrary.aero/articles/4d-trajectory-concept

>The 4D trajectory of an aircraft consists of the three spatial dimensions plus time as a fourth dimension. This means that any delay is in fact a distortion of the trajectory as much as a level change or a change of the horizontal position. Tactical interventions by air traffic controllers rarely take into account the effect on the trajectory as a whole due to the relatively short look-ahead time (in the order of 20 minutes or so).

>The implementation of 4D trajectory management is being researched by SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) in the EU and NextGen in the US.

>The 4D trajectory concept is based on the integration of time into the 3D aircraft trajectory. It aims to ensure flight on a practically unrestricted, optimum trajectory for as long as possible in exchange for the aircraft being obliged to meet very accurately an arrival time over a designated point.

Yes, this multiplies the complexity. When you talk to ATC you always need your tail number and airplane model. Why? Because a landing Cessna 150 is moving at 70mph. An incoming jet is moving at 130mph. And the jet can’t just slow down to 70 or it will fall out of the sky. They need to consider aircraft performance in all aspects of planning.

    > there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour

I Googled about this. London Heathrow is widely regarded as the busiest two runway airport in the world. They allow less than 50 arrival per hour. Are there any airports in the world that can have "hundreds of arrivals per hour"? Conservatively, 200 can be considered "hundreds", then you would need 8x runways operating at max capacity. That seems hard to imagine. Google also tells me that Atlanta (normally the business airport in the US) can handle about 250 "operations" per hour, so let's say half for arrivals.

Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.

> Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.

Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe it is a more modern phenomena, enabled by a steady diet of 30 second videos.

Either way, I'm quite disturbed, regularly, recently, by the # of people who breezily stumble through quarter-baked thoughts while speaking dismissively, as if they've covered the surface of a complex universe that has been worked on very many smart people for decades, and now we can get to the real singular problem that'd fix everything, the one thing they've identified.

I don't even know where to begin trying to interlocute when the starting premise is "3D is hard for modern computers."

So I speak straightforwardly, in a way that I wish wouldn't be seen as rude, but it is.

So it goes.

You're right about the arrivals, but you missed the forest for the trees in the comment you're replying to.

You're reading into it too much. It wasn't dismissive.

And the framing of "3d" is a reasonable followup to the train comparison.

Well, if it wasn't, it certainly is now! ;)

?? I have no idea what this means.

Are you implying your reply would make the previous post become dismissive?

"It" is an indefinite pronoun, meaning, "it" is by definition unclear to anyone but the speaker.

Here, "it" means "your involvement in this discussion"

To put it a bit more plainly, and apologies if it is hard to hear currently, I'd find this very helpful to hear this if I were you:

- The first comment was objectively, straightforwardly, dismissive. You questioned one statistic, then ignored the thrust of the comment and the comments leading up to it, instead framing the difficulty as "modern computers have a hard time with 3D", eliding the main point communicated.

- You then replied to my comment to tell me I'm wrong, it wasn't dismissive. This is also, in itself, dismissive. I had already fisked you, and I felt bad, so I didn't want to get overly literal and criticize you roughly again, in front of a crowd, so soon. So, I choose to keep it brief, rely on your ability to recognize the irony in your reply being dismissive in telling me the original comment wasn't dismissive, especially when combined with the wink.

To be hyper clear, it's...unusual...when communicating with others to ignore most of what they just said and fixate on one illustrative part of what they said, then when told you were being dismissive, to just say "I wasn't being dismissive" and put the burden on the listener. It's so unusual as to be objectively amusing.

You certainly did not mean to be dismissive, but you were. I sympathize with the reflex, I am 100% sure I've made many similar errors in my own journey, probably more than you ever have and will. It is a problem area for me.

With humility, I'd humbly suggest that when given feedback, rather than briefly asserting the feedback is incorrect, you come with curiosity and ask why it came off that way.

Given their answer, you'll be able to tell very quickly if the person is having a bad day/picking on you, or if you were unclear.

I'm a different person from the guy you originally called dismissive.

Your advice would make sense if I was the same person, but if I was the same person I would have responded very differently to the criticism. I gave a brief reply because I'm a third party.

Aha! Glad we cleared that up :)

We’ve built good enough systems that lots of people have never had engage with the complexity of reality?

Great, concise, thought that wraps together some of my other bugaboos. Will be stealing it for many years to come :)

I think the 3D part is fine, it's more "all of physics" coming into play with a plane. Like bird strikes, engine failures, trying to decide how to handle that. What is the loss function the AI is supposed to apply if an emergency landing is needed?

And then if you have people flying the planes, you have to deal with people mostly _but not always_ doing the right thing. So now you build out a plan and have to deal with consequences of that.

So at the end of the day you're still looking at funneling humans into a thing. At worst you could consider ATC as "customer support", there to press buttons on machines to actually handle a bunch of logistics because the pilots need to figure things out.

On top of all of this, airports are trying to get through a lot of flights quickly. So people can make snap judgements about whether planes can or cannot advance, what they should do, etc. No matter how well your plan is, the instant a pilot mishears something it's over.

If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. But in the meantime there's somebody not following the plan often enough.

This does lead to an interesting question for me, though: what is the biggest "human movement" system that is actually entirely hands-off logistics? I would imagine that postal service companies are doing a lot but every major person moving operation seems pretty hands-on from the outside.

> If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs.

There's currently a human in the loop at almost all times but a great many planes are already self-flying. Autopilots are a thing, and have been for decades. Modern airliners routinely land themselves, and Garmin have developed an emergency landing system for general aviation aircraft which can handle everything including selecting an airport and communicating with ATC in the case of the pilot being incapacitated.

In many ways a self-piloting plane is an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars. Every plane has (or will have in the near future) a beacon on it transmitting it's location to every other plane around it to allow collision avoidance, and the procedure for getting from one major airport to another is pretty much prescribed in the form of standard departures, arrivals, and airways. The big difference of course is that if a car on the road breaks down and the AI can't handle it then the car can just stop, and baring someone not noticing and plowing into the back of them everyone will be fine, while if that happens in a plane it's a matter of time until the thing falls out of the sky killing everyone on board.

The happy path is easy, as you imagine. It’s all the other imaginable and unimaginable paths, each unhappy in their own way…

Oh and thousands of lives hang in the literal balance

It's not just a 3D problem. It's all of the management in the air and on the ground. Could a computer eventually do it autonomously? I would think eventually, but the problem is handling exceptions. The Navy has been experimenting for years with a digital replacement of their Ouija board analog flight deck management tool for carriers [1]. And even then, people are still making most of the decisions.

And ATL is a crazy busy airport (there's an old doc on Netflix I think which is interesting). To confirm your question, ATL can run 5 runways nearly continuously[2]. It would be interesting to know what they peak at during a busy Monday morning, but my guess is they are more constrained by gate space at this point.

[1] https://newatlas.com/us-navy-ouija-board/50087/ [2] https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-econom...

I should have said “arrivals and departures”. KATL has 2,100–2,700 arrivals and departures per day. Even if we assume those are equally spaced throughout the day (they aren’t) we’re over 100/hour.

But sure. It’s a mild exaggeration. It still doesn’t change the core point.

3D isn’t just “magically hard” for computers, but the process for routing traffic is wildly complex and a bunch of planes arriving and leaving at semi-random times, directions, and with different requirements and capabilities is where the problem starts not finishes.

The happy path is relatively easy. The exceptions are innumerable.

> one track might see a handful of them per day.

In the middle of nowhere. A metro track can have a train every 60s.

But it's still entirely fixed, with easy to deploy sensors on both the tracks and trains.

> 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.

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.

It just seems like software could pretty easily compute non-intersecting flight paths for all planes and assign them accordingly. As well it could real time monitor all trajectories and continue to give out the updated flight paths. I don't see why you also couldn't run a trillion tests using real and simulated flight data to make sure it works well.

Because right now airplanes are flown by humans. A large part of atcs jobs is dealing with humans. Not every pilot will be able to fly the optimum flight path.

Air traffic control has a lot more things to deal with. There are scenarios like runway closed and all traffic has to be diverted. Loss of communication. Various emergencies. Weather changes. It's not just a question of 3D motion planning. Controllers in the tower also use their eyes.

In your imaginary system how is the software "tower" communicating with airplanes, using voice? I don't think we even have software that can reliably decode the variety of human voices over radio that a controller can respond to.

One can imagine a digital protocol to all airplanes but technology works its way really slowly into aviation.

Yes, it would require a piece of hardware, but that seems easy to regulate and wouldn't need to be very expensive certainly not in relation to the costs of owning and operating an airplane.

Seems like you’ve stumbled onto a very obvious solution that would be easy to implement and that no one else has ever managed to see, but which would totally revolutionize the airline industry. Time to start a business!

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.

not a bad question honestly.. I'd want some highly skilled humans there monitoring things but, yes. The air traffic control system of the US is absolutely incredibly amazing, but their entire mission, technology and equipment used to accomplish that mission, etc need to be reviewed, maybe rebuilt to be even safer.

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?

Positive Train Control has been a big fight too.

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

https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/01/broad-exemptions-t...

> President Trump signed an executive order instituting the freeze on Monday shortly after his inauguration, but allowed for exceptions for positions related to immigration enforcement, national security or public safety.

Important to read the details! There will be lots of misinformation as people invoke the minority of critical jobs as cover to defend the less critical ones.

And we also did make it basically impossible for ATC workers to strike, so its not like the ATC workers could have said "fix this shit so people don't die or we will strike" because they can't really and anyone who says it anyways alone is going to be given the boot and blacklisted from the job. Not to mention the amount of training and effort needed to become one in the first place with basically zero job security or recourse if you make the wrong person angry.

Hiring controllers is not easy. A friend's daughter just went through the hiring process. She graduated from college with an appropriate degree right as COVID hit. Her FAA application wasn't accepted for four years.

This past summer she did the four-week interactive online courses. Applicants must pass this and may not re-enter the program if they do not. After that she did the six-week courses in Oklahoma City. Again, applicants must pass this and may not re-enter the program if they do not. She passed. Only half her class of 20 passed. In the prior class, only 4 of 15 passed.

She declined the position when they could not offer a position within reasonable proximity of her family. She, too, may not re-enter the program. On top of all that, the program has strict age requirements because there's a mandatory retirement age (55, I believe).

There isn't a large pool of applicants and the percentage of successful ones is not high. Considering the amount of lives on the line, it's understandable the hiring criteria is strict. All told, it's not an easy position to fill and even explicit efforts to increase the number of applicants will take years. Just like many other skilled fields.

