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The video sure makes "accident" hard to understand....
What a sad situation.
What a sad situation.
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Commercial Flight Collides with Helicopter Over Potomac
- Thread starter Stampede
- Start date
They say the flight parameters of the Blackhawk were stay below 200 feet on their training mission. The crash occurred at 400 feet. The blackhawk pilot was a female. Not saying that had anything to do with it. Just saying that is what was said.
Click on the video, watch it
Tell me about it... Would be really fun!!
And this, watch what she says
Falling debris. White House.......
I've seen a couple former pilots with that unit saying (on ze interwebs) that even with a max altitude of 200' they flew that route at or below 100', and much closer to the east bank. I'm assuming it's SOP to run it low and fast if you are practicing VIP transit/extraction and generally those are the skills they are working on. The Helicopter was where it shouldn't have been vertically, longitudinally, and temporally, and if it had been where it was supposed to be in just one of those variables this would have been avoided.
I'm not a helicopter pilot, but I gotta think it's still gotta be pretty obvious when you are 350 ft up instead of ~100 (obviously altitudes at this point are estimates from flight trackers, and we'll know more about the positions/vectors of the aircraft when the NTSB releases more data), and where the river bank is. Maybe you lose track of / misidentify the CRJ, but the river bank doesn't move, and neither does sea level.
The media is jumping on ATC understaffing for not having a ten minute convo with the helo pilot about exactly where every object in the sky was that night and it's heading, but helo requested and affirmed visual seperation, there could have been 20 more people in the tower and they would have just told the helo the same thing.
I know there are a lot of helos zipping "important" people around DC, and that crews need constant practice to maintain competency, but maybe it's also time to examine how many of these flights are actually time critical where they can't be diverted around an active approach or made to hold for wider clearances.
I'm not a helicopter pilot, but I gotta think it's still gotta be pretty obvious when you are 350 ft up instead of ~100 (obviously altitudes at this point are estimates from flight trackers, and we'll know more about the positions/vectors of the aircraft when the NTSB releases more data), and where the river bank is. Maybe you lose track of / misidentify the CRJ, but the river bank doesn't move, and neither does sea level.
The media is jumping on ATC understaffing for not having a ten minute convo with the helo pilot about exactly where every object in the sky was that night and it's heading, but helo requested and affirmed visual seperation, there could have been 20 more people in the tower and they would have just told the helo the same thing.
I know there are a lot of helos zipping "important" people around DC, and that crews need constant practice to maintain competency, but maybe it's also time to examine how many of these flights are actually time critical where they can't be diverted around an active approach or made to hold for wider clearances.
