The missteps that led to a fatal plane crash at Reagan National Airport

I think they should prohibit such type of flights when ranks are reversed. Let's imagine he would have yanked the controls and avoided the crash. Now the Captain could have said "you're insubordinate and tanked my qualification flight, there will be a price to pay".

> Nathan Fielder studies airliner black box transcripts in which the first officer feels too intimidated to challenge the captain, leading to fatal crashes due to pilot error. He discusses this with John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member, who had once recommended roleplay simulation to improve pilot communication.

Really good season so far!

I'd be shocked if the US military didn't provide crew resource management training for their aviators. This is exactly the kind of situation CRM is designed to prevent.

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

Forget training, why is this happening under any circumstances ever? If a military transport mission is ever so critical that you're willing to fly it within 30 meters of a civilian airlines it seems to me that you should just close the airspace to civil air traffic at that point.

It is far more likely to be something like cognitive overload rather than a clash or personalities - you don’t get to be in that position in the first place if you have a tendency to disregard instructors.

Yes you ease into it, the first level of training is done in a safe environment, however as the person gains competence the training moves into the domain in question, the person gains experience at doing the thing in question while being supervised. Or to put it another way.

What? You expect that their first flight through that tight corridor at night should be done alone?

In conclusion, I think it is fine in general that they were doing training on that flight path. However the fact that the both pilot and the trainer erred so badly indicates the need for better low level training and a reevaluation of the need for such a tight flight path in a civilian zone.

Update: unrelated thought, I could not decide if low or high tolerance was the term i wanted, after waffling a bit I went with high tolerance. as that is the correct engineering meaning, but really the term is ambiguous and means the different things in different domains, he has a high tolerance for alcohol means the opposite of he made a high tolerance part.

I don’t know why the instructor didn’t take a more forceful/active role leading up to the crash, but I don’t think rank was a contributing factor.

I'm not sure that's a correct understanding of how the approach path to the runway and the helicopter route are supposed to interact. So far as I understand, the intent was never that a helicopter and airplane were supposed to be able to happily barrel along their respective paths within worrying about running into each other. That kind of thing happens a lot in aviation, but the separation distance is much, much larger.

Instead, one was supposed to see the other and use their eyes to visually stay away (ideally by much more than 100 ft). That's what was supposed to happen here, and what the instructor pilot in the helicopter said they were doing. Visual separation is also used a lot in aviation, often in places where there are no narrowly defined paths at all, but it carries the risk of aircraft not seeing or misidentifying each other, which could be what happened here.

This doesn't match with how I understood the ATC's instructions. The helicopter was instructed to "pass behind" the landing airliner, not pass below. I think the controller's intention was for the helicopter to hold short of passing the runway 33 flight path, and not to enter that space until the plane had crossed the river.

I would agree in general, but in that particular environment around DC with the restricted WH fly zone, the busy airport, the river and the bridges and the ADSB switched off it can make a huge difference.

Yeah, that one has been around as long as there have been computers. It's sort of like the flying car of the ATC world - it's always 5 years away.

> temporal normal distribution to human attention spans

Tn this case we had both the ATC and the instructor tell the pilot to do something different and they didn't listen. Not sure if that's an attention span issue, it may be, but it's not clear it's definitely what it is.

| He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank.

Now, I'd love to _hear_ the actual comment/instruction here. He may have been hedging because he was trying to piece together the stepped on "pass behind" direction from ATC. But I also wonder if it's an inherent problem when the student outranks the instructor?

Even if they were out of the helicopter airway, based at least on radio transmissions the instructor thought they had the landing aircraft in sight and presumably thought they could stay separated from it visually. I would agree with you if staying at the exact right altitude and position was being thought of as the primary factor keeping them separated from traffic they couldn't see, but it seems different when they were operating under visual separation and thought they could see the aircraft.

That said, I fly Skyhawks not Blackhawks (or any kind of helicopter), so maybe the expectations are different in the rotary wing world. But my experience is that a 100ft altitude deviation is not an "instructors takes the controls" situation in an airplane unless you're about to run into something. Of course they were in this case, but it's not obvious the instructor knew that.

Why shouldn't I focus on those? I guess just by asking the question you haven't quite shown why your guess are better. I guess I don't how lack of sleep is a better explainer than, I don't know, a family member dying?

I guess which one would the investigator be able to figure out? They can read the obituary of the grandmother but how would they figure she didn't sleep well the night before.

I think eventually they figured out and instructed the pilot to avoid but the pilot didn't listen. But that was the second mishap of the flight. The pilot was failing to maintain a proper altitude before that.

> Maybe visual flight separation is a bad idea when there are a bunch of lights from the ground and a busy airspace. A plane on a collision course with you will just look like a static light, like many many other lights in the area.

To me, at least in this case, it seems the pilot was not adequately prepared. They were either distracted or rusty. The instructor should have taken controls and flown back at the first sign of not being able to maintain a proper altitude. However, the pilot outranked the instructor; taking controls away and failing the qualification / training flight could have resulted in some retribution or more hassles. Also, I think they should instead let pilots do this kind of qualification in similar but more remote or less busy area, longer, until they get more hours under their belt and not allow rank reversals to train like that. They should have found someone outranking her who wouldn't have though twice about grabbing the control.

At that level a few hundred feet (since the helicopter is already supposed to be flying 200 or so feet above the ground) can make all the difference.

> I think the statement in the article about many things going wrong all at the same time is likely the right one, although of course we should wait for the final NTSB report to say for certain. I feel like people want the satisfaction of identifying one single primary cause, but most aircraft accidents don't really work like that. And we should want to understand all the factors to plug as many holes in the swiss cheese as we can going forward.

There can be contributing factors but the just because there are many factors doesn't mean they are equally weighted. At least with the pilot with have at least two indications they were confused. The instructor next to them tried to correct them a few times already.

> At least based on the article, it's not clear the controller provided enough information that the helicopter pilots could have determined if they had visually identified the right aircraft. Given how busy the airspace is, making sure the helicopter was tracking the right landing aircraft is pretty critical.

I think at least the non-flying pilot, the instructor, had understood and directed the pilot to avoid the collision, but the pilot didn't listen. The ATC in a busy airspace like don't have the time to have a long discussion with pilots ensuring they are good pilots and know what aircraft they are seeing "do you see 3 lights on it, one is red?", "how many engines do you see?". That just not very likely. They assume a helicopter pilot on that kind of an airspace configuration will know what they are doing. If they request visual separation they assume a hefty responsibility.

Especially in this era when this administration seems to be gearing up for military action in domestic spaces when Congress has declared no war.

Then we're not at war. Hope this clears things up for you!

Turning ADS-B on/off likely has zero effect on the training/fighting relationship.

That seems like a misalignment of incentives.

Sad to say, as a former aviator, I have seen it before where people died and families lost loved ones ultimately because of a systematic risk inherent in what they were doing, but also other times because someone flat-out just screwed up.