> appropriate degree

what's considered an appropriate degree for 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.

Since the chances of landing an ATC job are so slim with the degree, what kind of job options does that degree afford you? What kind of job did she end up taking (or doing while waiting on the FAA)?

While waiting for the FAA and since declining the ATC position she's worked at her family's auto repair shop. Pre-FAA she did repair work and for the last few months since returning she's more on the management side. She hasn't yet decided if the family business or something else is the career she wants.

> Bachelors in Aviation and Aerospace Science with an Air Traffic Control Concentration

I’m not that far removed from my time in college, but I’m shocked by the specificity of that.

Here's the FAA overview of what the agency calls the Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) Program:

https://www.faa.gov/jobs/students/schools

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

Another problem is the maximum entry age for the ATC school - if you are over the age of 31 you can't apply.

Not being allowed to re-enter the program is just insane.

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?

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

That depends on the test, and the training surrounding it.

If I'm hiring for a job where there's a strict requirement to be 6 feet tall and there's nothing candidates can do to get taller - then once you've measured under 6 feet there's no point in re-testing you.

If I'm hiring for a job where there's a strict requirement that you be able to lift a 90 lbs weight, a lot of people will fail - but if they hit the gym, in a month or two they'll be able to pass easily.

If I'm hiring for a job where there's a strict requirement that you be able to lift a 90 lbs weight, but before the test every applicant goes through a 6 month strength training program, so we test them at absolute peak strength? Re-testing would be a waste of time, except in a few cases like if someone had a loved one die just before the final test.

If I'm hiring for a job with a written test, the test draws a random selection of questions from a question bank, and some questions are much easier than others? There might be a substantial random element to the results. If re-testing people produces substantially different scores, probably that indicates I need to improve the design of my test.

Yes, wrong I think.

People's performance varies from day to day, and if doing the test just once, then some people will pass it because of good luck shape that day, although another day they would have failed.

When constantly predictable high performance is important, it makes sense to do the test on a bunch of different occasions, and look at the overall result (like, lowest, median and average scores). And it'd be ok to do a bit worse on one occasion, as long as you were always above the minimum.

Rather than in effect randomly picking just one test result.

Looking at the results from many tests, reduces false negatives, but also false positives.

(And of course if studying and practice matters, getting to re-take the test some years later: yes of course, but possibly the test should then be a little bit longer.)

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

ATC doesn't get to redo traffic flying in the air.

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

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?

They get multiple chances to "retry" in the FAA academy. It isn't one pass/fail test; they practice a lot and take multiple tests. They can fail the first few tests as long as they average out to a 70% or greater.

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

Agreed. Imagine if tech hiring worked like that. Entry-level positions could be moved to WV or the Dakotas, optimize for low salary and cost-of-living and ignore retention/burnout/washout rates since you figure they're going to be high anyway.

FYI the states(/districts) with lowest ATC pay are DC, IA, MS, MT, SD, VT, WV : See third plot: "Annual mean wage for air traffic controllers, by state, May 2023" and lots of other useful stats in https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes532021.htm

In addition, ATC is not allowed to go on strike, limiting the degree to which they can bargain for better working conditions, pay, etc.

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

Union predates the legal ban on striking, and still represents employees, even though their actual power has been significantly neutered.

There is a law that the govt has to negotiate in good faith. Presumably while they could say "no" to everything, it would be hard to prove that was "good faith" if the union takes them to court.

The ATC union has some unique history [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

In the US, most public-sector unions incl. transport workers are essentially not allowed strike under the Railway Labor Act unless they have exhausted all mandatory federal negotiation/ mediation (nominally on the grounds that it could cripple the economy).

This was also an issue in the 2022 US freight rail labor dispute where Biden, Pelosi and Congress passed a law to criminalize the prospect of rail strike. [0][1] If the freight staffing level cuts had been reversed, it's quite likely the 2/2023 East Palestine, OH train derailment and $$bn environmental disaster [2] would have been avoided. The freight companies, in the name of efficiency and slashing staffing levels, had combined multiple trains into one huge one (which has a higher risk of derailing, and larger size of derailment.)

To your question, it would be good if the US had a nonpartisan setup for balancing profit and efficiency vs safety and conditions, but that's not the case. Since the time of Reagan and the 1981 PATCO strike. Curious if there's any objective comparison between China and US how freight rail is operated. But then the Chinese freight rail is state-owned which largely removes the profit incentive for cutting safety. Compared to the US, China has almost no freight rail disasters, and it has more freight traffic.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33781421

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_la...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de...

And current controllers are often working 60-70+ weeks because of the understaffing...

Their candidate success rate would probably be higher if they weren’t rejecting the vast majority of their most-qualified applicants for reasons that are clearly pretextual: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

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).

ATC (as well as most government jobs) are a real case of "you get what you pay for". When you bring wages down so low that educated engineers don't want to work your job, your options are to lower the qualifications or leave empty seats.

DEI might have contributed to this, but we wouldn't be hiring unqualified people in the first place if America could naturally compete for talent. The lesson learned seems to be less about the dangers of diversity and more about how the feds aren't paying the industry rate for professionals.

Did you read the link that I replied to? Because in that link, what I am responding to, it EXPLICITLY says that the FAA changed the ATC selection process to exclude candidates based on demographics (being not diverse) regardless of their aptitude as tested using a standardized and validated cognitive assessment. These were candidates who had already completed multiple years of schooling and explicitly wanted to be ATCs, so you are talking about a pipeline problem which may or may not exist but is irrelevant to the article I am responding to in the link above my comment.

Per that article, candidates who accepted the pay terms and wanted to become ATCs were /rejected/ explicitly because they were not minorities or otherwise able to produce a biographical or demographic reason for acceptance, even when they scored a perfect score on the standardized aptitude assessment.

If you have something to refute the article the person above me linked, I'd love to see it because I'm incredibly disappointed in what I read about in that article.

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 the FAA https://mslegal.org/press-releases/mslf-prevails-over-faas-a... )...

What actually happened was that the FAA invalidated a bunch of AT-SAT[1] scores to align with its new diversity policy, and a bunch of people who barely passed the first time didn't want to re-take the test again and risk failing. So they did the American thing and sued instead.

The FAA has not rejected qualified candidates on the grounds of "diversity." And at any rate, the controller in the DC tower last night was hired during the Trump administration and the Blackhawk pilot that caused the crash wasn't the kind of candidate who would have been selected on DEI grounds...

[1] it's like the SAT, but for controller jobs instead of college admissions

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 my understanding of the article. The fact they won the case on procedural grounds is not relevant to the fact the court is opining in the case that the evidence supports a conclusion that the FAA discriminated against "non-diverse" candidates who were otherwise qualified.

I think we can all agree that for a role like ATC, the most important thing is that candidates are competent and capable, because it is literally life or death. I have the strong belief that minority candidates are also competent and capable, so discriminatory against "non-diverse" candidates is reprehensible in the strongest terms. I don't think my position here is unusual, unreasonable, or in any way objectionable, and it turns out Congress agreed and made this practice explicitly illegal.

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...

>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

The "correct" answers on a biographical test are to claim to have more experience than your really do.

In other words... fraud. If you get caught you lose the job and spend some free time in a cell.

You're really stretching to turn this into a scandal. Nobody complained that the answers to the previous test had been leaked.

>The "correct" answers on a biographical test are to claim to have more experience than your really do.

That's not what happened, and that isn't what the test questions were about at all:

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

>You're really stretching to turn this into a scandal. Nobody complained that the answers to the previous test had been leaked.

There hadn't been such a test previously, the black ATC union lobbied for it to be created in the first place.

that isn't what the test questions were about at all:

The best source you can cite is a series of twitter posts that gets basic facts wrong, like the timeline and "test" contents?

The link claims the new "test" was implemented in 2014. It makes this claim repeatedly. But the BA was implemented in 2013 after years of being refined (including, as discussed by the OIG, by having current ATC staff take it). It was not intended to increase DEI-style diversity; Fox News ran a report in 2015 about a (tribal) Native American candidate who would have aced the BA if DEI-style diversity had been the goal. The original goal was to vastly expand the pool of candidates, because the FAA had a serious shortfall of candidates willing to work in all of the locations where ATCs were required and the hope was that they by bringing in more applicants, including so-called less qualified candidates, this would yield candidates willing to work at difficult-to-staff smaller airports where candidates wouldn't need to be as highly qualified to adequately perform the job.

The claim that the "correct" answers were leaked to the black ATC union (while true) is irrelevant. The "test" was a biographical questionnaire. The only way to cheat was to lie. And notably, members of the NBCFAE who supposedly had copies of the "correct" answers...didn't score any better than the people in the lawsuit suing over the test. Because again...the only way to cheat was to lie... (Unless those of you railing against the BA are suggesting that someone actually needs to be told that having more experience and expressing more enthusiasm about work is better than having less experience and not caring about your job?)

And one final important point: after Congress eliminated the BA in 2018, in 2019 Trump's FAA implemented the diversity hiring program he spent most of yesterday railing against.

Yep, that's right. The evil DEI program that Trump is mad about is his own program.

Educated engineers generally don't want to work ATC jobs regardless of pay because they're not engineering jobs. Controllers are operators, not engineers. There are some working controllers with engineering degrees, but almost nothing in typical engineering coursework is directly relevant to the job.

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.

It says "In 2016, Congress passed Public Law 114-190, which among other things banned the use of biographical assessments as a first-line hiring tool for air traffic controllers."

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?

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

Probably not much, considering the biggest constraining factor is pay. For example, San Carlos airport is shutting down ATC entirely because they can't pay anyone enough to live locally to the tower: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/bay-area-airport-losing-...

There would be no problem filling the seats if the compensation was handsome and attractive. But we all know how federal workers are compensated, even when lives are on the line.

My understanding is ATCs are pretty well paid. With most making 140-150, and many making up to 200k.

I could see this maybe being an issue in the bay area but outside of that area that pretty good pay.

Starting salary is US $90,000 along with government benefits.

I think a small airport/airfield in one of the most expensive areas of the country is a bit of an exceptional case. In most places ATC employees make pretty competitive/comfortable wages, so I’m not sure this is the only factor.

This is, justifiably, very similar to nuclear reactor operators. Pay needs to reflect the working conditions to attract more people (it does for reactor operators).

