[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by DaFace

Continuing to read through discussions about this from people who actually know the aviation industry, it seems like the most likely explanation is that the black hawk said they had the CRJ in sight, but they were looking at the wrong plane.

It's hard as a civilian to understand how that can happen, and I have to imagine they're going to take a long look at standard practices in that area to ensure this can't happen again. Even if it's technically pilot error, there shouldn't be a situation where looking at the wrong lights in the dark ends up killing 70 people.

Just terrible.

Kind of but not really. But aside from numerous technical caveats that would be getting off subject I'll just say tower is never going to try to separate by altitude in this spot. The route the helicopter was on is already restricted to 200' max, which is recklessly low in any other context, so tower will never give instructions to go to a lower altitude. Even if they wanted to tell the helicopter to literally skim the water the airplane will be low enough on approach to make that extremely uncomfortable separation.

They're not going to tell them to go higher either. The airplane needs space above in case they need to abort their approach and go around, not to mention just having enough space in case their approach is a bit higher or longer than standard. And the helicopter was tasked with maintaining visual separation, which makes sense as they're more maneuverable and in cruise flight vs a jet that has slowed to near stall speed and needs to maintain a pretty tight path to land on a short runway. You want the aircraft seeing and avoiding to be lower because cockpit visibility is a lot better looking up than looking down. And >99% of the time helicopters are cruising lower than jets so it makes sense to keep them that way unless you have a really good reason to switch them up. And by the time you have that reason it's too late to coordinate it. That's the reason the helicopter route is restricted to 200', with nearby routes allowing higher the further away you get from the airport. It keeps helicopter traffic separated from jets in nearly all cases outside of the jet's short final.

Bottom line, lateral separation is the only way to deconflict in this spot.

The technology you're thinking of isn't radar but it displays similarly for pilots. Also not a night requirement and shouldn't be (should be day and night). There is a requirement as of 2020 for **civilian** aircraft to be equipped with the half of the technology that broadcasts your own information so other aircraft can see you on their "radar". But there's no requirement to have the side that lets you see what everyone else is broadcasting (again there should be, but this is an expensive upgrade for a small airplane).

The Black Hawk doesn't necessarily broadcast anything because government aircraft are exempt from the requirement. Older Black Hawks aren't even capable. I believe the Army has upgraded theirs to have the capability to broadcast but it can be turned off. As far as I know the unit who had this accident is in the habit of leaving their broadcast on, at least for training flights. I used to fly with an organization that insisted theirs remain off and it's ****ing stupid. So the airplane likely would've "seen" the helicopter on their "radar" but that doesn't do much good when they're trusting the helicopter to avoid them and DC runs traffic tight enough and the resolution on these things is broad enough you have to ignore the alerts.

What's really stupid is Black Hawks don't have the receiving end of the technology or at least no capability to display it to the pilots. So the helicopter wouldn't have had any "radar" showing the airplane or any alerts outside of ATC's warnings. Maybe an iPad with a moving map showing traffic, but you're not looking at that flying 200' off the Potomac and it's not giving you aural warnings. I flew Black Hawks for 15 years and now fly much cheaper civilian helicopters but I have the "radar" display now. I wouldn't say it saves me cause I survived without it for 15 years but there are multiple times a month where it gives me useful enough information I'm glad to have it. In fact just a few days ago I was thinking "I can't believe I flew so long without this and it's dumb that there are still people flying around without it." So keeping in mind clovis's valid point that we can't know what caused this accident, would it have been avoided if we could drag the military's fleet of aircraft into the 21st century? Almost definitely, yes.

From a professional helicopter pilot I know from another forum.