60% PAT, 40% tower. A lot of negligence on the Militarily's part that caused them to broadside a CRJ at 500 feet.

 

Ummm. Who wrote and approved the river helo procedure?

 

90% FAA. 10% USAF/ANG Enterprise.

The military leans forward to accomplish the missions they are assigned. Those missions are often risky, and it's frankly not the military's place to evaluate and adjudicate risk on the civilian side. They rely on the FAA to keep them in an adequate sandbox.

If National Command Authority wants to them to fly helos around DC, that's what they do.

You can argue that maybe some O6 with the big picture maybe should have raised concerns with the FAA, but again that's not their primary role.

FAA should have thrown the BS flag a long time ago, and I can only speculate that career bureaucrats didn't want to say "No Can Do" to DC power players.

You could blame the political people, but they really don't have any expertise. Again comes down to FAA.

This would be quite a different discussion if some Pete Mitchel in an F-Teen had erroneously blown through Bravo at mach 1.5 and hit an airliner, but that's not what happened. Everybody was reasonably where they were supposed to be. The system just gave them zero margins. Negative margins actually.

 

The FAA did, but the boneheads were busting the top altitude, were out of path, and for some mind boggling reason were wearing night vision goggles flying through a very active Class B airspace. This wasn't way up or down the river.

 

FAA retains responsibility for the airspace, but the "national security" card always trumps that.

 

PAT25 twice affirmed and called the traffic then requested visual seperation, The PAT25 flying pilot never actually made it below the route ceiling, at one time 120' above the ceiling while straying out of the corridor to the west towards the middle of the river just before impact. Sad situation all around.

 

funny hearing you be critical of the FAA. Thought everything in the world was a Boeing’s fault?


this is the FAA. They are the ones lying and hiding the truth. Time is long past due for them to held accountable.

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As per usual it's the government's fault. Good luck to the families trying to sue the government and getting any sort of compensation.

 

We can always count on water to be wet, and for you to share some confidently moronic take on a topic you don't know about...

 

There's no "mission" that needs to be "leaned forward to accomplish" in the Washington DC airspace. NCA directives to "fly helos around DC" don't happen in a vacuum and certainly don't ignore risks from any source. The military considers risk on every mission from all factors including civilian influences. When I flew fighters, our missions were hampered daily by civilian influences. Airline corridors over the top of or adjacent to the MOAs or Warning areas we were using. VFR civilian traffic transiting the MOA because it saves them some time and gas to name just a few. We didn't have the option to ignore those operational risks simply because they were generated from a civilian source. As a matter of fact, most USAF units conduct an operation risk management analysis of every mission which definitely included all civilian factors.
100 feet is not an acceptable deviation in a helicopter cruising at approximately 120 knots. At that speed, a one degree pitch change creates about a 200 FPM climb rate. So, inadvertently pitching up 1 to 2 degrees is going to create that "acceptable" (not) 100' deviation in 15-30 seconds. It's not that difficult to notice such a deviation in that time period and correct it. A fighter doing 600 knots with the same 1 degree pitch change is going to generate 1000 PFM of climb. That gets you off altitude by 100' in the blink of an eye. We never considered being off altitude by 100' acceptable. But an inadvertent altitude bust isn't what happened in the helo. The problem was that this UH-60 crew was consistently high for most of the portion of the flight in question. If there aren't other factors involved such as malfunctioning equipment or incorrect altimeter settings, then they were just lazy about being on altitude...... most of the time.
The other thing that really bothers me is both times when the UH-60 was queried by ATC about the CRJ, the response was immediate - "...traffic in sight, request visual separation." It was a rote, instinctive response with zero actual thought given to the separation responsibility to which the speaker was agreeing. He might as well have said, "Yeah, yeah, stop talking to me about the traffic, we're gonna do what we always do and fly this route." The truth is obvious - they didn't see the traffic. That pilot had probably made the same radio call numerous times on other flights and very likely didn't see the traffic for certain on other flights as well. The geometry and timing were different on those other nights and they got away with it. Or maybe they did see the traffic at some point once they had a chance to pick it out of the other lights in the sky over DC. But their radio call on this night was clearly a matter of habit and not an acceptance of the visual separation they claimed they would maintain.

The bottom line is that this integration of a visual helo route and inbound traffic to DCA was an absolute abortion. It should have never been set up as it was. That lays at the feet of any agency involved in the creation and maintenance of this procedure over the years. But there is certainly a measure of responsibility on the actual operators and controllers who had intimate knowledge of this as well. My guess is that most airline pilots had no clue that acceptance of a circle to 33 MIGHT put them passing 75' over the top of a helo at the correct max altitude on the visual route if the timing was right. If they were aware of that possibility, I doubt any of them would have accepted the clearance. Could they have found that out? Sure, if they knew to look for the information in the first place. Most probably had no clue that there even was a visual helo route passing under the final for 33 unless it was spelled out in their company provided charts. My Jepps don't have many details on the helo routes even now after this tragedy has occurred. The helo pilots using the visual route likely had much more SA on how it integrated with the DCA approaches and if any group of pilots had enough pieces of the puzzle to start waving the BS flag, it was them. Regardless of the mission, military pilots are not automatons who are expected to just go along with the program no matter how stupid or risky it is. Especially during peacetime flying a training mission around the nation's Capitol. The worst operator in this is ATC who had all the puzzle pieces and should have known this was a disaster waiting to happen based on basic common sense as well as numerous prior events that were lucky close calls.
None of us, military or civilian, are required to blindly follow procedures we feel are unsafe. We have a professional responsibility to report them and do what we can to change them. In the meantime, in many cases we have other options - refuse questionable clearances, use the magic "unable" word and make the tough calls we get paid the big PIC dollars to make regardless of what agency, federal or otherwise, is responsible for creating the problem in the first place. I'm not trying to say the CRJ pilots should have known or made another decision. They didn't have the big picture and made the same choice hundreds, if not thousands of other more lucky pilots made with the information they had at the time. My point is, if your answer is, "well the feds made this procedure, so who am I to argue with it", I think this tragedy has proven that's not an acceptable solution.