Comment by YetAnotherNick

Coincidentally, Nathan Fielder is currently doing an entire season of The Rehearsal based on the premise that a number of flight crashes occurred after the co-pilot failed to contradict or take controls from the pilot.

> Nathan Fielder studies airliner black box transcripts in which the first officer feels too intimidated to challenge the captain, leading to fatal crashes due to pilot error. He discusses this with John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member, who had once recommended roleplay simulation to improve pilot communication.

Really good season so far!

> I think it was because of military egos and ranks, the warrant officer didn't force corrected the Captain.

I'd be shocked if the US military didn't provide crew resource management training for their aviators. This is exactly the kind of situation CRM is designed to prevent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management

> Also why is training happening in such dangerous path where even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart.

Forget training, why is this happening under any circumstances ever? If a military transport mission is ever so critical that you're willing to fly it within 30 meters of a civilian airlines it seems to me that you should just close the airspace to civil air traffic at that point.

While I can’t speak to their individual temperaments, this is not an issue in the Army. Warrant officers are probably the least likely to worry about rank being confused with authority. They have the military experience from serving in the enlisted ranks as an NCO, with the protection of being officers that are above enlisted but still fall outside the commissioned officer ranks. They aren't untouchable but are highly insulated from petty tyrants.

I don’t know why the instructor didn’t take a more forceful/active role leading up to the crash, but I don’t think rank was a contributing factor.

I don’t know if the US shares a great deal with UK armed forces, but an officer ignoring a senior NCO, especially one training them, does so very much at their own peril.

It is far more likely to be something like cognitive overload rather than a clash or personalities - you don’t get to be in that position in the first place if you have a tendency to disregard instructors.

I've personally never met a warrant officer afraid of (or even the least bit timid about) correcting a commissioned company-grade officer (O-3 in this case).

> I think it was because of military egos and ranks, the warrant officer didn't force corrected the Captain.

I think they should prohibit such type of flights when ranks are reversed. Let's imagine he would have yanked the controls and avoided the crash. Now the Captain could have said "you're insubordinate and tanked my qualification flight, there will be a price to pay".

> Also why is training happening in such dangerous path where even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart.

I'm not sure that's a correct understanding of how the approach path to the runway and the helicopter route are supposed to interact. So far as I understand, the intent was never that a helicopter and airplane were supposed to be able to happily barrel along their respective paths within worrying about running into each other. That kind of thing happens a lot in aviation, but the separation distance is much, much larger.

Instead, one was supposed to see the other and use their eyes to visually stay away (ideally by much more than 100 ft). That's what was supposed to happen here, and what the instructor pilot in the helicopter said they were doing. Visual separation is also used a lot in aviation, often in places where there are no narrowly defined paths at all, but it carries the risk of aircraft not seeing or misidentifying each other, which could be what happened here.

That's actually the crux of the matter - not only shouldn't they have done training (at night, with night vision goggles) in conditions where aircraft could be only 30 m apart, this construct of a helicopter flight corridor being within an altimeter's tolerance of the glide path for an airport runway shouldn't have been allowed to happen at all! It's unfortunate that the article focuses on who made what missteps and doesn't mention this systemic issue.

even if the instructions were followed the aircrafts could get as close as 30 m apart

This doesn't match with how I understood the ATC's instructions. The helicopter was instructed to "pass behind" the landing airliner, not pass below. I think the controller's intention was for the helicopter to hold short of passing the runway 33 flight path, and not to enter that space until the plane had crossed the river.

exploring this phenomenon is the premise of season two of "the rehearsal"

With regards to training for high tolerance situations. Places and times where a small error can have large consequences.

Yes you ease into it, the first level of training is done in a safe environment, however as the person gains competence the training moves into the domain in question, the person gains experience at doing the thing in question while being supervised. Or to put it another way.

What? You expect that their first flight through that tight corridor at night should be done alone?

In conclusion, I think it is fine in general that they were doing training on that flight path. However the fact that the both pilot and the trainer erred so badly indicates the need for better low level training and a reevaluation of the need for such a tight flight path in a civilian zone.

Update: unrelated thought, I could not decide if low or high tolerance was the term i wanted, after waffling a bit I went with high tolerance. as that is the correct engineering meaning, but really the term is ambiguous and means the different things in different domains, he has a high tolerance for alcohol means the opposite of he made a high tolerance part.