> the four-week interactive online courses

Yikes, is that paid, or is the candidate supposed to do that on their own time?

Paid

I believe this happened in DC SFRA, which is a 30-mile radius specially controlled airspace due to the level of traffic and national security interests.

Not that being near DC affords me any kind of right to an opinion, but:

Given the uptick in near miss incidents across the US the last few years, this is the kind of incident that should've been entirely avoidable through changes in policy from these past events but is also apparently the only kind that can spur along policy changes. I can see a world where the fault is on the VH-60, but absent more information, it would surprise me less to hear that it's the fault of the tower.

Knowing where AA5342 was in its approach, I see no possibility of the jet being at fault.

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/AAL5342

I'm drawing a lot of early conclusions but it's mostly because I'm just not surprised. Angry as someone who flies a bunch, but not surprised.

Regulations are written in blood, which is why it's such a disservice to indiscriminately tear it all down. We will re-learn the same lessons and people will pay for those lessons with their lives.

Some regulations are written and blood but some regulations are written to cover someone's ass and the two should not be treated equally. We shouldn't give equal respect to the Federal Aviation Regulations and to OPM's Qualification Standards for Federal Jobs; doing so deligitamizes the importance of the former.

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.

You mean the same FAA people that allowed Boeing to self certify? The FAA is not spotless. I can only imagine how much worse air travel would be without them, but they are only run by humans trying to work in a political controlled environment.

Congress directed the FAA--by law--to delegate certain aspects of certification to non-FAA entities. This directive was issued by H.R. 302 - FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, 115th Congress.

Is that the 49 USC 44736 Organization designation authorizations part?[1]

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/302/...

Yes, the ODAs. I'm not making a value judgement that this is good, bad, or indifferent. I'm just trying to provide factual context to understand when and why the delegation of certain aspects of certification has occurred.

The FAA is pretty bonkers; Rayiner is right here. Besides, what other system beyond "humans trying to work in a political controlled environment" are you advocating here?

> You mean the same FAA people that allowed Boeing to self certify?

Reputation lags reality.

Boeing used to be a product-first organization, and the FAA relied on that. However Boeing changed and put other priorities first and started cutting corners but their reputation was still good. After all, why would Boeing (unlike, say, tobacco) sell products that would kill their customers: it would be against Boeing's own interests.

In the 1980s and 1990s Boeing could be trusted to have less oversight, but since the 2000s that was no longer true, but no one noticed that. Now everyone recognizes that Boeing needs a babysitter.

> sell products that would kill their customers

Because the company ended up being run by people who had no clue what it takes to not kill your customers.

The existence of all the "FAA: We are not happy until you are not happy" funny t-shirts seems to disagree with that observation.

Ehh...FAA is kind of crazy and subject to a certain conceit. That's not to say they're bad, or always wrong, but they are a little nuts. For instance there's a rule that says you can't fly under a bridge. A floatplane pilot was on the water, increased his speed so that his floats got on a plane, while still on the water. FAA decided this was flying, even though he was going below stall speed and was by definition not flying. Courts until recently deferred judgement to the agencies that made the rules, and the guy lost his case (and his pilot's license? Don't recall). Also see how shooting a drone flying over your property (even if they don't have a transponder and are literally watching your kids) gets treated as downing an aircraft. Also see the recent kerfuffle between FAA and FCC with 5G. That was just nuts.

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.

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.

There was an awful lot of complaining about rolling back regulations in the first Trump term, so maybe the administration does care about it.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-envir...

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-regulatory-chang...

^^ includes Trump's first term and Biden's term.

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

That was rude, and didn't at all speak to OP's point. They indicated that not all regulations are equal. Some are important and put into place because people died without them. Others are put into place for less important reasons. And the fact that _some_ regulations were removed doesn't mean that "ones written in blood" necessarily were.

There are definitely regulations out there written by people that have no idea what they are talking about, and that are a net negative on the area(s) they impact. Does that mean we should remove Chesterton's Fence? No. But it does mean that, if you see someone removing a fence, you shouldn't immediately accuse them of causing harm.

Not as rude as ignorant indiscriminate knee-jerk criticism of government work.

It’s not rude. Making some inane point contrasting FAA regulations to HR rules is a stupid comparison feeding the nihilist attitude that everything is broken, except for what I think.

Air regulations are “written in blood”. Nobody claimed that OPM rules about HR were.

I took it more as a don't throw the baby out with the bath water type comment. Regulations _do_ need to be looked at and decided if they should be kept. Not every regulation was written in blood, and not every regulation is going to get people killed if we get rid of it. Some of them are critical, no doubt. But there's also a lot of them written by people that don't know what they're doing, but feel the need to justify their job.

Okay, what blood was the NOAA regulations concerning earth-observing satellites written in? The national security justification is quite flimsy when you remember that China, Russia, etc are not bound to those regulations, only satellites from the US.

Ooh… which ones?

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

Chesterton's Fence

Oof. Correct.

Typically, the ones that protect me are good, the ones that slow me down are bad. Easy!

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.

> Regulations are written in blood, which is why it's such a disservice to indiscriminately tear it all down. We will re-learn the same lessons and people will pay for those lessons with their lives.

And which regulation was eliminated that caused this?

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.

OK then, what regulation do you think was missing that could have prevented this

I mean, that's pretty obvious right? It's absolutely insane to have VFR traffic passing through the final approach corridor, especially at night.

Apparently not obvious enough for anyone in the FAA ever, over numerous decades, to think it can’t be safely done.

Reagan should have been shut down for commercial use many moons ago.

It will never be shut down because it's got all the exceptions so that Congresscritters don't have to be treated the same as us plebians.

>It will never be shut down because it's got all the exceptions so that Congresscritters don't have to be treated the same as us plebians.

DCA is open to the public.

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.

Please expand.

I fly out of DCA and IAD frequently (and JFK and LGA). I’ve gone through the process next to politicians, though I’ve never recognized any highly ranked ones (e.g. Pelosi, McConnell, etc.).

What’s the difference they experience?

Not OP but the only thing I'm aware of is new Senator Jim Justice who seems to use a private plane to get to the airport which seems relatively rare.

https://punchbowl.news/article/senate/jim-justice-takes-priv...

I watched Warren and some of her staff cut the entire pre-check line at BOS. They still had to walk through the metal detectors but without any bags, they whisked through.

I got to cut the line at security once because I was on the job, I was completely embarrassed.

Isn’t that just what CLEAR is?

Kind of but even Clear still has a line. Warren had an airport escort walk her around the stanchions and directly to the metal detector.

> the inconveniences that you and I have to endure.

What are those? With pre check you just more or less walk through and use a metal detector.

A lot of people here like to go on about security. I agree there's a certain amount of theater, and I try to avoid really peak times, but with pre-check I do tend to arrive early because I don't want stress but, as you say, it's rarely more than a few minute wait and I pretty much toss my bag on the carousel and walk through the metal detector. It's really not a big deal if you're prepared.

Your airport sounds a lot better than the ones near me!

In my area they all want you to arrive 2-3 hours before your flight, without any water, then to shuffle through security without your belt and shoes.

I usually arrive about 2 hours before flight time. For one thing, my car company doesn't really want you to cut things close as they'll tend to catch the blame if you miss your flight for some unavoidable reason. But usually security is maybe 5-10 minutes. Don't remember the last time I needed anything like the margin that I give myself.

Probably doesn't hurt that I'm usually taking early morning flights.

2-3 hours means you get 1-2 hours spending airside.

What's pre-check?

TSA pre-check is a pre-screening program that air travelers can use to bypass the normal security line.

It's not a huge time-saver (any more, used to be more) but gets you out of a few annoyances like removing shoes, unpacking toiletries, and a few other things. And the lines are usually a bit shorter and the ratio of regular traveller to new traveller is a bit better (less likely to get caught behind somebody who doesn't know the process and wastes everybody's time).

And they don't put you through the nudie scanner (or whatever it's called) which is important to some people. I have pre-check automatically through global entry (that basically lets you bypass immigration coming back into the US).

Just got ETA for the UK and you also have e-entry (which usually works) from the US and a number of other countries as well.

Usually true, though I don't believe that's guaranteed.

And all the lines at IAD have the new, high-powered luggage scanners (for carry-on, so still less powerful than the ones used for checked bags). So for those of that fly with film camera gear, we need a hand check with or without pre-check.

Right--though pretty rare in my experience. Though you can always(?) ask for a hand check rather than going through the more invasive scanner.

Haven't used film for a while :-) Back in the film days, at least latterly I traveled with my film in a lead-lined bag.

Not disagreeing, but is there something particularly wrong with DCA?

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.

Short runway too. 9/11 restrictions only made it that much worse.

It was discussed post 9/11 about closing National Airport, but congress wouldn't hear it. It was too convenient from DC. (At a time when IAD was way the hell out there, rather than being 1/2 the way out the sprawl.)

I won't fly through DCA in the winter, because when I was a kid there was the Air Florida crash. I'd much prefer IAD with it's 3 mile runways and straight approaches.

The Air Florida crash had very little to do with the airport and a lot to do with the pilots who took off with dangerous amounts of ice/snow on the wings. Fortunately, de-icing procedures have also improved since then - in the 80s, it was possible to have a long time between deicing and takeoff; today, deicing is done at the end of the runway, shortly before lining up for takeoff.

Full story: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-cold-laws-of-winter-...

I was in 6th grade. It was a shitty day all around -- there was a metrorail accident under the river. I was on a school bus for 4 hours while getting home in the snow. The plane hit a bridge and went into the river.

Think of what you know about DC traffic when there's a flake of snow in the air, and put an airliner crash and a metro accident on top of that.

Maybe it's not logical, but I'm still not a fan of flying through National in the winter.

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.

> more funding/staffing for ATC

More funding? From an administration that is currently doing its best to get rid of as many federal employees as possible and has an extra "department" (led by you-know-who) dedicated to that? What they will probably do with ATC is privatize it (which is actually a reasonable thing to do - it's private in most of Europe, but if the intention behind it is to save money, it will probably not improve the system).

I would not be surprised if ATC _at DCA_ gets some more funding given the complicated air traffic environment and its unique position as Congress’s second-favorite airport.

What is Congress' favorite airport?

Presumably Dulles because international and probably long-haul generally flights. (Though I imagine more fly in and out of Reagan/National on a regular basis.)

