
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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It's not "nit picking", it's taking your comment at face value when in post 201 and 221 you keep saying they must hold and wait (I'm assuming your post above is an unfortunate typo and you mean "cross" and not crash"??). That part, as far as I understand it, is simply not correct. The helicopter requested night visual flight rules and within a second the ATC controller said approved. This meant the responsibility for not crashing into anything, be it the ground, a tower or an aircraft, passed from the controller to the pilot(s) of the helicopter. All ATC did was give them the basic information about what was happening in front of them and left it up to them as to what to do. Even when ATC had collision warning alarms blaring at them, all they did was ask some wishy washy question to the helicopter pilot. There was NOTHING, anywhere in the documentation I've read that said the helicopter needed to hold or go past a certain point before the aircraft stopped crossing in front of them. There were two mandatory "reporting" positions where they needed to radio ATC and tell then what they wanted to do, but this was not a hold point.They must WAIT for the plane to crash. Call it whatever you want, but quit nitpicking my terminology, which I called HOLD, as in they can't go past a certain point until the plane passes. I guess I should have written a whole paragraph about how they were supposed to maneuver around as the plane passed to ensure they didn't have to actually stop and wait for it to placate the nitpicky people here.