Mid-Air Collision in DC

[Lord Ratner]

1 hour ago, brabus said:

Depends on the community. I can’t speak for Army RW, but a 1000 hr IP in a fighter is fairly experienced. Flight hours cannot necessarily be compared across communities to determine comparable experience/capability levels. 

No, that's very true. In the tanker it would take far more hours to be experienced. 8 hours where 75% of it is reading a magazine obviously doesn't compare to 1.5 hours in a Viper.

 

But part of this is what we consider experienced. I don't think of a guy with one assignment on the line as experienced. There's "Mission Ready" and then there's "experienced." Another element is time. You can shove 10,000 hours into one year (if that was possible) and it wouldn't make you experienced necessarily. Some things just take time for the brain to process and for you personally go through enough scenarios and enough experiences to be, experienced.

 

I've got about 2,500 hours in 7 years at the airlines and I think I'm realistically just now starting to be experienced. I don't fly much so it took me a bit longer than it might take someone else, but we have lots of captains now with 2 years at AA. They are qualified, but they are not experienced. 

 

Anyways, still agree with busdriver and others who blame DCA as the root cause:

On 1/30/2025 at 10:31 AM, Lord Ratner said:

DCA has been pretending like their bullshit airspace arrangement is perfectly ok and no big deal for a long time. Sadly, this was bound to happen.

 

[busdriver]

18 minutes ago, Lord Ratner said:

8 hours where 75% of it is reading a magazine obviously doesn't compare to 1.5 hours in a Viper.

But part of this is what we consider experienced. I don't think of a guy with one assignment on the line as experienced. .....Another element is time. Some things just take time for the brain to process and for you personally go through enough scenarios

In sum sortie count and variety of experience is what matters, the hour count just happens.  And I agree.

[tac airlifter]

7 hours ago, Lord Ratner said:

You can be hot shit, you can be talented and confident and all sorts of other things, but not experienced. 

Pretending otherwise is exactly what military leadership has been doing to justify reducing the training and currency of pilots. 

That doesn't mean you can't get the mission done. I certainly did. But there's no fucking way 500-hour-LordRatner made better decisions than 6,000-hour-LordRatner does. I'm honestly not sure how this is controversial. Would *you* have flown that close to a regional aircraft landing at DCA, at night, on nogs?

Agreed 100% with your last few posts, I think some folks aren’t understanding what you’re saying WRT “experience” and the implications to AF decisions recently.  Hours is a poor metric to judge “experienced” but it’s a good metric to judge “inexperienced” because there’s no training that can take effect below a certain threshold and I assert that principle applies across communities.  That said, not sure experience of the MP plays into this since the procedure design was so bad and controller so complacent.
 

There’s an over-emphasis on altitude deviation when it appears the entire RW crew had zero SA on actual CRJ location they were instructed to follow.  It’s a shit procedure and they flew it poorly (including the IP).  I get it, I’ve made a lot of mistakes but holy shit the risk acceptance of DCA with RW training flights flying under you is totally unacceptable.

[Lord Ratner]

11 minutes ago, tac airlifter said:

Hours is a poor metric to judge “experienced” but it’s a good metric to judge “inexperienced” because there’s no training that can take effect below a certain threshold and I assert that principle applies across communities.

Thank you, this is a fantastic and concise phrasing of what I was trying to convey.

[reloder]

In my new hire airline class, I was next to oldest with about 4400 hours total. There were a number of young guys in their mid-20s who commented that my total time was pretty low for such an old coot (44 at the time). I just smiled and passed on the question but I would have liked to explain to them that there is a difference between experience and repetition. Flying boxes and checks from point A to B isn't quite the same as a 35 minute air-to-air sortie in a F-104 where 5 minutes in taxi time was included or an F-4 range sortie with 3 strafe, 6 bomb, and 3 more rocket events.

 

[Lawman]

I believe you. That means you have a largely inexperienced corps of helicopter pilots. 
 
This isn't about dick waving or which service is better or really anything other than accepting the reality that normal ≠ experienced. You simple cannot be experienced with those hours. You can be hot shit, you can be talented and confident and all sorts of other things, but not experienced. 
 
Pretending otherwise is exactly what military leadership has been doing to justify reducing the training and currency of pilots. 
 
That doesn't mean you can't get the mission done. I certainly did. But there's no ing way 500-hour-LordRatner made better decisions than 6,000-hour-LordRatner does. I'm honestly not sure how this is controversial. Would *you* have flown that close to a regional aircraft landing at DCA, at night, on nogs?
 
Is this some sort of White Knight defense of the military pilot? I don't fault her for the DCA procedures, and I don't fault her for her own experience. The former is the fault of the FAA and the latter is the fault of the Army. Again, I do not agree with people picking apart her career and motivations with no knowledge of them. But we do have direct knowledge of her experience, and commenting on it is fair game. 
Her instructor pilot had what, 1,000 hours? If that's true then he was barely experienced, and certainly not an experienced instructor. Again, not his fault.

