
Reagan National Airport crash: Military Black Hawk helicopter collides midair with American Airlines jet
An Army Black Hawk helicopter collided midair with an American Airlines flight from Wichita, Kansas, at Reagan National Airport on Wednesday.
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Since runway 33 is lightly used, there would be minimal problems if helicopters ALWAYS had to stop a fly-through when a plane was due through that area.
I don't know about the supposed to hold bit. They have two or three mandatory reporting points and one non mandatory one at the junction of route 1/4 which they actually called in, but there was no instruction or requirement to hold, just an approval to continue using visual flight rules and operating according to the helicopter routing which said max altitude 200ft. They clearly either got the wrong aircraft or couldn't see it because they ran into it.They do, the helicopter was supposed to hold and wait for the plane to pass. It waited for the wrong plane. The error was allowing the helicopter to control their location and deciding when to pass through via visual separation. If there were well defined holding points and the ATC had to co-ordinate the planes and helicopters then a crash should be much less likely.
If you mean any time a plane will be landing, then the route can never be used because planes are always due to land or take off through that airspace almost any time the airport is operating.
It would seem to me that if landing is runway 1/15 and takeoffs are runway 19/15 then the helicopters maybe go around the other side of the airport and the planes taking off hold until they pass. That would mean flying over other buildings though which wouldn't be acceptable.
Exactly what they should have been doing, but seems they were not.Isn't this where you use the non flying pilot to call out / monitor whatever it is you're not looking at but is important? Like velocity, heading, altitude, talking to the ATC etc?
The key downside to that is that only ATC has a very good idea of other aircraft in the vicinity, their altitude and heading and there's no point in killing the passengers by just being all macho about it....I highly doubt those missions, training or transport, will let atc control where or how they fly.
It appears you are correct that every sweep of needle on barometric would incrementally add 1000' to the digital readout, and there looks to be space in the digital readout area to indicate how many thousands of feet plus the less than whole thousand feet. In this case it appears helo is at 850' from digital readout.Is it a mixture of a needle and also a number? Is the sweep of the needle one per thousand foot? Does the number only change in discrete lumps?
The way everyone seems to talkin hundreds of feet and not say Altitude 270ft or 220?
This is what I can find, but don't know if its the same as the one which crashed. If so it would seem to be quite clear the helicopter was a lot higher than 200 ft.