Washington DC Plane/Helicopter Collision

[ThatEllie]

Is anyone awake and following this, or anyone in the States? It looks horrific. A US military Blackhawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines plane and both went down into the Potomac River.

You can see helicopters circling like mad on FlightRadar. I really hope they’re finding people.

www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/29/us/plane-crash-washington-dc

Sorry to jump in this thread but while there are knowledgeable people around it's worth an ask - while flying to Italy last year from the UK I was looking out of the window, we were about halfway through the route and above the clouds, when seemingly out of nowhere there was another passenger jet approaching then flying below us, and it was so close. It was an Emirates plane, the branding was clearly visible and it looked so big, it was that close. Is this normal?? I've never experienced that before and I was quite freaked out (not a happy flyer as it is!).

@SheilaFentiman

I think one issue is for most people everyday life is so safe there’s a rush to think unnatural deaths or deaths must almost always be the result of something underhand or mysterious going on….

You can see it in things like the current debate elsewhere on MN regarding Diana’s death - many struggle with the idea that that fatality take bad driving plus no seatbelt is enough to kill you…There’s at least one other fatal driving event still under investigation that according to some here simply could not be an accident…(what hope the Jury system)….

If you’ve read enough transport industry safety/accident/incident reports (especially the military aviation ones) you realise pretty soon it doesn’t take too many holes in the Swiss cheese to line up and for you to be in trouble…the challenge is having a system that is robust enough to stop the line ups happening, the DCA accident may well be one where the system did not prevent that happening,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Minimum distances vary but in the cruise over a lot of the world (including Europe) you can cross directly above/below another aircraft and be legitimately vertically separated by 1000’..

That’s about 4 and a bit A380 or 777 wingspan equivalents, so I agree it doesn’t look like much but it’s perfectly fine.

Thank you.

I didn’t say it was weird. I said it was either weird, poor timing or pilot error.

I know you did, and I was specifically addressing the weird comment.

I’m not trying to pick a fight but I’m going to have to say I don’t actually think the accident was simply down to the other two causes you mention, though human error, possibly by several individuals, not just pilots, may well have been a factor.

Not me but if you read the rest of my post, I added in other factors as I do believe it is multifaceted and I do think it’s weird that for an industry that is usually so well regulated that things got to tho and people lost their lives.

The number of ATC had been reduced below optimal levels, the Blackhawk also did not have optimal crew numbers. Plus it was night with the associated issues with vision, especially with city lights reflected on the river etc plus the fact that the helicopter was neither at the height it should have been or on its pre planned flight path. All of this is a recipe for disaster and as a collision had also nearly happened already in the days preceding, that suggests that there was a lack of reactivity to issues and nothing followed up either by the military or civilian staff. I do find that strange tbh.

@MrsElijahMikaelson1

Hi, sorry if I was a bit snippy early on but I think caution need to be applied in thinking this accident was set in motion by just one or two errors.

Someone in another place came up with a nice list of probable contributing factors, I don’t want to C&P that but it went along the lines of:

Very very busy, perhaps excessively busy regional airport (suits politicians travelling to/from their constituencies).

Stupid amount of local helicopter traffic hopping around the city (suits politicians and military).

Result of those two is overloaded airspace with increasing reliance on visual procedures to ensure separation….not great by day, iffy as heck at night.

Lack of adequate ATC staffing (politicians again, cost saving).

ATC staff starting to ignore automated radar generated conflict alerts between traffic because as a consequence of the tight spacing they were happening so often > classic case of what’s known as “normalization of deviance”..they possibly weren’t the only ones guilty of that..we will see.

Nobody at administration and/or political level really taking an interest in any of the above, even when they were flight crew reports of possible/actual conflicts (such as the one you mentioned from the night before the accident) because doing so that might have meant reducing helicopter flights or flights out of DCA…maybe shifting some to out of town to Dulles.. not something the really senior politicians would have welcomed.

So blind eyes were turned and staff at an operational level struggled along doing their best with luck playing a large part in preventing accidents..and finally a couple of nights back the luck ran out.

Sorry for the long post but to conclude it’s possible the actions of Blackhawk crew and/or the controller will probably end up being deemed the main reason for the accident, but they, plus the airliner occupants look to have been victims of a neglected failing system, rather than victim of something deeper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance#:~:text=Normalization%20of%20deviance%2C%20according%20to,or%20rule%20becomes%20culturally%20normalized.

That’s v interesting about normalisation of deviance.

Hi

is it just me or did the link break/get corrupted…let me try again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance#:~:text=Normalization%20of%20deviance%2C%20according%20to,or%20rule%20becomes%20culturally%20normalized.

Just in case, C&P of the early text:

“Normalization of deviance, according to American sociologist Diane Vaughan, is the process in which deviance from correct or proper behavior or rule becomes culturally normalized.[1]
Vaughan defines the process where a clearly unsafe practice becomes considered normal if it does not immediately cause a catastrophe: "a long incubation period [before a final disaster] with early warning signs that were either misinterpreted, ignored or missed completely".[2][3]
The original example cited by Vaughan is the events leading to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, but the concept has also been applied to aviation safety,[4][5] clinical practice in medicine,[6] and the public's deviance from health measures aimed to stop the COVID-19 pandemic.[7]”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/01/army-helicopter-dc-plane-crash-continuity-of-government-drill

well that explains why the Doomsday plane was kicking around.

