The way this airspace is set up is very unusual where there is only about 150 feet of separation between the approach and the helicopter route. Normally there would be at least 500 feet and more likely 1000 feet of separation. Also the controller did call out the traffic but he wasn’t that specific about where it was, just that it was a CRJ, which you can’t even really tell at night. He also didn’t call out the traffic to the jet. To be fair to the controller though, he was working two positions simultaneously due to a controller shortage. He might have been able to be more helpful if he wasn’t so busy that night.

The controller was specific about the location of the CRJ during initial communication with the Blackhawk.

> Traffic just south of the Woodrow Bridge, a CRJ, it's 1,200 feet setting up for Runway 33.

Subsequent communications in the following minute from both parties were not specific.

How much or what parts of atc can be automated?

If have a feeling it’s what musk will try to do.

Then people will die.

Always did.

Somehow this area looks ripe for some automation - extremely difficult for human brain, tons of rules. Being risky makes even more sense to automate.

That article makes a very valid point that they need new technology and training, but can't due to internal failures and the whims of congress.

What happened with this accident is a wake call but nothing will change -- the current administration is interested in destroying institutions, not building them up.

I imagine this one hits pretty close to home for Congresscritters. You might see some action.

> You might see some action.

One would hope, but it's a tricky thing to do and it's so much easier to do media performances for your constituents.

TFA mentioned that they tried modernizing way back and it was a failure. To make it succeed would require both adequate funding and good governance -- both currently in short supply.

Ironically, DOGE would be perfect for this role if it did what it says on the tin (the GE part of the name). My spidey sense on that it that it's really about doing a Jack Welch number on disliked organizations. But hey, Welch made GE into the powerhouse it is today so there's hope! /s

GE powerhouse? Beg to differ. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/26/jack-welch-screwed-up-g...

I had a trailing `/s` there. It was not a compliment on my part.

Ah, didn't notice. My bad.

Visual separation at night in dense airspace has no checks and no margin for error. There is no way for anyone to tell whether the crew is tracking the correct aircraft or whether they are correctly guessing its attitude etc.

That practice is plainly asking for an accident to happen.

In the UK I know traffic is indicated with a relative position and altitude: “traffic at your 10 o’clock, 2 miles, altitude 1500 feet”.

The ATC for the Reagan crash did not indicate a relative or absolute position, only referencing “the CRJ”, which might be hard to identify in the dark, and the helicopter pilot may have assumed he “had visual”, but was looking at a different aircraft.

I keep seeing comments that no relative position was given but ATC does provide detail in their initial communications, though not subsequent.

> Traffic just south of the Woodrow Bridge, a CRJ, it's 1,200 feet setting up for Runway 33.

Where is the Woodrow bridge? Are all pilots expected to know this flying around the Reagan airport? There are multiple bridges on the Potomac.

The helicopter crew resided in this area and this is one of the largest, widest, most-used bridges in the area.

TCAS has limitations as you suspect. Below 1000 feet it doesn't make Resolution Advisories (RA) because of the very real risk that it could steer a pilot into terrain. Below 500 feet it doesn't deliver aural warnings, only the visual ones. These are both limitations of the tech as it exists right now, and in theory pilots should be aware of this and be extremely cautious.

Personally I'm in favor of the "Swiss cheese" model of accidents, in which a lot of errors might routinely happen, but they're blocked from leading to an accident by other measures. When however the holes in the cheese line up... boom. There's evidence that there was a culture of accepting near-misses along this route, there's evidence that the training flight ignored best practices, there was a single ATC person managing rotary and fixed wing in that airspace, it was night time, the jet was making an approach to the shorter runway, etc etc.

On any given night one or two of these factors might have lined up, but not all of that. That night however they all lined up, and people died. This notion of failure in depth is the driving force between the total nature of an NTSB investigation, they don't want to find the LAST failure, they want to find ALL of the failures.

Flying the helicopter mission with only one crew chief may also have contributed if the chef was distracted or not looking/watching out the left side of the helicopter for the airplane, possibly looking out the right side and/or watching the airport.