Why is a Blackhawk helicopter Performing a “training flight” at night very close to DCA?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These helicopters are always going up and down the Potomac all the time.
Imagine if there was VIP onboard, especially if it was foreign VIP.