Huh, yeah I think that's maybe the Virginia delegation's favorite airport but I'm highly skeptical it is for other members as it's pretty far and while it does have more flights, I don't think it's incredible. For international flights when traveling for work, many Congresspeople will use milair anyways. For reference, I worked as a staffer in Congress for a couple of years and just picked this up although I've never done any in-depth research

Congressmen from areas that can serve DCA tend to pick DCA due to proximity/convenience. Noted elsewhere, it's a bit easier to navigate internally (smaller, newer terminal building vs IAD), though I don't know how much that impacts Congressmen - I'm guessing they at minimum are using first class/preferred facilities and not queuing up with us plebes for security.

Periodically, Congress pushes to have DCA take more traffic total and from a larger portion of the US. Currently, DCA is limited to destinations 1250 miles away, though powerful Congressmen have obtained permanent waivers for this over the years for specific flights so they get an easy flight to their own home region.

What is the rationale for the mile limit (other than protectionism for Dulles, which is what I suspect the answer is)? DCA’s short runways and tight space mean larger aircraft can’t use so that’s already a natural limiter.

My bias is that I think Dulles needs to become a better airport rather than limiting competition with DCA.

The rule was put in place by Congress in 1966, when IAD opened. Notionally to manage congestion at DCA, but yes also to get residents to use IAD, which was intended to be DC’s major airport.

When I fly to Washington from Europe I try to go to Baltimore - the number of hours I’ve lost at Dulles immigration arrival is painful, Baltimore is 5-10 minutes.

Their respective home airports, of course. ;-)

Ha, should have guessed that!

There's a privately controlled tower at KSQL (San Carlos) and there have been numerous incidents of ATC losing their cool on pilots, sometimes brand new students. All the YT comments say it's because it's privately controlled and understaffed and many pilots vouch for similar drama happening to them. I can't prove it, just passing along a data point. Obviously this problem could be solved by paying better and having enough staff. But how likely is that?

KSQL's current controllers have announced that they are all quitting effective tomorrow.

The private corp running the tower lowered their pay by eliminating COL adjustments in the latest contract renewal (a big deal for an airport that is in Palo Alto).

This weekend, with no planning, there will be a completely untowered airport operating underneath the airspace of SFO.

The management is scrambling right now to prevent this, but the best case scenario is that controllers with no experience or local knowledge in training will be thrown into a tower on the busiest day of the week with no colleagues that have done the job before.

good for them (I'm not advocating for a more dangerous, uncontrolled airport, I think pilots should not fly there). Any private ATC should be required to put 50-100M in escrow (at a minimum) and/or insurance to cover mass casualty events caused by their failure.

Thank's for the detailed explanation! I have a warm spot in my heart for Dulles, because it's my first memory of American (we flew into Dulles from Bangladesh in 1989). It's really convenient if you live in Great Falls or Reston. And I loved what was then the semi-rural Virginia around the airport. But agreed, it's a huge pain in the butt to navigate.

For all the hate EWR (Newark) gets, I much prefer to connect through from there to Europe from Boston than Dulles. My biggest objection to EWR is that it's a PITA to get into Manhattan from but, then, that's pretty much true of all the NYC airports. I'm rarely doing that though as I'm almost always taking the train into the city.

> the airport is fairly easy to navigate once you're in.

I see you skipped talking about how terrible it is navigating the road traffic to arrivals/departures

You mean if you’re driving? Sometimes there’s bad traffic around the ring and sometimes there’s not, a lot of airports are like that.

Specifically the terrible signage and navigation to the right dropoffs

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.

I have a feeling from your comment that you know more about aviation than you are letting on, and the part about being in DC not giving you a right to an opinion seems pretty silly in that context.

This seems to be a resolved problem and one that we shouldn't have in this era. An unnecessary tragedy.

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 focused on the wrong plane to avoid because they didn’t see the right one thanks to the city skyline. It looks like the classic swiss cheese where multiple problems stacked up to cause the collision. See the video for details.

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.

Air traffic controllers are staffed at 65% across the US. Budget cuts and turnover are cited. Meanwhile the FAA is being rattled to its core by the Orange One.

I sometimes wonder about the value of these news stories on forums and social media.

It's all pretty much wild speculation with several potential causes already mentioned on this forum.

News important yes, every rando with a few shreds of factoids speculating, not so much.

I’ve been saying something similar to friends recently. We have access to a bit Too much news for our own good.

Anything about civilian air safety is like catnip for nerds. It is the ultimate armchair nerd sport -- speculating about reasons for a civilian air crash. I guess this discussion will be more than 1,000 comments before its heat-death.

Let's go back to AI non-stop 24/7, hallucinations are saner.

In this case there is no or negative value. Wait for the facts, avoid the noise and wild speculation.

But my dopamine…

Don't you know? If a person can program in Rust and Kotlin, that makes him an expert in every other field, too.

I've seen at least one "why don't you just <misunderstanding of how aviation works>" upthread already. Can't believe this flavor of tech hubris is running the country now. No wonder the goddamn planes are falling out of the sky...

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 ...

Yes, tons of speculation, and very little clear basic facts.

When I clicked, I expected to find the comments interesting (since I worked in a small corner of flight safety), but, skimming through, I kept feeling aversion to threads.

Most modern news organizations aren't much better.

I come to hn for the speculations.

Here we get air traffic controller recordings, and people who are ammeter pilots. It is more informed speculation than my "normal" friends or co-workers.

I suspect moderately informed, but not completely informed, is the worst kind of speculation. It has a sense of authority and knowledge that is hard to pinpoint its accuracy.

Almost all the amateur theories in here, just by the variety, are going to be dead wrong.

It just sounds more informed. Just like all the "amateur" physicists who speculate on theoretical physics posts on HN.

Here, I get ATC transcripts and learn about the helicopter flight paths. Traditional news describes an airliner with 60 people on board as a “small plane.”

Well, last night when there were only 10 comments here, the essentials of what had happened were available from those comments. Meanwhile the mainstream news TV I was watching at the same time was presenting either zero information, or false information (e.g. that 4 survivors had been rescued).

Oh man. I’m in Wichita and am getting a bunch of texts.

Texted my friends that fly that route regularly and most have texted back.

It can all be gone in an instant, tell those you love what they mean to you.

edit: everyone is accounted for

> everyone is accounted for

Happy to hear that.

Thank you!

DCA has two runways. The longer runway is aligned with the river’s north/south direction at that point, so planes flying the approach to this runway from the south track along the western shore of the river, leaving the eastern shore clear for other aircraft like helicopters. The vast majority of flights on approach from the south [1] use this longer runway.

The secondary runway is set at a diagonal NW/SE. Planes flying an approach from the south follow the river at first, but then loop out over the eastern shore of the river to line up on that runway. To my eye the radar track of the downed flight follows this path. It’s possible since it was a small plane and only small planes can use the diagonal runway—it’s shorter.

I mention this because this track takes planes into airspace that is a) usually clear of commercial airplane traffic, and b) directly over military facilities like Naval Research Lab and Joint Base Bolling, which have significant military helicopter travel.

Basically, I wonder to what extent the helicopter pilot was surprised to find an airplane descending in that location.

[1] When flights are approaching from the north, the main runway requires a pretty sharp right turn seconds before touching down. Approaches to the diagonal runway from the north take planes almost directly over the Pentagon.

The press conference this morning mentioned that this was a new flight path. I wonder if the helicopter crew were not fully briefed on the new path, if that is the case.

In looking at the radar recording, the plane appears to be approaching from the south going north (very slightly east), than diverts northwest to land on the runway, as you describe.

I work at NRL, east of DCA and about 500 yards south of the crash. Can confirm that it is not unusual for flights to pass directly overhead of us, however I don’t understand the statement that this was a new flight path.

What it means is that the aircraft was on approach into runway 1 (ILS) and then on ATC instruction changed runway to 33 (no ILS). This required a "jog" in flight path -- a slight right turn followed by a left turn, to account for the different orientation between the runways. You can see the turns on the ADS data. Crash happened right at the end of the second turn.

It wasn't a surprise, the ATC recording is out there already [0], also while it's a less common approach path it's not exactly new or that unusual military traffic has to deal with the commercial traffic all the time in that area.

[0] Crash happens around 8:21 the chopper pilot is advised of and reports traffic in sight at around 7:06 and 8:12 https://archives.broadcastify.com/44114/20250129/20250129200...

Anecdotally, the amount of helicopter & air traffic going on around DC has been absurd this month.

My house in DC has calmed down some but we had a bunch of low flying fighters jets & helicopters for a bit. It's been wild having the house shaken at noon or 1:00 from pairs of fighter jets!

I've had an in-week around Tysons this week, and it's been wild seeing pair after pair after pair of helicopter flying east towards the city this week. I'm normally up there once or twice a week and usually there's nothing like this.

Agreed. Why so many heli's to McClean? Are they just too stingy to pay the I66 toll in the afternoon?

I work at a Navy installation on the Potomac just south of DCA. As of 10 am EST today there was a moderate police and rescue presence on the water. There is a significant amount of debris visible floating in the river, and the boats are fishing it out piece by piece. The only things in the air are a handful of helicopters, presumably related to the search operation.

This will be the worst disaster since Colgan in 2009 which is the crash that upped the hours requirement for ATP pilots from 250 to 1500 even though both pilots had over 1500 hours. I think this is going to be a very big deal and very quickly become a political football. Regardless, this is absolutely awful and extremely unfortunate.

Early indications are that the airliner and ATC were operating as planned, and the immediate cause of the crash was the military helicopter.

This is an often repeated misconception. ATP always needed 1500 hours. What wasn’t required is for both pilots to have an ATP, just the captain - the flight officer only needed a commercial certificate. Airlines would hire with lower hours and train on the job.

While both pilots in the crash did have over 1500 hours, the flight officer did not in fact hold an ATP. The rule also changed some of the ATP training requirements, and there were other regulation changes on duty cycles, etc.

It’s very possible we’ve had a run of good luck since 2009. It’s also possible some of the rule changes helped. I wouldn’t dismiss that possibility too quickly.

https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/notice/n_8900.225....

Damn. We’ve avoided a US airliner having a fatal crash since 2009.

It's a crazy accomplishment really, unimaginable how safe US commercial airplanes have been in the last two decades

So sad that streak finally ended

As someone working in aviation safety, this is heartbreaking and awful to watch. The efforts of CAST and ASIAS in reducing aviation safety accidents have been very successful, but of course we still have so much to do.

There have been incidents that were just saved by luck (eg losing door in flight). And Too many near misses.

