I’ll bet the final NTSB report lists as a contributing factor that there was only one controller that night; a second controller might have had the time to notice the altitude was too close, or vector the helicopter behind.
Put another way, military aircraft, especially certain military aircraft, can do things that civilian aircraft can't.
If I were piloting a helicopter in that airspace, that ATC transcript would have been significantly different.
We should be looking at root causes. Which means we should ask the uncomfortable questions about the deference given to some military/government aircraft. But we don't want to ask those questions. So we keep quibbling around the edges by talking about ATC or Reagan firing everyone or even the ridiculous suggestion that maybe the civilian airliners could be in a hold pattern at certain times.
It would be humorous if it wasn't so tragic.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/dc-plane-c...
>on Wednesday evening was also monitoring planes taking off and landing, according to the FAA report reviewed by The New York Times. These jobs are typically assigned to two different people, the outlet reported
But:
>However, the National Transportation Safety Board said they will not speculate on the causes of the crash and will release a preliminary report on the incident within 30 days.
So perhaps its not staffing. Although I don't really know what world the report is going to be going out into in 30 days.
One complaint I've seen is that the ATC should not have let the helicopter do visual spacing in that regime, that it was somewhat careless and unsafe and possibly discouraged. If the ATC operator was overloaded with work, they would be incentivized to "outsource" the spacing management to the helicopter who would then be able to screw it up by "seeing" the wrong plane. I can see the merits of the argument but it would take the NTSB to have the right knowledge to confirm or deny it.
This is what I mean. Clearly, people are unfamiliar with what actions certain military/government pilots are able to take in that airspace. It's rules. It's not about being encouraged or discouraged or overworked or underworked or rainbow farting unicorns. That's not how ATC works.
I would want to change the rules that allow military pilots to do this sort of thing. Or at least, have a reasoned conversation about why it's necessary to allow them to do this sort of thing. But that sort of conversation is difficult. So everyone wants to talk about everything else instead. The issue being that everything else is very likely not the root problem.
I hope when the reports do come out we can stop this nonsense about ATC, or Reagan being a moron, or civilian airliner holding patterns or whatever else and actually have the hard sit down on that issue.
The problem isn't that the controller didn't notice they were too close; it is that less than 1000 feet of separation is considered fine and normal and commonplace. It's too close and leaves no room for error.
Echoes.
The fired workers were replaced as rapidly as possible. That would result in massive change in the age distribution of controllers. It takes a few years to train a new controller so lets assume the youngest new hires were 22. New controllers have to be 31 and under.
Let's take the best case and assume all the new controllers are 22 through 31 and are evenly distributed in that range, and started in 1982. The group will start reaching 56 in 2007 and finish reaching 56 in 2016. That's over 11000 controllers retiring over a 10 year span.
I haven't been able to find data on the actual distribution of ages for the replacements. I'd guess that it was skewed younger, which could make that echo narrower. Maybe 11000 controllers retiring over 5 years.
If they hired enough people to replace those that group too will show up as another echo, but more spread out.
The union's problem was that they assumed air traffic control was so important they could dictate terms and then they got called on it and lost. Public sector unions don't really work because the other side of the table is the government (and by extension the public), so the two possible outcomes are that the union gets screwed by the government or the public gets screwed by the union.
For that to be the case there would have to be some more proximate problem compromising the ability to replace air traffic controllers at the rate it was possible to in the 1980s. Like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939941
If it had become a norm then a second controller would probably not change anything.