How many 6000 hour pilots do you think exist in the Army RW community?

This is exactly why hour counts as a metric for experience are a crappy way of measuring as a metric. I had half to less than a third of the hours my peer group had following my first deployment, but 80% of my time was in the dark supporting actual missions not flying hardstand to handstand carrying ass and trash. Explain who is more experienced in that regime given those conditions. All bolting hour count to an experience label does is help delay young pilots from gaining valuable experience early as they are limited from participation while the old guys do the hard stuff.

There is no way to simply produce a 6000 hour pilot and simply deciding that what was normal 10-15 years ago when we were all doing 12 on 12 off deployments is and forever will be the bar is just ignorant of reality. What was normal in 2007 wasn’t normally in 97 or 87 and somehow nobody had a problem with it. What’s the magic number where we declare a pilot “experienced” by community vote?

The drone of attacking experience or inexperience does nothing but deflect conversation from reality which is people with oversight permitted this situation to operate for far too long either due to negligence or ignorance and it only became public when we burned a few aircraft in. A front office stacked with hours doesn’t change the math of the problem here or the negligence in our procedures to predict and review it.

And I’d take recency over hour count any day which is a far bigger problem for my pilot population currently.


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[M2]

FAA must do better after fatal DC Black Hawk crash, agency leader says

No shit.

"Investigators have highlighted 85 close calls around Reagan Airport in the three years before the crash that should have signaled a growing safety problem."

Again, no shit.

"NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said there clearly was an issue with identifying trends in the data the FAA collects."

Rinse and repeat the 'no shit.'

"Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said he learned that the Secret Service and U.S. Navy triggered a rash of collision alarms in planes around Reagan Airport on March 1 while testing anti-drone technology that used a similar frequency to the one used by planes’ warning systems. Cruz said that happened despite a warning from the FAA against doing it."

OK, this is the first time I'm hearing this!   Of course, it happened after the accident, but have we not learned anything yet?!?

"The U.S. Army’s head of aviation Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman acknowledged that as of Thursday morning helicopters were still flying over the nation’s capital with a key system broadcasting their locations turned off during most missions because it deemed them sensitive."

Apparently not...

"The Army says the helicopter unit’s highest-priority mission is evacuating top government officials in the event of an attack."

Then maybe their highest priority needs to be getting those "top government officials" to where they are going without putting them and innocent civilians into the Potomac!

"Rocheleau then said the FAA will immediately require all aircraft flying near Reagan Airport to broadcast their locations. The 'ADS-B out data' is designed to let air traffic controllers track a helicopter’s location."

That's a step...

"Homendy said it is also important to inspect that equipment to make sure it actually works. The helicopter involved in this collision had not transmitted any location data for 730 days. When the NTSB checked the rest of the unit’s helicopters after the crash, it found eight of them that hadn’t transmitted since 2023."

That's another step...

"Homendy said she’s not sure what the Army was doing with any close call reports it received or how closely it was monitoring whether its helicopters violated altitude limits during their flights like the one that collided with the jetliner did. She said most of the safety conversations at the battalion level were focused on “OSHA slips, trips and falls.”"

YGTBSM!  Please someone tell me she got her info wrong! 🤬🤬🤬

[Majestik Møøse]

Have some recency dealing with FAA entities and developing (negotiating) routes to get through busy Class B. I asked if they have some fancy 3D visualization systems to show all the arrivals and departures so we could thread the needle better. I’m sure you know the answer, it’s pencils and a map.

[Lawman]

Have some recency dealing with FAA entities and developing (negotiating) routes to get through busy Class B. I asked if they have some fancy 3D visualization systems to show all the arrivals and departures so we could thread the needle better. I’m sure you know the answer, it’s pencils and a map.

Started building visualizations in Mace/Armor for that exact reason.

It’s these old dinosaur retirees that think the old way is fine.


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[disgruntledemployee]

CNN article on a T-38 doing 350mph (typo?) at 800' near Reagan and tripping an RA on a Delta takeoff.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/delta-military-jet-close-call-dca/index.html

[uhhello]

1 hour ago, disgruntledemployee said:

CNN article on a T-38 doing 350mph (typo?) at 800' near Reagan and tripping an RA on a Delta takeoff.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/delta-military-jet-close-call-dca/index.html

 

[Majestik Møøse]

1 hour ago, disgruntledemployee said:

CNN article on a T-38 doing 350mph (typo?) at 800' near Reagan and tripping an RA on a Delta takeoff.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/delta-military-jet-close-call-dca/index.html

300 kts x 1.15 = 345 mph

Root cause is always planning, if they really needed that run-in heading they probably should’ve had a 1m ground stop at DCA. Pure speculation and conjecture.

[Standby]

This is the pendulum swinging the other way. 2ish miles of lateral sep and 500’ vertical…non-event. Copy it’s an RA, but the system is predictive/lag tool and as it turns out, a fighter-type jet will trigger extraneous advisories based on speed/maneuver capabilities.