Better a near miss than a catastrophic incident.

And in such an avoidable way, too.

There was a fatality on a Southwest flight in 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380

> fatal crash

But yes, you're right to point that out.

Not a US airliner, but in the US: Asiana Airlines Flight 214

Although Air Canada Flight 759 was far too close for comfort and should be classified as a failure of the system, even if it did not result in an accident.

I'm sorry, doesn't matter who you support, but to blame DEI or former presidents for this is just shameful.

And yet, completely unsurprising. I know there is no limit to how low this pathetic human being can go.

DEI is the new catch-all boogeyman.

My take is that the emperor has no clothes, and most people around him are simply too afraid to say anything. The rest have something to gain from his current anti-DEI fixation.

I fully expect Trump to blame every future scandal, accident, crisis, etc. on DEI.

The Trump killings have started

They found a new scapegoat. They blame public employees, they just advised all air traffic controllers to find a job in the private sector after this crash.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/us/politics/federal-worke...

If anyone needs a palate cleanser after listening to a depressing ATC recording, I can recommend this heartwarming first time solo flying teenager dealing with her landing gear coming off after takeoff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ5q7Iv5wTM

The amount of times i've wtched this video needing an excuse to feel hype is greater than 10.

Her personal instructor finally arriving ("Maggie it's john") and Maggie starting to normalize the situation/making professonal raido calls really show the power of humanity working through struggle.

This was great, thanks!

Gods, her "OK" at 30seconds is fucking heart wrenching.

The absolute terror she must have felt. All she could probably think of was that she was not going to survive that flight.

Though it sounds like she successfully landed it without any injury.

Thank you so much for sharing this. Probably the most wholesome, scary, heartening thing I've seen this year.

I’ve watched this countless times and I’ll watch it countless times more.

We really can't have this type of accident, a midair collision happen anywhere in the United States, much less the nation's capital, especially considering the Washington area is some of the highest controlled airspace in the country. DCA has been a high-risk airport really since the jet-age, and I have a feeling this might be the end of it as a major passenger airport (at least for Part 121 operations). DOT/FAA are really going to need to step up after this and figure it out, for good. I hope there are survivors but it is really cold in that water right now, look up Air Florida flight 90 for a completely different accident, but in a similar time of the year.

Unfortunately it's not gonna happen. The traffic at DCA only keeps going up, and I've heard chatter that it's because a lot of congressman and senators prefer taking flights from DCA instead of driving to Dulles or BWI.

Cities should have convenient airports

Maybe the evtol technology will alleviate this dilemma

> DOT/FAA are really going to need to step up after this and figure it out, for good.

Yeah. First, we should fill the currently vacant US Secretary of Transportation role. Then we should fill the currently vacant FAA Administrator role. Then we should fill the FAA Deputy Administrator role [0]. Then we should fill the currently vacant DoT Inspector General role that Trump just opened up by illegally firing this watchdog without the required 30 days notice to Congress [1]. Then we can start investigating.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250129122818/https://www.faa.g...

[1] https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2025/01/trump-fires-multip...

We’ve gone this long without an accident, what’s to say we’re not gonna learn the hard lesson from this and make sure it doesn’t happen again?

I wonder if this administration's firing of many FAA civil positions and the federal worker "buyouts" are responsible.

Just learned about it here: https://fallows.substack.com/p/it-had-been-16-years-since-a-...

Likely more affected are learning about the aftermath via investigation, but I am not sure.

Edit: No wait, that article mentioned the disbanding of Aviation Security Advisory Committee a week ago.

I'll bite. How are you thinking that might've contributed to the crash?

The intelligent response would be "probably not, but we'll see what the investigation says".

But imagine if the tables were turned politically. Fox News would be going off 24/7 about "DEI" or some such for weeks on end. That strategy seems to be successful, so I would expect the other side to start employing it more as well.

Having a bunch of harried, overworked people stressed about their jobs and the future certainly doesn't help anything, in any case.

Yea I had the same thought, its a ticky-tacky thing to say right now, but I wouldn't expect any more from the other side either.

And there it is. He's out there saying it right now.

Yep, I should have expected it honestly. This is a pretty great opening for an aspiring Democratic leader right now, there are no sacred topics for political clout anymore.

RW media and the POTUS himself is making the dubious claim that DEI practices are responsible for low standards of hiring for air traffic controllers in the FAA during the Biden presidency.

I don't think POTUS was serious because he also claimed people shouldn't be hesitant to fly.

'He is later asked by a reporter if people should be hesitant to fly, and he says: "No, not at all."'

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cy7kxx74yxlt

Basically, their idea is that only white men can do these kinds of jobs. It's just racism.

It results in more questions than answers. Like why was the impact of DEI on ATC competence overlooked by the Commander-in-Chief and DOD when training mission in DC airspace began?

There is no Fox News equivalent for the left, though. In fact, most of the US media seems to be owned by or otherwise aligned with the right.

As long as it also affects the investigation to find out its all the same to a psychopath.

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 over those years. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were far fewer flights but multiple crashes every year was the norm.

That was my thought exactly when I heard of this. I trust that like other major accidents, that we will learn from this and make the skies safer. Sixteen years without a major airline crash was an incredible accomplishment. It's a tragedy it couldn't have gone on longer.

I think Boeing specifically attracts criticism due to all the fatalities outside of the US in that time period.

And the perceived sentiment that those fatalities are directly linked to changes in the corporate culture that emphasized 'greed' and 'middle management power structures' over 'engineering focus'

Not saying these are true - or false - just that the prevalent media coverage and social media commentary (including here on HN) has been touching on these points frequently. The 'good guys' at Boeing were pushed out or silenced, the 'sleazy guys' won and didn't care about the consequences as long as they got their payday

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.

Although in terms of risk it is better framed as big ship vs big ship. Because if they touch they are both going down. And both will be constrained in how far they can realistically detect and avoid the other. That is a fact with flying visually and that is why you have instrument flight rules and atc based separation. I know nothing about this location but theoretically ATC could take active steps to avoid conflict. They could change the arrival sequence to allow crossings. Send the arrivals around if need be. The crossing could take place above the airfield or further away to provide more vertical separation. .

> We like to throw shade at Boeing, the FAA etc, but this is still an incredible accomplishment, especially given the explosive growth of traffic over those years

To be fair to them, the Boeing-related incidents could have well happened in the US and killed Americans too. And the FAA absolutely refused to do their job until their hand was forced by everyone else - they refused to ground the Maxes until all other major air authorities did. That's also why EASA is involved in the Max recertification, and the 777X certification. Nobody trusts the FAA anymore.

And the fact that the door blowout didn't damage any part of the plane is miraculous - if it had hit the vertical stabiliser, the plane would have been a total loss.

So you're giving credit where very little is due.

There is simply no reason to use the statistical safety of air travel to excuse incidents. We can appreciate the incredible feats of engineering and logistics that make air travel so safe without letting the bar dip down or throwing up our hands and saying "well it can't be perfect, don't throw shade" when a specific organization has a specific incident.

Edit: To be clear, I'm referring to what you said, not to the current incident.

Well it is objectively true that it can't be perfect.

We can simultaneously acknowledge this amazing safety record and still want to fix issues that are found.

Can you clarify the difference between these?

> first fatal crash of a US commercial airliner

> first fatal commercial airliner crash in the United States

Is it that the 2009 crash was a US-manufactured plane while the 2013 crash was not manufactured in the US but happened in the US?

Actually, the planes from both crashes were Bombardier, a Canadian company. The first one means operated by a US company and the second one refers to a crash in the US.

I believe the distinction the OP was making was foreign-owned/operated airline vs domestic. Makes a small difference, but not hufe, as all commericial pilots landing in the US must have an FAA ATP, and the same minimum flight hours as American pilots (though the quality of those hours and other training may vary).

Operated vs Located

The 2009 crash was a Canadian-manufactured, US-operated plane, located in the US.

The 2013 crash was a US-manufactured, Korean-operated plane, located in the US.

---

The operating county has far more ability to ensure pilot training, maintenance of aircraft, on-board safety procedures, etc.

E.g. the 2013 crash was due to mismanagement of altitude by the (non-US) crew, resulting in crashing short of the runway.

I believe the Marine aviation unit supporting the WH operates from the navy base east across from DCA. You can watch them training from the terminal.

Not sure how they or the Army transition the approach ends to the runways, but it’s really close.

Real talk, the helicopter was operating night VFR, right? How is this safe when the jet is moving extremely fast relative to the chopper and the only separation is a visual reference to some navigation lights?

Right or wrong, the US has fewer (but not quite zero) limits on night-time VFR.

This differs from some of the EU, where night VFR can have more stringent operating parameters than day-time VFR.

It’s not. That’s the simple answer. Accident waiting to happen.

Radar replay: https://x.com/avgeekjake/status/1884823071611363833

UHF feed with comms from the military helicopter: https://archives.broadcastify.com/44114/20250129/20250129200...

- 5:41 - AA5342 is given instructions for circling to 33

- 6:45 - PAT-25 reports Memorial

- 7:06 - Tower gives PAT-25 traffic advisory, PAT-25 reports traffic in sight and requests visual separation

- 8:08 - Tower asks PAT-25 if they have the CRJ in sight. PAT-25 again reports traffic in sight and again requests visual separation

- 8:23 - Crash occurs

aaand.. it's gone.

archive of the radar replay: https://dpaste.com/3DUG9YWFB

sha3-256: 539b49e57443109cb0aea06209ce142d44a5ccbee16e42e0c71026742fc56703

No, the Twitter/X post is gone but the archives.broadcastify.com link is still good.

more: https://dpaste.com/HDBW79JMX

(no height data, so I ignore the overlay comments on the first video)

sha3-256's 7c608babe5552ac436499978b1a458b3a74ddc7e1d7e5011c6573b724729149e 24a3e23aa97f348ebd8740af83b3b50ae7dd5cd5147e88636b564e93d99d9775

blancolirio: Potomac Mid Air Collision DCA 1/29/25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouDAnO8eMf8

The video makes it look like the helicopter crashed into the airplane, not the other way around.

How do you figure? The videos of the crash that I can find on X just show a small airline light suddenly turning into a low-res explosion. (Edit: ah. yes.)

there's a dot moving from the left to right that intercepts the airline lights and explodes. I would presume that's the helicopter.

