AA jet and Military helicopter collide over Potomac 8

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.

www.foxnews.com

 

[LionelHutz]

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.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

I think I would call it clearance limit.

I would expect the tower to clear the rotary to a certain point which is the clearance limit.

Then " cleared to cross rwy finals"

But the American radio telephony standards are quite poor both pilots and controllers

 

[LittleInch]

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.

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.

The basic issue here was that I suspect both pilots thought they had right of way in the sky - the CRJ because the controller had cleared them to land on runway 33, the helicopter pilot because ATC had approved them flying night VFR.

I have been fairly shocked by recent US ATC transcripts on different incidents how vague and almost conversational they were. The door plug incident was on where the wording was dreadful from both pilot and ATC.

 

[Garbage1]

It is yet to be determined what the Helo Pilot's were thinking? Their actions indicate, whether they had the right of way or not, that they were going to do whatever they wanted to do, as they had been provided Card Blanche Authority from ATC tower, aka Visual Separation.......

 

[DirteJoe]

What they were thinking is likely all going to be speculation, so I doubt much will be said on that subject officially.
The crew chief and IP had 22 years combined in the military with multiple combat and deployment metals.

The PIC was Army National Guard, never deployed, only received standard medals most Army members receive for non-combat related services, graduated ROTC 2 years early which earned her the 15A as a Leutenant(entry level pilot essentially) and spent most of her active career as a political Biden admin social media and event aid, durring which in 2023-2024 was promoted to captain. 6 years of "service", only one rank, and most work was political.

The lack of discussing alt errors on a check ride somewhat makes me think, that the rest of the crew was not thinking higly of whom they were evaluating.