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

Agree. Both about the incident being tragic whatever the cause, and that Agenda Free TV is great, since as you say the host always seems unbiased to me and he scans all the media reports and relays them in real time without drama.

Re the Doomsday plane, I wouldn't read much into that. I believe there are several, one in flight at all times, and the others at various air force bases. I would guess one will be found frequently at Andrews.

As anyone who flies in and out of DC knows, this is an insanely congested airport with crazy flight paths. It's actually surprising something like this hasn't happened before.

Almost 100% certainty that it's a tragic human error accident. My heart goes out to the victims, their friends and families and the first responders and airport personnel.

Ignore the arses

It's on posters to explain what they mean without needing others to go off an Google.

I didn't know either and on the given co text had no idea what I was expected to make of it

God, I find your suggestion that it's only a matter of time that there's a horrific aircrash anywhere there's a busy airport very concerning - and also probably untrue. I really don't think there's any kind of a 'let's wait until the shit hits the fan and then deal with it' approach to air traffic control.

I find this particular accident to be VERY weird, for all the reasons people have already said. Helicopters are agile. They have excellent visibility. Military pilots are highly trained. Air traffic control is regimented. It just seems a very strange thing to have happened.

Yes that's true. The idea of the training is that it will save some lives. There's no expectation that it will save most or all. It's all about percentage gains. If you change something from a 97% chance of death to a 96% chance, the majority won't see a better outcome. But occasionally someone will survive. It's the same logic with the old Vinnie Jones CPR ad on TV. Someone will be alive because someone saw that ad and knew what to do. For the overwhelming majority, the ad was of no benefit (they may not have seen it, they may already known it, they may have panicked when the situation occurred).

Many things in life are a risk. There's an expectation that planes will crash and people will be killed. It's unavoidable given that flying is unnatural and requires the overcoming of the realities of physics which prevent us flying without mechanical aid. The same with cars and trains for that matter. They are pushing humans beyond what we are built to tolerate, and when things go wrong our bodies cannot cope.

Just with the helicopter training, a plane is designed to minimise the risk. Procedures minimise the risk. The risk is always there though and that's the price to be paid for living in the world we have created.

I think what looks like a change of direction was it starting to circle over the river.

I've seen pictures of the circles the training helicopters do over that area.

So that looks normal.

It seems to be a greater structural issue.

An airport that's too busy.

A training base too close bye.

Several recent near misses.

Unclear communications between ATC & the helicopter.

There have been similar mid air collisions before, one in Northern California I think and one in San Diego?

Add in nighttime it was only a matter of time before this happened.

I don't wish to argue with you over a tragic incident, but I think you're possibly being a bit naive, which seems to be very fertile ground for conspiracy theory. And we know absolutely nothing about the military pilot. Could have been their first flight for all we know.

https://san.com/cc/sen-tim-kaine-said-reagan-airport-is-dangerous-warned-of-collision/

I'm being naive about the efficiency of air traffic control over and into the city which the President of the USA lives in? OK.

And I'm adding that I only care because, as witnessed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, conspiracy theories can cause unimaginable amounts of further pain for the families of victims.

Sigh. Did you read the link?

Sigh. Yes. He warns against future expansion, not against the possibility of crashes now.

No. Read the whole article. He is saying it's already dangerous.

“When you hear an air traffic controller having to shout stop, stop to get two jets trying to use this main runway to stop within 300 feet of each other,” Kaine said. “This is a flashing red warning sign telling everyone that this airport is already overburdened and you shouldn’t do more.”

And they did add more flights.

https://www.levernews.com/before-d-c-airport-collision-lawmakers-brushed-off-warnings-and-boosted-flights/

Try to look at it this way. Say for any individual flight the risk of successful take-off, flight and landing is 99.999999%. That means that the overwhelming amount of the time, everything goes according to plan. But the risk is always there. We can't eliminate risk in something as inherently dangerous as packing dozens or hundreds of people into a flimsy contraption rammed full of highly flammable fuel.

Planes are not designed purely for maximum safety. They are designed to be an acceptable compromise of various factors. Safety is a high one, but reliablity, weight and cost-effectiveness are others. A standard plane could be made much safer but would not be cost-effective, it would be so expensive nobody could afford to use one.

Procedures could be put in place to prevent an aircraft coming within 10 miles of another aircraft. Airports could be designed to be 100 miles away from any form of settlement, and be limited to one flight in or out per day. Things could be made much safer, but make flying uneconomical.

The real driver is cost. Flying has to be profitable. Safety is an afterthought of this, it's required to be of a standard that doesn't make people too afraid to pay to fly, but it's a secondary concern.