Its on final landing. The small light (helicopter) from the left intersects it.

https://x.com/aletweetsnews/status/1884789306645983319

You see the helo coming from the left on the screen while the airliner appears to be descending. The helo must have gotten in the way (as opposed to catching up from behind). The airliner's lights are unmistakable, so how did the helo pilot not notice them? The airliner's pilots might not have had a chance to notice the helo. Since the helo was crossing an active runway approach the fault has to be with them.

My only thought is that it's a regional jet, so it's smaller than a "normal" commercial flight. At night, if you expect it to be a big jet and it looks small, you presume it's just further away. I think they saw it, saw it small and presumed they had enough time to make it in front of it.

Maybe, but those smaller aircraft handle tons of flights in and out of DCA. Lots of commuter flights to NYC, Boston, etc.

Not many big jets at DCA. Max is typically a 757.

Anyone that can explain what the people on X mean when they comment that it was "intentional"? I'm probably out of the loop but this feels super out of place to me.

These are only a small amount directly from the replies to the tweet you shared, you can find many more if you keep scrolling.

https://x.com/27steph77/status/1884799302947500062 https://x.com/Aangtweets/status/1884793609326666014 https://x.com/Ray4444444444/status/1884824192308134234 https://x.com/OmarGoshTV/status/1884807622588522981 https://x.com/Sgt_Mac87/status/1884795428559814968 https://x.com/dudeodnv/status/1884796307665203456 https://x.com/USBornNRaised/status/1884793041610842420 https://x.com/thatcrazytoast1/status/1884797991678034183

Because too Allah-damned-many people are worm-brained conspiracy theorists nowadays: https://archive.is/sS3W1

I feel like Q is much more prevalent in discussions here and on reddit than between actual conspiracy theorists... Q didn't start that, it's just part of it. But I do think it shows that we should help people understand more. A lot of secrecy nowadays.

It doesn't have to be connected to QAnon, a lot of people now just jump into "it's a conspiracy, I'm sure of it!" and when they find X and Y and create a connection between the 2, their brain rewards them, even if that connection isn't there in reality. And imagine how exhausting it is for debunkers, when they try to say "you're hallucinating", the conspiracy theorist holds strong to his belief, thinking the debunker doesn't get it or they're part of the lying pack.

> As game designers would expect, it works very well — because when you “figure it out yourself,” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of finding the rabbit hole and tumbling down it. Because you were persuaded to “connect the dots yourself,” you can see the absolute logic of it, even if you made it up.

Because everything is intentionally nowadays according to Twitter users. No matter the event.

Landing lights are very focused. They're only noticeable if they're pointed towards you (but then they're very bright). They were visible to the camera but perhaps not to the heli.

Of course the plane would have anti-collision lights as well though, those are omnidirectional.

For the record:

January 20: FAA director fired

January 21: Air Traffic Controller hiring freeze

January 22: Aviation Safety Advisory Committee disbanded

January 28: Buyout/retirement demand sent to existing employees

A CRJ700 crashing into a Black Hawk sounds bad. :/

FR24 shows helicopters from various agencies doing many laps around the site, presumably looking for survivors.

https://i.imgur.com/SykzxUA.png

On the ATC radio archive you can hear the tower asking aircraft if they have lights, can the circle over the east side of the field to help locate survivors

Could be a relevant DEFCON talk: https://youtu.be/KYuBf2HpXJg?si=srOl5T6CY6Lg8HZQ

Sounds like maybe the ADSB was on in this case though.

Sad all round, and I hope that the NTSB, who are pretty good at getting to the bottom of things without getting into finger pointing, will do so.

That said, DC airspace is complicated as hell. You've got very heavily restricted airspace over the city immediately east. VIP natsec/military base facilities on the other side of the Potomac. There are major highways to the north, west, and south of all the approaches. The standard route and safety corridor is along the Potomac river, which is heavily trafficked at all altitudes, with commercial, law enforcement, military, and VIP transport. The CIA is 5 miles up the river and is hardly gonna thank you for dropping out of the sky with no notice. Not an easy place to fly.

PPRUNE has a long thread about the accident at [1]. Usual mixture of perspectives, mostly well informed I think.

[1] https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/663888-aa5342-d...

Are pilots landing at DCA conditioned to ignore TCAS warnings on approach? Would there have been one?

TCAS has a minimum altitude of 700ft AFAIK

It's 900ft AGL and below while descending

(CRJ pilot here)

A real tragedy.

Here on HN someone mentioned after a recent (last year) near miss that the US system was overloading the system and that some tragedy might be incoming. Maybe of the most insightful and heart breaking “competency crisis” related posts I’ve encountered.

It’s probably really early to ask, but in case anyone here is knowledgeable and has any idea: why didn’t TCAS help avoid the accident? Isn’t it designed for such situations where 2 aircrafts collide? Do military crafts not have it or something?

Too low, most likely.

It’s likely both the helicopter and the jet received a TCAS warning. In dense airspaces, those alerts tend to trigger frequently, so there’s a strong chance they may have dismissed it. The CRJ crew might have been aware of the Blackhawk’s presence, but if the other crew had visual contact with the approaching traffic (the CRJ), they might not have felt the need to take further action.

TCAS RAs are inhibited at low altitude.

I've seen this comment widely. But...why doesn't TCAS show the pilots at least as much information as I would have seen on my phone if I'd been browsing flightradar at the time? It's one thing to design a system with "don't saturate the operator with audible alerts" but another to say that it's appropriate to withhold very valuable information from the operator ("there are loads of planes in the general vicinity, but yeah look at that one coming at you from the left").

the TCAS data would have been displayed. but not on instruments or in any place that you typically pay attention to the most during final visual approach (ie., mostly outside).

as others have said, likely too low. tcas is pretty awesome (and yes, most military flights will use it), but it is (deliberately) muted/degraded at low altitudes (i think around 1500feet).

AV Herald has a great summary and discussion: https://avherald.com/h?article=52374362&opt=0

Does anyone have the flight path for the helicopter? (Tail number PAT25). FlightAware doesn't show it but it might have been tracked by open source ADS-B receivers.

This helicopter was often utilized for VIP transport.

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae313d

Note: This is MLAT, not ADSB-Out data.

https://skybrary.aero/articles/multilateration

PAT25 would be a temporary military flight call sign, not a tail number. US military aircraft don't have FAA "N" registration numbers like civilian aircraft do. Military aircraft do have official numbers but those aren't used for ATC or radio communications.

In this particular case it appears that the "PAT" part is an acronym for Priority Air Travel. In other words, it was a VIP transport flight (there may not have been any VIPs actually on board at the time).

"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.

"Commercial jet collides with helicopter during landing", while not the article title, would be far more accurate.

Gruesome, in a crash like this, if there were any survivors from the impact, the water would likely have finished them off.

If they can get out, they have a chance. There was a crash on the Potomac in January 1982 and there were several survivors. The video of the rescue is pretty crazy.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/from-the-archives-h...

There was a truck that crashed on bridge right next to lincoln memorial and then veered off roadway into bridge, and both were deceased. Its very cold in DC right now and an airplane crashing is much more catastrophic.

It was very cold in DC until recently but it's 45°F right now at 11:21. I was walking & biking around in a sports jacket today with a winter coat strapped onto the outside of my bag.

Best wishes to the victims.

Potomac is half frozen still.

Why is a Blackhawk helicopter Performing a “training flight” at night very close to DCA?

Presumably because they might have to fly a regular flight at night very close to DCA?

Imagine if there was VIP onboard, especially if it was foreign VIP.

Because DCA is right beside a couple of military bases, the headquarters of the US military, and the political capital of the US.

These helicopters are always going up and down the Potomac all the time.

I'm pretty sure "training flight" in this context simply means they weren't actively carrying passengers. And it's not indicative of a junior or unqualified pilot (doesn't rule it out, just can't infer much from the phrase in this context).

At the extreme, fighter pilots fly almost exclusively training flights because we're not actively waging war at the moment.

There are a few military bases in the area - Belvior (Army), Quantico (USMC), Andrews (USAF), Pentagon, and some smaller ones (some of which have helipads, but no helicopters on station). And lots of shuttling of DoD and other government VIPs from location to location across the DC metro area.

Yes, the public needs to understand this. That unit's [1] task is to provide transportation to senior government officials and security forces around the capital, including to and from that airport. If they didn't train to operate there, then their first time doing so would be with someone like the Secretary of Defense onboard or during some other mission that's critical to national security.

And the aviators assigned to that unit are typically more senior people who've already done a tour or two with more conventional units. Source: I'm a career Army officer and former Black Hawk pilot.

[1] https://jtfncr.mdw.army.mil/TAAB/

So, Hegseth indicated the Army helicopter was using night vision… would that be normal when flying in a dense urban airspace?

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 crash, Army officials said.

~ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/politics/army-helicopt...

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.

> Sure, but if they weren’t in use, why mention them?

Errr, Hegseth is a functioning alcoholic recently parachuted into a job several orders of magnitude past anything in his prior experience.

He's likely to blurt out anything unredacted that he's heard in briefings without any due consideration of consequence.

That aside, these are training missions, they have night vision available, this would have been flagged as one of many possible influencing factors in the absence of a full accident investigation that crawls through everything.

It's unknown (to the public at least, and at this point no one who knows would or should say) whether they were in use for now.

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.

"FAA Got Rid of Its Leader Before D.C. Plane Crash—Thanks to Elon Musk":

* https://newrepublic.com/post/190942/faa-no-leader-dc-plane-c...

"FAA Administrator Quit on Jan. 20 After Elon Musk Told Him to Resign":

* https://www.thedailybeast.com/faa-chief-michael-whitaker-qui...

"The FAA is facing a major crisis without a leader because Elon Musk pushed him out*

* https://www.theverge.com/news/603113/faa-chief-musk-dc-plane...

If we see more accidents a year from now, you have a point. The most you can really blame on leadership changes right now is stress from worrying about your next paycheck. Even then, this looks like a military pilot screwed up doing a routine training exercise.

Probably, but that pilot was it seems operating within a very risky environment (being able to see and avoid a plane in the dark in a place with many such planes and other lighted objects) that with hindsight should not have existed. I'd certainly never have flown on a plane into DCA if I had known that military helicopters were routinely buzzing around in the same airspace with no technological deconfliction aids.

It's important to consider what the administration was focused on during a life-or-death crisis.

Gotta find a way to blame every tragedy on the politicians we don't like, huh? Trump is out there blaming Biden's administration for hiring bad ATC under the banner of DEI. Meanwhile, his detractors blame him and Musk for letting go of some FAA administrator.

