What could have caused the DC air accident that killed 67 people

The Fatal Midair Collision on Wednesday evening between an army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and one US airline Passenger jet moment away from landing in Washington, DC’s Reagan National Airport was a shocking and extremely rare event, according to experts who believe that human faults are the most likely explanation behind the tragedy that claimed dozens of life.

In the sound from the tower at Reagan, which communicates with the helicopter crew, a controller can be heard if they have the aircraft in the visual area and tells the hacker to pass behind Jet. Moment later beat the two in each other, Kills all 64 people on the planethat flew in from Wichita, Kansas and the three service members on board the black hawk. On Thursday, officials with the National Transportation Safety Board told reporters that they were not yet sure of the tragedy’s root cause.

Philip Greensspun, a MIT professor and former Delta Pilot who flew the same Canadair Regional Jet involved, touched on the same airport countless times. According to his mind, the crash was probably the result of human errors derived from a confluence of factors. Head among the possibilities, he assumed, could have been a misunderstanding between air traffic control units and the Black Hawk pilots. Additional composition factors may have included visual distractions, incorrect assumptions from controllers about Black Hawk’s intentions and idiosyncraries that are inherent in the collision warning devices on board both aircraft.

Greensspun-which is also a FAA certified helicopter instructor and has trained black hawk pilots to fly civil hackers-has spent hundreds of hours piloting Helos around Boston’s Logan Airport and said it would be very rare to have to cross the approach or departure. “

“You usually try to avoid it, if possible,” he told The IndependentWhile they note that helicopters in the DC area still “inevitably cross the trails of the aircraft” and have for decades without colliding. (Still, About two -thirds Of the rare Midair collisions that occur, occur under final strategy.)

Among the further questions that could have contributed to Wednesday’s collision, Greensspun pointed to a potential misunderstanding between air traffic controllers and Black Hawk pilots, who were commissioned to keep the sight on American Airlines CRJOne of several in the area at that time and maintains visual separation.

But black hawk pilots fly with helmets, and often, at night, use night glasses. Helmets reduce peripheral vision significantly, as well as goggles, which can also make it more difficult to see lightly lit objects against dark backgrounds, such as an airplane in a dark sky with its landing lights burning. When the aircraft got up on a slip road, ready to land, the helicopter should have had an easier time to get out of the way, but not, according to Greensspun.

“I am 99 percent sure that Black Hawk (the crew) was confused about which aircraft they talked about,” Greensspun said.

On that note he wondered why the control tower did not warn the black hawk That it had to immediately deviate from the course it was on and give them a stronger warning than just asking, about 20 seconds before the influence, if it had CRJ in sight. The Black Hawk crew replied that yes, it did, but there were several aircraft nearby and Greensspun believes they probably referred to the wrong plan.

The controls at such a busy airport “are about as good as you can get,” according to Greensspun, who said that the pilots at the controls of an aircraft are also top level, and that Army Black Hawk pilots “are far above average.”

The situation on Wednesday was “completely routine”, and one as air traffic control, or ATC, was almost certainly “very comfortable with.”

“It’s a shame, because air traffic controllers are really excellent people, but after 70 plus years of attempts, human excellence is just enough,” said Greensspun, noting that those who work in ATC Towers “work, in principle, in principle, with the 1950s technology. ”

In the same way, Greenspan also believes that aircraft cockpits need a major update. A number of factors, including the long development cycles involved in the manufacture of commercial and military aircraft, mean that the systems used are commonly located even inexpensive consumer quality available to the masses.

For this purpose, Matt Cox, who flew the F/A-18 Hornet fighter aircraft for the US Navy before he switched to the private industry, that his Volvo is “much more advanced, in terms of technology” than $ 70 million which he piloted while serving in the military.

“Avionics in the horn was designed in the 80s and 90s,” Cox told The Independent. “The Avionics package in a 757 cockpit was designed several decades ago.”

Nevertheless, the components that are currently in place have been everything but have been perfected since the aviation dawn 120 years ago, according to Cox, whose company, Beacon Aidevelops the next generation automated ”Co-pilot“Software for both the commercial sector and the military.

In the beginning, COX explained, mechanical error accounted for 80 percent to 90 percent of aircraft accidents, while 80 to 90 percent of accidents today are caused by human errors.

“Engines are more reliable, systems have several layoffs, as a society we have pushed all these causes down,” he said. “But during the 120 years, the human brain did not have a similar renaissance.”

Human pilots have the task of making the right decision, as close as possible to 100 percent of the time, which means “hoping that the helicopter crew finds the right plan (out through the window) and does all the right things” to avoid beating it, according to to Cox.

But he claimed: “Even the most skilled pilots will make human mistakes, because they are human. We have wanted people to have a lot of control, and it has worked to get us into a great security record today, ”Cox said. “But it won’t keep us on the security item we want.”

Full autonomy in the cockpit is still “far away”, Cox continued, but he said: “We believe there are any progress that exists to bring to the cockpit along with human pilots, driver assisted things, to enhance their capacity and to help them to their jobs better. Make an automatic gearbox a bad driver to a good

What happened specifically, Wednesday’s air disaster Was “a bad f ** k-up”, according to Mike Henderson, who owns an Academy Academy in Livermore, California, and testifies as an expert witness to aviation accidents.

“If you were to try to hit an airplane with a helicopter it’s pretty hard,” Henderson told The Independent. “Heaven is a big place. That said, collisions are more likely to happen where aircraft are the most dense. “

The American Airlines plane “was full tabs, wheels down, in about 30 seconds, they would touch asphalt, and this chopper cuts in front of it,” Henderson said. “Someone screwed.”

It is still far too early to assign the indication of what happened, according to Greensspun, which said: “Most aviation accidents are (the result of) an accident chain,” he said. “You need more than one person to screw up … it really just shows that people are fallable.”

One thing is clear to him: Hane is not the obligation.

Greensspun pushed back President Donald Trump’s assertion On Thursday, the diversity, capital and inclusion programs related to the employment of air traffic controls had something to do with the deadly crash.

“I don’t think that Dei is a factor here,” Greensspun said, emphasizing that the incident occurred in the airspace in class B, the most busy and most restrictive in the country. “There are 37 Bravo-Class airports in the United States, and it is largely a merit based … So yes, I really don’t think it can be a factor.”