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Comment by mbrameld

7 months ago

> As much as the article tries to balance it out that the controllers should have done more it seems that ultimately the pilot flying was distracted and not following instructions from the instructor sitting next to them. It happened at least twice based on the captured recordings.

I'm a helicopter flight instructor, although I've never flown in the military. There are 5 magic words the instructor can, and I would argue is obligated to, use to fix the situation: "I have the flight controls"

Knowing they were 100 feet high and flying into the approach corridor with an aircraft on short final and not taking the controls is an enormous failure on the part of the instructor. The student was likely task-saturated and the instructor should have recognized that.

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mbrameld

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rainsford  7 months ago

> Knowing they were 100 feet high and flying into the approach corridor with an aircraft on short final and not taking the controls is an enormous failure on the part of the instructor.

Even if they were out of the helicopter airway, based at least on radio transmissions the instructor thought they had the landing aircraft in sight and presumably thought they could stay separated from it visually. I would agree with you if staying at the exact right altitude and position was being thought of as the primary factor keeping them separated from traffic they couldn't see, but it seems different when they were operating under visual separation and thought they could see the aircraft.

That said, I fly Skyhawks not Blackhawks (or any kind of helicopter), so maybe the expectations are different in the rotary wing world. But my experience is that a 100ft altitude deviation is not an "instructors takes the controls" situation in an airplane unless you're about to run into something. Of course they were in this case, but it's not obvious the instructor knew that.

  • rogerrogerr  7 months ago

    I also fly Skyhawks - it seems to me, as a helicopter outsider, that they think in hundreds of feet where we fixed wing pilots think in thousands of feet. It would be interesting to hear from a RW instructor, especially one from the army, whether a 100ft altitude deviation is more akin to a student deviation 100ft or 1000ft in the fixed wing context.

rconti  7 months ago

I was also struck by

| He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank.

Now, I'd love to _hear_ the actual comment/instruction here. He may have been hedging because he was trying to piece together the stepped on "pass behind" direction from ATC. But I also wonder if it's an inherent problem when the student outranks the instructor?

  • aaronbaugher  7 months ago

    Seems like a lot of people have never had to deal with a higher-ranked person who might ruin the underling's career if shown up in a particularly embarrassing way. It's easy to imagine that prospect causing the instructor to hesitate just enough for disaster.