But of couse neither of those explanations are likely to hold water. The sad, mundane reality is these people probably lost their lives due to a miscommunication or misunderstanding between ATC and the helicopter pilots. And this political mudslinging will probably get in the way of us ever implementing process changes so it doesn't happen again.

No, the political mudslinging is not yet at the level where it will interfere with the methodological investigation of the circumstances, and making and implementing recommendations so that it does not happen again.

The political mudslinging will distract the general population from that process, but that's all right - they weren't involved in it anyway.

> Trump is out there blaming Biden's administration for hiring bad ATC under the banner of DEI.

The policies were in place since 2013, and somehow were not a problem during Trump's first term (2016-2020).

> Meanwhile, his detractors blame him and Musk for letting go of some FAA administrator.

The FAA administrator in question was around for about a year, and had a term until 2028, so there's no need to push him out now.

And the crash is not the fault of Biden or Trump, but there is unnecessary chaos because of Trump et al.

Maybe not related at all, but I can't help but wonder if this is affected by the funding turmoil. Would a less distracted ATC controller prevent this?

No.

A passenger jet originating from Kansas collided with a Blackhawk helicopter midair near Reagan National Airport on Wednesday night.

Flights at the airport have been halted.

appears to have collided with a helicopter

Another horrible cost of militarism.

The real question, I feel, is whether the current U.S. government as it exists in 2025 is still capable of continuing to improve things, and whether it's still putting all the lessons of the past into practice - or whether we were just coasting on a combination of luck and the vestigial safety left to us by the diligence of the past.

[flagged]

nothing new there

The current administration wants to burn it all down and doesn’t carry any reverence or appreciation for past accomplishments or prior work.

Considering that the head of the FAA and TSA were forced to resign, and a hiring freeze on air traffic controllers is suddenly in effect, I don't think the current government wants to improve flight safety.

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2025-0...

Honestly I'm expecting an executive order banning left wings at this rate.

Reagan fired the ATCs when they tried to assert their rights - can't be good if they think they may be the next in line for DOGEing.

> when they tried to assert their rights

That's an interesting way of phrasing going on an illegal strike which they agreed not to do as part of their employment contract.

The fact that a strike can be illegal is, in and of itself, an erosion of worker rights.

It's a compromise to ensure the functioning of the country.

PATCO members were offered more than double % raises of any other government employee with a small reduction in work hours.

They overplayed their (illegal) hand and it bit them. No sympathy.

Everyone else was offered 2.5%?

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 actually "vote" anyone out or establish a leadership position by virtue of popular support, and most importantly there's no constituency to air grievances to

Yeah, imagine if somebody at say Google made a union as opposed to just buying up 51% of the stock to vote somebody out.

Everybody makes in-groups to advocate their positions. idk why when it comes to workers people are all like "but they shouldn't". Let me know when you're against the US Chamber of Congress ...

I don't think that's an unpopular opinion really. Unions are supposed to be an adversary of management who they negotiate with, and depending on who wins the election they are an ally. There's a conflict of interest. So naturally the group that supports the person that wins the election will have a favorable contract and be able to grow their union as that's beneficial to the political party and the union.

At the very least states should implement laws and statutes that define limits and rules such as union compensation must be paid with the current years revenues and not with bonds that are paid for by future generations, etc.

That’s a good point against unionization for government employees.

But anti-union is against the right to assemble, and any law requiring an individual to work goes against some very basic freedoms (self-determination, slavery?)

Let’s not make stripping away of freedoms a common thing that employers, government or private, can do. Rights are rights.

> simply run for office

That "simply" is doing an absurd amount of heavy lifting.

The people in federal workers unions aren't in elected positions, no country or government anywhere has voters weigh in on every clerk, office manager, etc.... They're just jobs, no one votes for them beyond in some cases voting for the head of their agencies but more often by voting for the people that will select the agency heads.

There's a very obvious error in your reasoning: the relationship between public worker and the government is a relationship between an employer and an employee, not between a government and the governed. Why shouldn't such workers be extended the same rights as others?

there is no mechanism in which you could actually "vote" anyone out

Here again, you are implying that public workers somehow do have that ability, to vote "out" their employer. How do you imagine that works, in practice? Do you think it would be better for public workers to form a PAC and run public campaigns for or against a specific candidate? That would be a much more problematic option, as something like that would make public workers political entities themselves and pit them against the government they're supposed to keep running.

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.

> Considering that the head of the FAA and TSA were forced to resign

For context, the heads of the FAA and TSA are supposed to serve 5-year terms. The FAA Admin (Michael Whitaker) who was forced out started serving in Oct 2023. The TSA Admin (David Pekoske) was first appointed in 2017, and then nominated for another 5-year term in 2022.

As far as I'm aware, this is the first time those positions have ever been told to resign by a new administration.

I've been avoiding the typical outrageous statements from the current POTUS for many years, but his comments at his press conference today, about how DEI hiring could be responsible for this accident, are just unbelievable. And all of a sudden it seems to have made him to decide that the FAA needs a director today.

What is unbelievable about them?

Yeah same here. Somehow these latest today by T have gone overboard and struck a chord. What an absolute bozo he is.

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 was landing on RWY 1.

Had the controller told him: Traffic ahead and to your left landing runway 33 is a CRJ report him in sight, then the helicopter crew would have LOOKED to their left and saw him. They unfortunately were looking straight ahead at a different plane.

The controller is going to take a major blame for this one unfortunately for not being more detailed. Those Helicopters literally fly directly in the path of those RWY 33 arrivals so as a controller you have to be EXACT!!!!

Another problem I see is the expectation bias. As controllers in that scenario, we want to hear the Helicopter say "traffic in sight and we will maintain Visual Separation. These Helicopter Pilots know we need to hear them say that (it's required), so they will say this just because even though they might not really have the aircraft in sight. They are just saying what we want to hear. If they don't, then we stop their forward progress or make them turn out. Comment from instagram

The controller will not take blame. It is a blameless culture where mistakes are expected and analyzed and learned from.

Agree with this

[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.

Parent is exactly right. There's already a scramble to pin the blame and some in the GOP are looking for DEI: https://bsky.app/profile/andylevy.net/post/3lgxsd35fhs2i

> There are some things in life that don't revolve around identity politics

Not anymore.

Simply wild coming from the person who introduced it where it was not being discussed.

If this is true, it's because you and people like you are inserting it in otherwise innocuous, productive discussions. Have you considered not doing that?

are you serious? https://www.fox5dc.com/news/trump-blames-dei-dc-plane-crash

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?

Since whitehouse.gov couldn't be bothered, here are some quotes from "Straight Arrow News":

----

President Trump also appeared to blame a “diversity push” at the FAA for the midair collision, reading some news headlines.

“I do want to point out that various articles that appeared prior to my entering office. And here’s one: the FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities,” Trump said.

When he was asked to clarify why he thought a diversity push played a role, he said, “It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a higher, much higher standard than anybody else.”

Trump did not cite any evidence.

He also placed blame on the Biden administration’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, using an expletive to describe Buttigieg’s time in office.

“He’s a disaster now. He’s just got a good line of bulls—,” Trump said of Buttigieg. “Well, he runs it, 45,000 people, and he’s run it right into the ground with his diversity.”

Trump’s pick for transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who just started the job, also spoke during the press conference.

“When Americans take off in airplanes, they should expect to land at their destination — that didn’t happen yesterday,” Duffy said. “That’s not acceptable, and so we will not accept excuses. We will not accept passing the buck.”

What, not immigrants? I mean, 483,493 people were killed, plus many cats and dogs.

/bittersarcasm

Trump is explicitly blaming programs to hire disabled people. Note that just because FAA had a program to hire people with disabilities, does not mean that they made any changes to the medical standards for air traffic controllers - there are many jobs at FAA besides air traffic controllers, and there are also plenty of disabilities that would not effect a person's ability to be an air traffic controller. FAA does not allow people with psychiatric disabilities to work in ATC.

> “I do want to point out that various articles that appeared prior to my entering office. And here’s one, the FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. That is amazing. And then it says FAA says people with severe disabilities are most underrepresented segment of the workforce said ‘they want them in, and they want them, they can be air traffic controllers. I don’t think so. This was January 14, so that was a week before I entered office. They put a big push to put diversity into the FAA’s program,” Trump said.

> “Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened because of the stress where you have many, many planes coming into one target, and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it,” the president added.

> When he was asked to clarify why he thought a “diversity push” at the FAA played a role in Wednesday’s collision, President Donald Trump told reporters Thursday that “it just could have been.”

> “It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a higher, much higher standard than anybody else,” Trump said.

> Trump did not cite any evidence. Source: https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/plane-crash-dca-potomac-was...

Unfortunately, there's a long-standing scandal and lawsuit around the ATC and its hiring practices that will inevitably play into the analysis of this tragedy -- details here: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

I can well believe it has absolutely nothing to do with this disaster, but I don't think either political side has any interest in arguing over the fine points of that distinction.

Wow, I hadn't heard about that. It seems the FAA inserted themselves into the culture wars. I take it all back. Every single thing is now based on identity politics.

Is this for real: (questions for becoming an ATC, linked from the article you liked. It's so weird so I'm not sure)

https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

The questions are mind-blowing. And:

> In the present day, there is a critical shortage of ATCs, with the FAA having 1,000 fewer ATCs in 2023 than it did in 2012.

If that's how they were hiring (although they don't do today), I could understand if that has a bit contributed to fewer ATCs today.

Seems it is for real: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jan/30/faa-diversi...

"... In 2013, the FAA started using a “biographical assessment” to increase the hiring of preferred minority racial groups at air traffic control centers. The assessment asked applicants about their participation in school sports and the age at which they started earning money."

"The assessment disqualified more experienced, qualified applicants ..."

>> In the present day, there is a critical shortage of ATCs, with the FAA having 1,000 fewer ATCs in 2023 than it did in 2012.

> If that's how they were hiring (although they don't do today), I could understand if that has a bit contributed to fewer ATCs today.

The shortage is that they have not been able to quickly replace all of the personnel that took early retirement options during COVID, while also stopping the hiring & training for an extended period during that time.

You might venture to say so, but unfortunately you'd be wrong.

The President:

>Asked how he could come to the conclusion that diversity played a role in the deadly midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Trump said, “Because I have common sense, OK? And unfortunately a lot of people don’t.”

>He later defended his assertion that diversity initiatives at the FAA could have contributed to the National Airport crash as the investigation continues.

