Air Traffic Control and Flight Safety in the Post-pandemic Era of the Black Hawk Hawking Pandemic: What Happens When the Pilots Switched?

A few minutes before arrival, air traffic control asked the American Airlines flight if it could land on runway 33, a shorter runway. The pilots switched runways during their approach. The change in flight path might have caught the Black Hawk off guard.

There are questions about a chronic shortage of air traffic controllers and pilots, likely caused by human error. Military and civilian aviation coordination may be looked at by authorities.

“Perhaps safety protocols, human factors were at play,” he says. “I don’t like to draw conclusions early on. In general, globally, after the pandemic, while the passenger number has bounced back quite a bit, I don’t think the workforce number has caught up, in every aspect of aviation.”

Source: Washington, DC, Plane Crash: Everything We Know So Far

The Collision of a UH-60 Black Hawk Helicopter with a Passenger Jet and a Relativistic Heavy Aircraft

The Bombardier CRJ-700 jet was damaged when an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter carrying three soldiers crashed less than a mile from Reagan National Airport. The charred remains of both aircraft fell into the river.

The passenger jet crew might not have heard the tower radioing the Black Hawk if it weren’t for the different frequencies military flights operate on. If more than one person on a channel are talking at the same time, others may not hear the entire conversation.

The helicopter may have taken off from a military base near the airport. In a grainy video from the Kennedy Center, a smaller light, presumably the helicopter, can be seen overtaking the brighter light of the plane, both of them flying low to the ground. Two people collide in an explosion, splitting into pieces.

The last major commercial airplane accident involving a U.S. passenger plane was in 2009 when a Colgan Air flight crashed near Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people.

Authorities are continuing to investigate a midair collision between an American Airlines airliner and an Army helicopter, in which the aircraft fell into the icy Potomac River near Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport on Wednesday night.

The previous administration had a tendency to hire aviation professionals, and President Trump appeared to blame that for a midair collision that killed 67 people. Experts and investigators involved with the crash will be looking over every detail of the crash in the next few weeks, to try and determine why it happened.

“You need to give us time,” Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a press conference Thursday. The investigation into the crash is being conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent US watchdog agency. She said that they had substantial amounts of information. We need to check the information.

Later on Thursday, the White House released a statement criticizing the Biden administration’s “rejection of merit-based hiring” at the FAA in favor of a hiring program that encouraged diversity. The FAA had been ordered by Trump to review all of the FAA’s hires and safety protocol changes made during the four years of the Biden administration and to take such corrective action as necessary to achieve aviation safety.

At least seven different working groups will be made up of federal investigators and other people who are involved in aviation, according to J. Todd Inman, the board member.

An operations group will look into the history of the accident and the crew involved. Another group will focus on the body of the aircraft, looking at both the wreck and the scene of the accident to figure out what happened before the collision. Another will take a closer look at the engines. Others will examine onboard hydraulic, electrical, and pneumatic systems, as well as flight control instruments. A group will use recordings and information from sensors to determine how professionals at National Airport responded to the incident. One will examine the reactions of the first responders, and the other will check out the helicopter. A “human performance” group will be embedded within several of those organizations, focusing on what role crew fatigue, workload, medication, equipment, and training might have played in the collision.

A regional American Airlines jet carrying 60 passengers and four crew members traveling from Wichita, Kan., was moments from landing when it collided with an Army Blackhawk helicopter carrying three U.S. service members, shortly before 9 p.m. ET.

Video footage of the incident shows the aircraft flying at a low altitude before an explosion happened at the moment of impact. The airspace around Reagan National Airport is particularly challenging for pilots and air traffic controllers due to the amount of air traffic according to John Cox.

The Helicopter-Plane Collision Near DCA: When Difficulties Start to Break in a Polarized Helium System, J. Todd Inman says

The probable cause of the crash won’t be determined until we are on the scene, J. Todd Inman said Thursday.

The black boxes were retrieved from the American Airlines plane. Black boxes record everything happening in the cockpit, as well as data about the plane and flight. The NTSB will use them to piece together what happened in the moments leading to the wreck.

The Skating club of Boston sent several of its team members to Wichita for the U.S Figure skating championship, and there were more than a dozen passengers.

The next day, he hypothesized in remarks to the press without offering evidence that faulty night vision goggles or diversity, equity and inclusion policies could have played a part in the collision.

A reporter asked the president how a conclusion about the relevance of DEI could be arrived at so early on in the investigation, to which the president replied that he has common sense. And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people to do this.

It’s been a long time since this kind of collision happened, he said, and he doesn’t expect it to happen again.

The families of the people who died in the helicopter and plane crash near DCA are being prayed for by the former president and his wife. We are grateful for the first responders and emergency personnel.

“This is a time when we’ll have to join arms together and help each other out,” said Sen. Roger Marshall, R.-Kan. “We’ve been through things like this before, through tornadoes and floods and things, but it’s really hard when you lose probably over 60 Kansans simultaneously.”