Plane Crash In DC

Dr.Sid said:
200ft vertical separation is not safe in the first place. The idea was there will be enough horizontal separation.
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Agreed. The media obsession with the relative altitude is a rapidly reddening herring. The problem is not that the helicopter flew too high or that the airliner flew too low. The problem is that the helicopter did not fly behind the airliner as instructed, likely due to misidentification of traffic. The NTSB was careful to say that the regulatory vertical separation rules (1000 feet in some cases, 2000 feet in others) is still the norm, helicopter route ceilings notwithstanding.
 
Because when I think of 'rapid safety upgrades' for anational air traffic control system, I immediately think of Elon's Tec Bros on the DOGE team.


Elon says
"With the support of President Donald Trump, the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.
Just a few days ago, the FAA’s primary aircraft safety notification system failed for several hours!"
 
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What are these upgrades?
Who is reviewing these system changes?
When are they going to complete the review?
 
Andy_Ross said:
Because when I think of 'rapid safety upgrades' for anational air traffic control system, I immediately think of Elon's Tec Bros on the DOGE team.


Elon says
"With the support of President Donald Trump, the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.
Just a few days ago, the FAA’s primary aircraft safety notification system failed for several hours!"
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This is the NOTAM system, not operational traffic control. There is a backup. It goes down on average once a year, often due to human error. It's an old, rickety system that could very well stand to be replaced. Musk's inexperienced code monkeys would not be my first choice to do the work. In general, a lot of old, rickety systems need replacing. The reason they've been allowed to operate for so long is usually because upgrades are usually early victims of budget cuts. I would rather have a budget allocation for an upgrade and for that upgrade to proceed according to best practices for system upgrades, on a sane schedule executed by knowledgeable, accountable people. "Move fast and break things" would not help here.
 
Andy_Ross said:
What are these upgrades?
Who is reviewing these system changes?
When are they going to complete the review?
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Indeed, making a bunch of teenage college drop-outs sleep on the floor until they have "working" code is not typically how safety-critical systems are engineered or upgraded. I'm happy to concede that the NOTAM system is old, rickety, and in need of an upgrade. That doesn't mean I'm just going to rubber-stamp Elon "Let's Crash Twitter" Musk's plan.
 
JayUtah said:
Agreed. The media obsession with the relative altitude is a rapidly reddening herring. The problem is not that the helicopter flew too high or that the airliner flew too low. The problem is that the helicopter did not fly behind the airliner as instructed, likely due to misidentification of traffic...
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Thanks, that makes sense.
 
JayUtah said:
Agreed. The media obsession with the relative altitude is a rapidly reddening herring. The problem is not that the helicopter flew too high or that the airliner flew too low. The problem is that the helicopter did not fly behind the airliner as instructed, likely due to misidentification of traffic.
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It's kind of a Swiss cheese model. Had the pilot been at or below the recommended altitude OR had the correct traffic in sight OR had passed behind the traffic, the collision would not have occurred. It took all three factors for the collision to occur.

The more I think about it, the more I think the accident came down to things: the helicopter not having the correct traffic in sight and the controller not having ascertained that the helicopter had the correct traffic in sight. The latter might be difficult enough to do that visual separation should, at least under some conditions (eg, night in crowded airspace), not be allowed.
 
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Donald's announcement on ATC

We're all gonna sit down & do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based ... you can't hook up land to satellites and you can't hook up satellites to land, it doesn't work ... let's spend less money and build a great system done by 2 or 3 companies ... when I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me ... I won't tell you what country, but I use a system from another country.
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Video in link.
 
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says

Secretary Sean Duffy
@SecDuffy

Big News - Talked to the DOGE team. They are going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.
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Donald is going to give the contrzcts for a new ATC system to Elon isn't he?

Part o his payoff.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Donald is going to give the contrzcts for a new ATC system to Elon isn't he?
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Quite likely. I remember the last time the ATC system was revamped. Even with the collective expertise of the entire industry, it was a massive undertaking. Giving the job to Elon's kids will be a disaster and will cost lives. I'm not opposed to upgrading ATC infrastructure, since quite a lot of U.S. infrastructure needs work. But the Silicon Valley "Move fast and break things" model will not work here. You need to actually engineer it. Further, if a Musk company does the get the job, Musk would be in the position of government oversight of a contract he himself is fulfilling. It will be instructive to see how this plays out.
 
Looks like you need a new system, when Donald lands in his plane his captain tells him he uses a system from another country.
 
How do you use a foreign ATC system when you are landing at an American airport?