>“No, I don’t think so at all,” Trump said when asked if he thinks his claims about the helicopter, air traffic control and DEI policies were getting ahead of the investigation. He quipped to the reporter that “I think that’s not a very smart question.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5116606-5-takeaw...

Fuck me this is gonna be a long 4 years and a LOT of ibuprofen.

Days without being an international embarrassment: 0

There was a scandal at the ATC which has culminated in a lawsuit Brigida v. Buttigieg, and from what I remember the facts look bad.

They replaced a skill assessment with a completely bizarre biography test where for instance you got +15 points if you listed science as your worst subject, but 0 if you listed math, English, history or P.E.

Then they leaked the answers to black organizations, as well as special keywords to put in their resume to go to top of the pile.

The students who spent years and thousands of dollars and aced the skill assessment but then failed the biographical test are suing in a class action.

It's been culminating for years. they don't fire incompetent people and they use skin color and gender as a factor in deciding who to hire. It's federal employment and is linked greatly to politics.

If it's been "culminating for years" why is this the first time this has happened in 16 years? Or are all the white men just doing that great of a job compensating for their dumbass POC/non-male colleagues? It's not like this is a team effort where one competent employee can cover for others; if an ATC is genuinely unqualified, shit is going to go wrong immediately.

Your grievance politics are nonsensical on their face.

If you didn't deliberately misinterpret the word "it" you would have nothing to dispute.

Feel free to correct my interpretation.

It takes time for all the holes to line up just right.

It's not like this is a team effort where one competent employee can cover for others

Yes it is - there's also the two pilots whose actions could've lead to a totally different outcome.

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

And apparently Trump included dwarfism in his DEI blame-game. Where the hell did that come from? Are little people eating the cats and dogs now, too?

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5116332-trump-0f...

If you're quoting someone else, please say so at the top of the comment instead leading with "I was a controller" and burying the attribution at the end of a paragraph.

> 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 just south of (unclear) bridge is a CRJ at 1,200ft turning for Runway 33"

> PAT25: PAT25 has the Traffic in sight, request visual separation

> Tower: Visual separation approved.

Then a minute later he asks again if PAT25 has the CRJ in sight, which I think is what you're referring to.

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

Maybe the military shouldn’t fly training flights there. Just an idea.

It's a bad idea. That unit's [1] task is to provide transportation to senior government officials and security forces around the capital, including to and from that airport. If they didn't train to operate there, then their first time doing so would be with someone like the Secretary of Defense onboard or during some other mission that's critical to national security.

"Training" here also doesn't imply some 21 year-old flight school student learning to fly. The aviators assigned to that unit are typically more senior people who've already done a tour or two with more conventional units.

I've lost count of how many times I've heard your sentiment already today, and I'm distraught by the general public's apparent lack of understanding about how things work.

[1] https://jtfncr.mdw.army.mil/TAAB/

I am appalled with your opinion.

If the system can’t be safely designed with a safe margin of error then it is too dangerous.

There are alternative ways and locations to train.

If there’s a nat sec issue have the planes hold.

The missions are flown through that airspace multiple times per day, and it's all for national security purposes. You can't put a hold on all commercial air traffic every time, and you need to train the pilots to navigate and communicate through that particular airspace.

Whether the system (i.e. separating rotary-wing and fixed-wing traffic there) can be more safely designed is a question for the FAA. The military aircraft are simply abiding by FAA rules for that airspace. Many more civilian helicopters are doing the same thing.

Whose idea was it to gut aviation safety?

The Boeing-ification of the federal government, in which everything is stripped down to below what is actually required to be safe, is in full effect.

I know that everyone crosses all altitudes during landing. But why don't ATC / FAA stratify aircraft type and use by altitude. Like all commercial traffic is put in even thousands altitudes. And the Military / EMS gets the odd thousands.

Its crazy to have things colliding like this.

Everything eventually needs to land, so when you’re talking about an area around an airport, at low altitudes, that’s going to be a difficult thing to do. If you mix in helicopter traffic that needs to run at lower altitudes anyway, that is also near an airport, it becomes a much more difficult scenario to control.

Helicopter flies at 200ft. Planes landing have to traverse through 200ft. Therefore vertical separation impossible.

This heli route is just crazy.

Agreed. Seems that underlying all of this is "people doing inadvisable things because they can".

Update: Found the routes in the FAA HELDC PDF

https://aeronav.faa.gov/visual/12-26-2024/PDFs/Balt-Wash_Hel...

Route 4 (the helicopter route along the river) has a maximum altitude of 200 feet for helicopter. From the crash it seemed like the helicopter pilot wasn't strictly following the ceiling.

You'd think they would've figured this out by now. Hacker News to the rescue!

In any event, unless the weather was IMC, where neither aircraft can see because of weather/cloud, which I'm deducing is not the case if they were allowed to maintain visual separation, the ultimate responsibility for maintaining separation is with the pilot(s) .. But as I posted, we should not have this happen anywhere in the United States in 2025 & much less the nation's capital. Hopefully DOT and FAA get to work, but I have a feeling that will be the end of DCA's usefull life as a major passenger airport.

[flagged]

> everyone is expecting to be fired regardless of their experience and skill.

How do you know this?

Presumably because Trump just offered an 8month severance package to all fed workers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvqe3le3z4o

> US President Donald Trump has offered federal workers the option to resign and receive pay for eight months, in a major effort to shrink and reform the US government.

It's not even a buyout. They have to work for those 8 months; it's not a severance package.

There's also no evidence they have the money to pay if the offers were in good faith. Combined with the fact the two people who came up with the idea have a history of deciding not to pay and instead go to the courts to avoid paying

From what I have seen, if a worker agress to it, they agree they could be reassigned or terminated early (and thus not paid the same or at all). Seems like a trap.

Replying to myself days later to correct this statement: I did learn later on that the deferred resignation does mean that the employee is free to stop working once they submit the resignation, and will continue to be paid for 8 months regardless of whether or not they continue working. I don't think it was clear from the initial "buyout" offer, but it was clarified in later communications.

Because I live here.

I also live here but that doesn’t give me crystal ball-like insight into what every single fed and fed-adjacent employee is feeling. It’s a fairly big city! Do you work in the federal space? I have acquaintances who do and their mood doesn’t quite match the hysteria you see on e.g. the regional subreddits.

I live far away from DC, but my friends in two different federal agencies (stationed outside of DC) are partly bemused and partly shocked at how unprofessional the emails and new directives they are receiving from this new administration are. All of their colleagues are expressing the same sentiment (and my friends usually do not fraternize after work with their colleagues, but they have all been doing that after work just to cope with what is going on). Your contrarian-ness about the 'hysteria' is misplaced. Professional and dedicated federal workers are deeply concerned.

Damn near every one I know is either worried about being fired OR is unclear on what their agency should be doing in light of the flurry of ambiguous EOs from Trump. The best case seems to be "my office is clusterfuck, but I'm a contractor in SCIF, so I guess I'm ok for now."

So basically you don't know, but are being dramatic. NSA and CIA and DoD in general?

The reason i say this is you mention experience and skill but ignore whether such people are in _roles_ that need to exist at all, which is what is being questioned, not the worth of individuals in those roles.

Weather was fine tonight.

Also DCA is the most popular airport and congress would stage their own revolution if they had to go further.

I definitely think it’ll stay open for charter flights (part 135)

it’s actually really hard for private jets / charter (whether part 91 or part 135) to use dca. requirements include having an armed officer on board. as a result almost nobody flies charter into dca.

Yeah, it's at least partially Congress's fault DCA is as busy as it is. Every few years, they push to allow more flights, and longer flights, into the airport, because they all want to convenience.

Which is silly, it's not like IAD is all that far away. It's a straight shot down the Access Road to 66 and then into the city. Of course, with the RTO mandate, the portion from 66 inward is going to get busy again, but hey, Congress wanted that too, so reap what they sow, I suppose.

DCA is much nicer in pretty much all respects other than having a fairly restricted set of routes. When the routes are available, I’ll pick DCA every time. It’s a gem, and I’m glad that Congress’ selfishness overrode their terrorism paranoia on this one.

That's true, DCA is smaller footprint, so easier to navigate inside. And even better now that the remote terminal redone and linked properly (vs the old "Take a bus and wait on a bench").

But, the last few years, I haven't had any issues at IAD. Yeah, it takes longer to get from the front door to the gate, but that's about it. The security lines are more reasonable now (pre-COVID they were pretty long at times).

I pick IAD when I can, but that's only because I live in Reston. If I lived inside the Beltway, I'd pick DCA, but only because of the shorter drive, not the airport experience itself.

And I wouldn't want DCA to be shuttered. But, it's been at capacity for a while and Congress keeps pushing that limit.

[flagged]

I didn’t know. this line is really upsetting people tonight.

I’m curious, how many people in your business were elected to their jobs?

Do you think people should be electing the ATC agents?

Also, what’s your opinion about the entire cabinet, Elon Musk, and the likes, all of whom are also unelected?

Kamala was also unelected for her position as the democratic candidate for the 2024 election.

My opinion is that was a really dumb idea that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for the democrats.

And the cray crays (“Elon is a Nazi”) have the nerve to accuse the other side of being the threat to democracy. Compared to the non-election anointing of Kamala, other unelected people are just noise. You know I’m right. All of this is just fallout from the unelected candidate being pushed on unwanting voters.

> The reformed federal workforce will be built around four pillars:

[…]

> 4. Enhanced standards of conduct: The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work. Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward. Employees who engage in unlawful behavior or other misconduct will be prioritized for appropriate investigation and discipline, including termination.

[…]

> Upon review of the below deferred resignation letter, if you wish to resign: 1) Select “Reply” to this email. You must reply from your government account. A reply from an account other than your .gov or .mil account will not be accepted. 2) Type the word “Resign” into the body of this reply email. Hit “Send”.

* https://www.opm.gov/fork

> Employees who engage in unlawful behavior

Convicted felon, that sort of thing?

Only if you’re president

    but I have a feeling that will be the end of 
    DCA's usefull life as a major passenger airport.

Wait, what?

I was with you until this last sentence. You think DCA will be spun down because an accident occurred there?

This seems wild - what am I missing here?

I only have a passing interest in this, but DCA's approach is tricky, the airspace is complex and restricted, and then you mix in military pilots doing VIP helicopter training runs across the approach. The procedures make it safe-ish, but it's riskier than other major airports.

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