Midair collision between Helicopter and CRJ (AA5342) at Washington (DCA)

[Quickstatus]

Was the heli actually on route 1 at the time of collision?.

 

[Quickstatus]

Clearly in this case the traffic was given far too early, I would have given the Blackhawk a restriction to hold north, when the CRJ got closer it would have got to the point where they could have safely confirmed identification and passed behind. Assuming no NVGs in use - and the helicopter had a controller with capacity to monitor it.

That seems an uninformed casual observer to involve a lot of potential failure points. A system should be resilient enough a few failures does not bring the whole thing down

 

[justinbrett]

That seems an uninformed casual observer to involve a lot of potential failure points. A system should be resilient enough a few failures does not bring the whole thing down

This is tower control bread and butter.

 

[jb747]

This is a simulation, but I suspect it’s extremely close to reality.

 

[justinbrett]

This is a simulation, but I suspect it’s extremely close to reality.

That audio is way out of sync with the video.

 

[RooFlyer]

Was the heli actually on route 1 at the time of collision?.

If you look at this Juan Brown video from 7 mins (he's a large plane commercial pilot), he shows the helo path overlain on the route map (ATC as well). It cuts the inside margin.

 

[jb747]

That audio is way out of sync with the video.

Who listens to the radio? I rarely want to hear what is said on youtube.... Anyway, it's about what could be seen, not heard.

 

[justinbrett]

Who listens to the radio? I rarely want to hear what is said on youtube.... Anyway, it's about what could be seen, not heard.

The point is the picture looked a lot different when the second traffic call was made. You could clearly see the individual nav lights of the CRJ (about 6 seconds from the audio). And I assume the pilots were issued with necks.

They are VFR after all. If they can’t spot aircraft at night they should be flying IFR.