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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   37087 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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A plane crashed into an army helicopter over Reagan airport and everyone died. Of course, before the black boxes can be dug up come the recriminations. Trump blamed DEI; posters here may be familiar with the case of the FAA hiring lawsuit over a 'biographical questionnaire' designed to increase diversity in air traffic controllers. This leads to the always fun "please let it be a _____" game played by ideologues on both sides. Why not just let a sober investigation determine the causal factors first? And of course you can't draw conclusions about a 'competency crisis' simply from headline grabbing anecdotes. The point of moving away from DEI and such systems was to tamper down racial tensions instead of focusing even more attention on it.

Too bad the adults in the "room" whenever a disaster strikes on social media are drowned out by the tribal people. One tribe blames DEI and looking at mastodon yesterday the other tribe is putting the blame Trumps federal employee shake up. Fuck that, it is a tragedy most likely a tragic accident and the tribes takes to social media to score political points and if someone tries to say that this isn't the time get shouted down by immature idiots in both camps.

My take is that most of the people that are trying score points haven't grown up yet!

In a way that is impressive. I am not sure I have the skill to ram a chopper into a moving plane on purpose (only played sims, never flown a real one). So there should indeed be thorough investigation how this fuck up happened. Waiting for the reports. From what I have heard - it seems to be on the chopper crew

They were probably too high, but I'd discourage the take that it was severe negligence on their part alone. DC airspace is a nightmare. It was an accident waiting to happen because of the incredibly dense traffic, and they likely had no way of seeing the threat from their position. The helicopter was warned about a plane and most likely was fixated on another one ahead of them. They were also wearing NVGs which can be a detriment in this kind of scenario

The Left narrative is already that this is the direct consequence of people quitting after Trump demanded everyone work in the office. But Air Traffic Controller are all in the tower at the airport anyways, right? This was never a remote position.

Regardless of the sanity of that narrative, that would sadly be the reigning narrative unless the Right pushed something else. What else do they have to push? Well, this lawsuit from ten years ago and DEI.

You may be surprised to know that the tower is for managing ground traffic. the real ATC is in the basement in a dark room watching a hundred screens. (Source Father is a pilot and was an ATC for a few years in the 80's. I've seen the rooms)

No one has to push anything. Sometimes horrible accidents happen like the recent Jeju Air crash. We can learn things from them that have nothing to do with DEI, like "don't put concrete barriers at the end of runways". If the left wants to push "this is because he fired the head of TSA" (a real take) then just point out how ludicrous that is.

Unfortunately for you, you can still absolutely wring a "compentency crisis" headline from this, assuming the plane in question was a Boeing.

The plane is not at fault most likely, it had the "right of way" and wasn't really supposed to be looking for stray helicopters coming in from weird angles in what is supposed to be a controlled airspace.

It's the helicopter that ended up where it shouldn't be, due to the crew failing to see the airplane, miscommunication between the helicopter and the ATC, or the ATC screwing up badly. The preliminary independent analysis (aka internet talk) seems to hint that among other things, the ATC did most likely screw up.

For the record, the plane was a Bombardier CRJ700, developed and built in Canada, so no Boeing connection there.

Why? Is there any evidence that there was a mechanical failure on the plane?

Most likely not, I guess I just wanted to point out that your ideal world is even further away than you thought (sorry).

I consider this the equivilent of blaming global warming whenever a hurricane or wildfire hits. You can tell a convincing story about how these processes increase the risk from their associated disasters, but it's still pretty nebulous whether any given event can be attributed to them.

The takeaway for me is to avoid operating helicopters in crowded airspace. I think this should retroactively update our assesment of the FAA's airspace restrictions in response to Hurricane Helene.

Not really. Emergency operations have a very difficult risk tolerance than regular ones, as well as much lower stakes (a handful of guys in a helicopter crash they signed up for vs a passenger plane full of people who didn't)

I went flying in a small plane in San Francisco recently, and it was freaky how close they let us get to jets full of hundreds of people just because the pilot had some sort of instrument rating. Multiply engine/control/pilot failure in small aircraft by the number of SFO passenger-flights a day, and you get a much higher expected fatality rate than a few weeks of letting people fly supplies into small towns.

If you were in a Class B, you had TCAS.

I hate to be the technocrat nerd here, but TCAS is literally magic -- it directly spits instructions for both planes to avoid a collision entirely autonomously. It's such magic that the FAA has instructed pilots to immediately obey its commands and then when possible inform ATC.

Interesting, thanks. That sounds like it was really ahead of its time when it came out. Remembering all the collision disasters in the 70s and 80s there must have been a lot of pressure to come up with it.

According to this Reuters article, TCAS does not function below 1100 feet, which is where this crash occurred.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=huVFZ__q2rI

It does function, but it only gives audible alarms not resolution advisories (e.g. it doesn't say CLIMB or DESCEND).

It seems blindingly obvious that helicopter training missions shouldn't be passing through the one area in all of DC where they could plausibly hit a passenger airplane.

The only other option is having said helicopters fly over all the residential and administrative stuff in the area. "Along the river and under the planes" is likely the least-bad choice, not because it's good but because the other options are worse.

The real question is why there's a military helicopter base in Washington DC, but there's probably a reason for that as well.

If army helicopter pilots can't be sent to conduct routine flights in common use air corridors, what makes you think they can go to war? Training flight doesn't mean these guys were fresh out of flight school, it's something all pilots need to do to maintain their standards, and the military has plenty of legitimate reasons to operate in places like DC that they need to be ready for.