Everything we do in life is a risk and cannot be completely safe. Getting out of bed in the morning has an inherent risk, as does not getting out of bed.

Comments about crashes like this one being inevitable should not be seen as anything other than stating the facts. If there's a chance something can happen, given enough opportunities to happen eventually it will.

There was an article a while ago that "debunked" the idea that an infinite number of monkeys sat at typewriters would, given an infinite amount of time, type out the works of Shakespeare. The claim that this was untrue was based on the fact that monkeys would cease to exist in evolutionary terms before they had achieved the feat. That misses the point though, because the "theory" was all about an infinite amount of resource. Clearly this infinite resource is impossible, just as it is with plane journeys - there is only a finite number that the planet could support. But the basic principle is sound. Given enough resources, something that can happen, will happen.

I get what you're saying - although it puts me, an already nervous flier, off getting on a plane again! But 'in an infinite universe anything is possible' also allows for other things, which also seem pretty possible. It wouldn't be the first time a major plane crash in the USA has turned out to be a terrorist attack, after all.

Air traffic control and safety measures can vary between countries, to say the least.

You should see what experienced professional pilots are saying about the practices and culture in the USA.

Very horrifying and very alarming.

Just watched the BBC news reporter say the passenger plane was “only a minute away from landing” so presumably, the majority of the friends and family were at the airport, waiting to pick up their loved ones.

Utterly and uncomprehendingly heartbreaking.

..and we know absolutely nothing about the military pilot. Could have been their first flight for all we know

Sorry, but just no..really really juat no...

No way under any system is a trainee pilots first flight at the controls done at night in a complex type out of a helipad adjacent to DCA.

@notimagain yeah, that would be like sending out a learner driver to have their first attempt at driving on the North Circular in rush hour.

For conspiracy-free analysis of any plane crash, I recommend PPrune, a forum frequented mostly by current or retired air crew. They are discussing this incident here: https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/663888-aa5342-down-dca.html

Also, and I apologise if this seems inappropriate, but: even if everyone on board has died, this would be the first US commercial air crash with fatalities since 2009 and the worst in terms of fatalities since November 2001. I suspect that the sheer rarity of such tragic events is part of what attracts the conspiracists.

My point was that speculation is pointless. And I didn't say a 'trainee' pilot. At some point it will be everyone's first flight in a given circumstance.

They will blame ATC. I feel for that person who was guiding those flights.

Also, thinking about it, the trajectory of the landing plane would already have been set by air traffic control. It's not the fault of whoever is flying the plane if a helicopter changes path and crashes into it, nor is it a safety issue with the plane or air traffic control. The fault here would seem to lie with the helicopter pilot. Helicopters are far more agile than planes and - I'm no expert so correct me if I am wrong - they wouldn't have a set path decided for them by air traffic control in the same way that a plane coming into land would.

It's not really 'conspiracy theory' to think this is weird. It would be conspiracy theory to say this was all a plot to undermine Donald Trump etc or to draw attention away from him or something.

Dare I try and give maybe a bit of insight based on flying commercial aircraft into/out of US airports a lot??

The US controllers/system often relies on packing lots of flights into tight airspace., TBF that’s increasingly happening elsewhere in the world.

In good weather in the US it’s not unusual for you to get offered a conditional clearance to do something based on you being visual with nominated traffic.

e.g. “737 on finals 2 miles ahead of you for the left, with that traffic in sight you are cleared to land.”. If you see that traffic and you accept the clearance ATC/the controller no longer has responsibility for ensuring separation.

I haven’t heard any of the ATC conversation from last night but one possibility is the controller issued a clearance based on the crew of one of the aircraft seeing the other.

It’s well known that it is hard to judge range and distance at night so one possibility is the crew in one of the aircraft acted incorrectly having misidentified the traffic they were meant to he avoiding.

Also it may be worth knowing anything on a collision course doesn’t move laterally/vertically in the windscreen, so objects on a collision course can be absolute sods to spot by eyeball until very late….

I have no idea if the above issues were a factor in last night but that’s the sort of thing that’s higher up the list of possibilities than pilot’s first flights.

Also there’s been some talk of collision avoidance systems - I’m no longer current but many of the early versions of the airborne warning system called TCAS, that the airliner would have carried, were inhibited from issuing certain warnings at low altitude..

That was because you didn’t want the system shouting at you to “descend”, if that was the appropriate action given the geometry, if you were already close to the ground. That may or may not have been a factor here, don’t know.

The footage appears to show the helicopter flying straight into the back of the plane as it comes in to land. So it would have been pretty hard for anyone guiding the plane to see it/get out of the way.