Comment by bombcar
3 months ago
I’ll bet the final NTSB report lists as a contributing factor that there was only one controller that night; a second controller might have had the time to notice the altitude was too close, or vector the helicopter behind.
No. There are also rules on who can do what.
Put another way, military aircraft, especially certain military aircraft, can do things that civilian aircraft can't.
If I were piloting a helicopter in that airspace, that ATC transcript would have been significantly different.
We should be looking at root causes. Which means we should ask the uncomfortable questions about the deference given to some military/government aircraft. But we don't want to ask those questions. So we keep quibbling around the edges by talking about ATC or Reagan firing everyone or even the ridiculous suggestion that maybe the civilian airliners could be in a hold pattern at certain times.
It would be humorous if it wasn't so tragic.
>Staffing at air traffic control tower ‘not normal’ during Washington plane crash, FAA report reveals
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/dc-plane-c...
>on Wednesday evening was also monitoring planes taking off and landing, according to the FAA report reviewed by The New York Times. These jobs are typically assigned to two different people, the outlet reported
But:
>However, the National Transportation Safety Board said they will not speculate on the causes of the crash and will release a preliminary report on the incident within 30 days.
So perhaps its not staffing. Although I don't really know what world the report is going to be going out into in 30 days.
Ultimately, I would expect the report to lay blame on both ATC and the helicopter pilot. The degree to which that blame should be allocated will be determined by the investigation. A less likely factor that could conceivably be uncovered would be some sort of controls failure that should have alerted one or all of the impacted pilots and controllers.
The entire point of Human ATC is that those rules are breached regularly in normal operations and we still expect traffic to be routed safely despite that
One complaint I've seen is that the ATC should not have let the helicopter do visual spacing in that regime, that it was somewhat careless and unsafe and possibly discouraged. If the ATC operator was overloaded with work, they would be incentivized to "outsource" the spacing management to the helicopter who would then be able to screw it up by "seeing" the wrong plane. I can see the merits of the argument but it would take the NTSB to have the right knowledge to confirm or deny it.
that it was somewhat careless and unsafe and possibly discouraged
This is what I mean. Clearly, people are unfamiliar with what actions certain military/government pilots are able to take in that airspace. It's rules. It's not about being encouraged or discouraged or overworked or underworked or rainbow farting unicorns. That's not how ATC works.
I would want to change the rules that allow military pilots to do this sort of thing. Or at least, have a reasoned conversation about why it's necessary to allow them to do this sort of thing. But that sort of conversation is difficult. So everyone wants to talk about everything else instead. The issue being that everything else is very likely not the root problem.
I hope when the reports do come out we can stop this nonsense about ATC, or Reagan being a moron, or civilian airliner holding patterns or whatever else and actually have the hard sit down on that issue.
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How could this be anything to do with Reagan firing them? The Reagan thing was 1981. Air traffic controllers have a mandatory retirement age of 56. Anyone under the age of 56 in 2025 would have been under the age of 12 in 1981.
> How could this be anything to do with Reagan firing them?
Echoes.
The fired workers were replaced as rapidly as possible. That would result in massive change in the age distribution of controllers. It takes a few years to train a new controller so lets assume the youngest new hires were 22. New controllers have to be 31 and under.
Let's take the best case and assume all the new controllers are 22 through 31 and are evenly distributed in that range, and started in 1982. The group will start reaching 56 in 2007 and finish reaching 56 in 2016. That's over 11000 controllers retiring over a 10 year span.
I haven't been able to find data on the actual distribution of ages for the replacements. I'd guess that it was skewed younger, which could make that echo narrower. Maybe 11000 controllers retiring over 5 years.
If they hired enough people to replace those that group too will show up as another echo, but more spread out.
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I would bet on "Normalization of deviance", such a close altitude separation should probably just not exists (default is 1000ft).
If it had become a norm then a second controller would probably not change anything.