He seems to be conflating navigation with traffic control
 
Andy_Ross said:
How do you use a foreign ATC system when you are landing at an American airport?

He seems to be conflating navigation with traffic control
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Literally anything is possible. He could be confusing ATC with his pilot's preferred brand of headset for all we know.
 
jt512 said:
It's kind of a Swiss cheese model.
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The beauty and power of the Swiss cheese model is that it always applies. You just parameterize the number of slices and the arrangement of holes.

jt512 said:
The more I think about it, the more I think the accident came down to things: the helicopter not having the correct traffic in sight and the controller not having ascertained that the helicopter had the correct traffic in sight. The latter might be difficult enough to do that visual separation should, at least under some conditions (eg, night in crowded airspace), not be allowed.
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Agreed. This all falls under "situational awareness" which ends up being a big category of operator-error explanations for accidents. I could teach a whole class on this. And in fact, I have. If the prevailing theory of traffic misidentification holds up as evidence is developed, the protocol for establishing visual separation should probably come under fire. The controller really doesn't have much else to go on except the flight crew's word (i.e., belief) that they have an accurate on-site picture of the traffic. As you well know, it's one thing to sit in a dark room looking at sanitized blips on a screen, and quite another thing to be swiveling your head in a cockpit trying to see traffic at night while at the same time flying an aircraft.

But one of the principles I teach is the notion of essential complexity. We can certainly play armchair flight controller and imagine what individual things could have been done here and there to prevent this one accident. But we have to look at a broader picture and decide to what degree the situation might have been essentially uncontrolllable. It's common (but ill-advised) to erode operational margins in order to improve production. This airport has a history of steadily increasing traffic. The helicopter service has a history of steadily increasing demand. The ATC service has a history of chronically inadequate staffing.

When people ask questions like, "Can we squeeze in a few more commercial flights?" or "Can we add one more helicopter route?" or "Can we get by with one less controller?" the answer is frequently "Yes" with the tacit understanding that you're spending a little bit of your operational margin in order to improve production. When all you erode is the margin, your normal operational rules will generally continue to achieve safety. This fools you into thinking you can operate safely over the long term without such a big margin. You can keep going as long as nothing goes wrong. But the point of the margin is to absorb the effect of things you didn't foresee. With a smaller margin, exceptional circumstances have the predicted detrimental effects.

To bring this back around, you're often either removing cheese slices or widening the holes because you falsely believe you have a history of getting away with it safely.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Literally anything is possible. He could be confusing ATC with his pilot's preferred brand of headset for all we know.
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That's a non-trivial concern. At NASA's Mission Control there was (and maybe still is) a semi-official cottage industry among electrical technicians for keeping Apollo-era headsets working. Apparently they were so well-liked among flight controllers that no effort should be spared to preserve them.

As I mentioned in another thread, I think, the system that has received attention lately is the NOTAM system, which isn't involved in the core operation of deconflicting the national airspace. It's the system that manages warnings to air crews about possibly hazardous conditions such as Starships re-entering the atmosphere in pieces. It is an essential system, since pilots will not want to fly without knowing what hazards are on their routes. But not quite as real-time essential as traffic management.

That said, the devil is in the details. As I hope many here will agree, when you propose to replace a complex (but ailing) system with a new system, you are trading one set of known bugs in the ailing system for another set of unknown bugs in the new system. That's not a categorical argument for never upgrading a system, because the premise is that the new bugs will be more tractable over the long term. But it's something that has to be accommodated in the planning and engineering of the replacement. Elon Musk has a terrible track record of building reliable solutions by himself. No one cares if Twitter goes down for a few hours. A few of its addicts may stomp and whine, but life goes on. And if Musk wants to blow up his own launch pad, that's his risk and his expense. But the job of safely engineering a critical system appears to be something Musk doesn't do instinctively. You don't want to move fast and break things when it's an infrastructure we all depend on. You want to move slowly and check your footing at every step.
 
Indeed, my great-grandmother lived to be 101 and was mentally sharp until the day she died. However, in President Trump's case he was never very sharp. And there are clear signs of mental decline. Ageist jokes aside, we should be paying that close attention to him.
 
JayUtah said:
Indeed, my great-grandmother lived to be 101 and was mentally sharp until the day she died. However, in President Trump's case he was never very sharp. And there are clear signs of mental decline. Ageist jokes aside, we should be paying that close attention to him.
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Hm, he doesn't seem that much different from the first time. Just some new hateful vengeance, a manifesto from Project 2025, and nothing to lose.
 
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