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Is Black Hawk helicopter & traffic control tower error to blame for American Airlines collision?

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Black Hawk helicopter pilot & traffic control tower error eyed in American Airlines collision
Black Hawk helicopter pilot & traffic control tower error eyed in American Airlines collision.
Black Hawk helicopter pilot & traffic control tower error eyed in American Airlines collision
Black Hawk helicopter pilot & traffic control tower error eyed in American Airlines collision.

What caused an American Airlines plane approaching runway at Washington’s D.C airport to collide with a Black Hawk military helicopter? Timeline suggests helicopter pilot error and possible oversight by air traffic control tower as President Donald Trump blames both in what he decries as a preventable tragedy. 

As investigators seek to identify what led to an American Airlines plane colliding with a Black Hawk military helicopter as the passenger plane carrying 64 began to approach landing, questions have been asked as to why the helicopter pilot failed to yield for the descending plane along with alleged air traffic control negligence for failing to tell military helicopter to change course.

While investigators have yet to say what caused the crash as AA flight# 5342 from Wichita, Kansas approached Ronald Reagan Airport at Washington D.C just before 9pm, Wednesday night, a minute by minute account in the preceding minutes (see below) is offering clues as to what went wrong.

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While helicopter pilot error along with what increasingly appears to be air traffic controllers not going far enough to prevent the tragedy, the airport itself is regarded to be the most complex in the U.S and most difficult for pilots to navigate and almost certainly contributed to the tragedy that killed 60 passengers, four airline crew and three soldiers and helicopter pilot crew.

The location of Reagan National makes flying into that airport one of the most complicated jobs for commercial pilots flying in the US, a former FAA accident investigator told CNN.

‘Not only is it (one of) the busiest, it’s the most complex airport,’ said David Soucie, CNN Safety Analyst. ‘There’s military and commercial together. There’s flight restrictions on where you can fly, what kind of approaches you have to make, and there’s demands on how quickly those airplanes have to come in and out.’

The airport sits just across an interstate from the Pentagon and across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, which has tightly restricted airspace.

Still, the complicated dance of coordinating planes in tight paths over large cities with multiple airports is something the US historically has done very effectively, Australian aviation analyst Geoffrey Thomas told CNN.

‘The United States is the masters, you are the masters of complicated airspace,’ the analyst told CNN. 

‘It’s very clear, looking at the flight paths of the aircraft and the radio transmissions, that the Black Hawk was asked to maintain visual separation from Flight 5342 for some reason –– and we don’t know that reason,’ Tony Stanton from Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority told CNN.

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What went wrong? 

Stanton added that, unlike many other ATC towers, Washington Tower has two radio frequencies used to communicate with airborne aircraft –– with one frequency used for rotorcraft helicopters and another one for other aircraft.

‘So in this circumstance, you would have had the Black Hawk talking to the tower on one frequency, and you would have had Flight 5342 talking to the tower on another frequency,’ he said, adding that the crash may have resulted in ‘a barrier of situational awareness between the pilots.’

Air traffic control audio from moments before the Wednesday collision indicates the US Army Black Hawk was aware of another nearby aircraft – what happened next, though, remains unclear.

‘There are a lot of things that can go wrong when you have too many aircraft in a very close airspace –– and that is DCA,’ former inspector general of the US Transportation Department, Mary Schiavo told CNN. ‘DCA is just a very busy airport that opened decades ago. It was supposed to close because it was too close to the city.’

A few minutes before flight 5342’s landing, air traffic controllers asked the arriving commercial jet if it could land on the shorter Runway 33 at Reagan National and the pilots immediately confirmed they were able to do so.

Controllers then cleared the plane to land on Runway 33 and flight tracking sites showed the plane duly adjusted its approach to the new runway.

At the same time, a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk US Army helicopter that had departed from Fort Belvoir in Virginia on a training exercise entered the airspace around Reagan National Airport.

Black Hawk helicopter & traffic control tower error

This is some of the most tightly controlled and monitored airspace in the world, just over three miles south of the White House and the Capitol.

All of the previous jets had made landings on the airport’s main runway, suggesting that the Black Hawk pilots may have expected the American Airlines flight to follow suit and may not have been aware of the change in flight path, the dailymail reported.

Less than 30 seconds before the crash, an air traffic controller asked the helicopter, whose call sign was registered as PAT25, if it had the arriving plane in sight.

The controller made another radio call to the helicopter moments later at 8.47pm ET – minutes before the American Airlines flight was projected to make its landing.

‘PAT25 do you see a CRJ? PAT 25 pass behind the CRJ,’ the air traffic controller said.

The helicopter pilot appears to confirm he sees the plane—though it’s not certain that he is referring to the American Airlines plane—and seems to request ‘visual separation to fly out of the plane’s path while keeping it in sight.

The two aircraft crashed seconds later, with the night sky above Washington DC briefly illuminated by the fireball that erupted as the two aircraft collided. The crash occurred at an altitude of just 400ft and less than three kilometres from the runway.

American Airlines flight 5342 was travelling at a speed of 140mph when it smashed into the chopper as it was making its runway approach.

Reflected one social media commentator: ‘I think the helicopter was maintaining separation from a different airplane, a mistake, and never saw the CJ. Helicopter was under and CJ above classic situation where they can’t see each other. Both pilots were surprised.’

Donald Trump blames helicopter pilot error and airport traffic control tower

President Donald Trump responding to the mid-air collision blamed helicopter pilot error along with faulting air traffic controllers according to a post he shared on Truth Social.

Noting that American Eagle Flight 5342, which was landing after a 2-hour and 45-minute flight from Wichita, Kansas, was on a ‘perfect and routine line of approach to the airport,’ Trump suggested that the control tower had failed to redirect the helicopter after it had strayed into the plane’s path.

‘The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,’ he wrote on Truth Social. ‘Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.’

Added Trump, ‘This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!’

Shortly after his initial post, Trump wrote on Truth Social, ‘What a terrible night this has been. God bless you all!’

Responding to assertions of human error, an aviation expert decried what they described as the FAA’s ‘bad management.’

‘This is a problem we have with air traffic control,’ Boyd Group International President Mike Boyd said on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria on Thursday according to the UK’s SUN.

‘We messed around with air traffic control for 30 years. Now we have deaths in the Potomac because of it.

‘So this is a wake-up call for the new administration, which means, fix the FAA and fix it soon before more people die.’

Several athletes and coaches from U.S. Figure Skating, including Russian-born Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, were aboard the plane when it went down.

As of Thursday early morning, some 30 bodies had been pulled to the surface from the frigid Potomac River, with search efforts still ongoing, while a temporary morgue has been set up in the capital to house the bodies.

The last major commercial airplane accident involving a U.S. passenger plane was in 2009 when a Colgan Air flight crashed near Buffalo killing a total of 50 people (49 passengers and crew, and one person inside a house).

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