@Igotjelly

Maybe, but might still be coincidence.

From what’s been said so far it’s sounds like the helicopter crew might have been involved in (recurrent) training/revalidation, possibly an annual check, for their specific role in the continuity of government process…that doesn’t mean the whole system or other elements were also being checked out.

Certainly the route they were on (4, heading south) doesn’t seem to feed Andrews AFB where the “Doomsday”aircraft went on the day, Route 4 heads south towards some facilities down near the coast.

Since these routes have been mentioned so much here’s a link to a PDF of the same for the DC and Baltimore area:

https://aeronav.faa.gov/visual/09-05-2024/PDFs/Balt-Wash_Heli.pdf

Thanks for your knowledge and for being the voice of reason as always @notimagain

I think it's so easy these days for people to get caught up in 'one' theory (be that conspiracy, gut feeling or otherwise) As you've said on more than one occasion, the Swiss cheese theory is possibly most likely.

Pleased to see that the helicopter corridor has been closed indefinitely. It certainly seemed like it was a potential accident waiting to happen.

The speculation reminds me of flight MH370, which was perhaps way more of an anomaly. At around the same time, we also had MH17 (both utterly devastating, and both had major levels of speculation) I actually knew someone who died on MH17. Although the circumstances of this most recent crash bear no resemblance to either of those two. (The most obvious thing being that no other aircraft was observed to be involved in a collision) I think it's very sad that the family of one of the personnel in the military aircraft don't want them to be named as they clearly don't wish to have the blame landed solely at their door. Trump has perhaps added to this fear. We live in an age of mob mentality.

Of course I'm also posting here, therefore adding to the discussion, because yes, as humans we want to know what went wrong. We all want to feel safe at the end of the day.

Sympathies should still first and foremost be with the victims families following this awful tragedy (and also the more recent crash in Philadelphia) It's sad to see that this wasn't perhaps the priority of the current US administration.

The name of the pilot has been released and I think an intentional act can be ruled out. I actually remember seeing this pilot escort Ralph Lauren when he was awarded the MOH, just very sad.

It will have been a series of failures, not just one person’s fault.

@RingoJuice was it confirmed which crew member was the pilot at the time?

I agree that the whole thing looks to be an accident but I can’t understand at the same time, how. Looking at the new airport footage, the plane is lit up very bright . It then appears the helicopter hits it while decreasing height ? But I thought it increased ?

Then it appears the helicopter 🚁 (& I completelte forgive you for calling me crazy because I feel like I’m going to delulu & I know I’m inclined to look for the alternate theory… )the helicopter seems to be intact and fly into the distance, not river. Otherwise what is the black object to the right after explosion ?

www.nbcnews.com/video/security-footage-shows-new-angles-of-d-c-crash-230772805611

Bear in mind the Blackhawk and its variants are two pilot aircraft, often operated with at least one non-pilot crewmember to handle additional tasks such as lookout.

This C&P from NPR:

“Captain Rebecca Lobach was 28 years old and a native of Durham, N.C. She was a distinguished military graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and commissioned in 2019 as an active-duty aviation officer.
She died along with fellow pilot Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Md. and crew member Staff Sergeant Ryan O'Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Ga.”

Given we’ve been told this was a check ride of some sort and given relative experience levels early speculation is that CWO Eaves was the Instructor Pilot (IP) doing the check and that Captain Lobach was the pilot under check.

I should have said ‘third’ crew member.

Tbh I don’t think it has been said explicitly who was flying the helicopter. But given one was supposedly the instructor and the other was the ‘crew chief’ it is probable she was.

The helicopter doesn't look like it flies off at all. Not sure what you're seeing there and what the hell is delulu.

Just to head off any possible questions about relative levels of responsibility, if you are doing two crew operations, even under check, it’s usually a case that the technical crew as a whole ultimately has responsibility for safety of flight.

Well I’m wondering what it is because to me it looks like the shilouette of a chopper. I finally managed to calm down my inner conspiracy theorist and then saw this. If you look in the video it is only visible after the explosion. I thought it was the chopper falling into the river but doesn’t explain why it’s intact and goes behind the land mass. Unless it’s some sort of an illusion or lighting.

www.nbcnews.com/video/security-footage-shows-new-angles-of-d-c-crash-230772805611

Delulu is a shorter slang word for delusional

Firstly the various claims about heights you are seeing in the MSM are based on data that may be out by maybe plus/minus 50 feet, possibly more, and the data certainly won’t be sensitive to last second flightpath changes.

The investigators will get high resolution data in things like height from the onboard recorders and possible some ATC radar info not (yet at least) in the public domain.

As for post impact trajectories, both aircraft weigh several tonnes, the post impact flight paths of the wreckage is entirely down to momentum…

You wouldn’t expect the two aircraft to stick together having met in midair so to some extent the airframes will, initially at least, until gravity and aerodynamics takes over, keep going in the same direction they were just before impact, the CRJ north west and the helicopter south west.

That’s exactly what those videos show.

Thanks this helpful & makes sense. I thought the plane was divided into three through ? The black mass/helicopter doesn’t appear to land in the river but behind the land mass ? It does look awfully like the shilouette of a black hawk.

It’s just really depressing, a lot of little thing piling up unaddressed until something like this happens