The alternative, where no one ever flies unless safety can be abundantly guaranteed, is that military pilots never get a chance to fly.

DC airspace is widely regarded as a mess from what I hear. The problem isn't that the army sends people to get flight hours in places with airports (every metropolitan area)

The alternative, where no one ever flies unless safety can be abundantly guaranteed, is that military pilots never get a chance to fly.

Or have training and proficiency maintenance flights launch from air stations outside of congested civilian air corridors. It's obviously difficult to keep military facilities the Goldilocks distance from major cities, but shuttling pilots from one base to another seems preferable to risking collisions like this. (Anyone happen to know if Navy pilots stationed at Coronado, across San Diego Bay from San Diego international airport, drive to the Marine air station on the other side of San Diego to do precisely this? I don't know what's around the Marine air station, but the Naval airfield and civilian airport look awfully close on a map.)

If army helicopter pilots can't be sent to conduct routine flights in common use air corridors, what makes you think they can go to war?

Accidents happen. We seem to read about a fatal training accident routinely a few times a year.

But the civilian casualties of military training accidents should be zero.

Counterpoint: I can think of a few potential reasons helicopters would want to fly over the Potomac (ease of navigation, soft landing in case of emergency, less concern about collateral damage in case of emergency, etc.). We didn't know until today which side was more important.

I'd agree with all that EXCEPT for the one area where the planes come in and out of the runway. That's not the entire Potomac, it's perhaps a ten miles radius around the airport. Avoid that area and you put the odds of hitting an airliner at zero.

Or, rather than tell them to look out for planes, tell them to stop and wait until there's a fifteen minute period with no planes.

A ten mile radius around DCA covers the entire extent of the river adjacent to the District of Columbia, and in fact most of the District. And a fifteen minute period for no planes at DCA would take longer than your helicopter has fuel, most times of day. There need to be practical solutions, not precautionary ones.

"Don't let helicopters (or anyone else for that matter) pass over/under other traffic with <200 ft proposed headroom, no matter what the pilots tell you" seems practical enough.

The preliminary speculations I’ve heard so far blame the helicopter pilot, but I have no idea how true they are.

Early twitter speculated it was an incompetent trans "woman" pilot that may have intentionally crashed the chopper. I've seen other sources (I like https://x.com/sentdefender) that says this is nonsense but now two of the pilots names have been released and the third is being withheld "on request of the family." Which does not soothe the twitter beast.

Wouldn't "incompetent" and "intentional" be opposing each other here?

Moderator of /r/army pretty much confirms it

I am aware of the name.
Do not get cute. Do not post it. Do not hint at it. Do not describe her background.

Don’t do it.

But isn't it going to be a matter of public record?

Eventually, sure. And when that eventual day comes it won't be as vitriolic a response as it will RIGHT NOW.

Anyone that can't understand why the family has asked that and why we're respecting those wishes can see themselves out.

/images/17383745212879014.webp

The surreal part of this sort of virtue signalling is that while publicly bragging that they're keeping the secret, they have to let on that it's an explosive truth that the MAGA chuds would salivate over. It's exactly how BART had to announce they were no longer releasing security footage because it "aided racists," rather than saying nothing. The built-in admission of guilt is necessary for the virtue signal to work; you can't have people mistaking that you're doing it out of principle rather than tribal allegiance.

"You call it virtue-signalling, I just call it being a good person" is a common gotcha, but it's easy to counter when behavior is optimized for public status-seeking rather than effectiveness. "Verily I say unto you, They have their reward"

https://news.sky.com/story/captain-rebecca-lobach-third-helicopter-pilot-who-died-in-washington-crash-was-former-white-house-aide-13301558

She's clearly not trans.

I wouldn't make much of the fact that she was a woman either, at least not unless we get some actual hard evidence that DEI was relevant. The white male pilot supervising her, who we hear on the voice recordings, does not seem like he saw the plane either (he was probably looking at the wrong plane when ATC asked him if he had the CRJ in sight). And surely he's equally culpable for the fact that they were flying 100 feet too high.

Plus just the fact they "merely" needed to be a little bit lower while crossing the final approach of a civilian plane says a lot about the situation quite apart from the individual helo pilots.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/01/female-army-black-hawk-helicopter-named-washington-aircrash/

I haven't been following it but other than the comments here that's the only story I've seen about this, and The Telegraph isn't the kind of paper to shy away from reporting whether someone is trans.

From the pictures I think she’d be very much in the higher percentile of passing trans women if she was.

That doesn't suggest anything more than a fear that the family could be harassed if the identity is known.

They are likely correct. ATC advises PAT25 about the plane in its path, PAT25 acknowledges that he has the plane in sight and accepts visual separation.

It is likely (of course in time we'll know more) that PAT25 saw a different plane when it told ATC it had the traffic in sight.

Did ATC give a heading to signify which plane was in concern? Are they supposed to say something like "there is a plane in your path at your 1?"

There's a concept in reviewing events like this that there are typically multiple points of failure, and many things to change. There shouldn't be one single point of failure that could cause this, there are multiple things that went wrong here. (Even if the thing that went wrong here is, "not designing something with multiple points of failure".)

You can listen to the audio yourself :-)

No, they didn't give a heading, they just said "in your path, go under the CRJ"

And yes, in some sense, it's always swiss cheese, but in another valid sense there is a difference between failure of a primary safety mechanism and failure of a failsafe/mitigation.

All the news articles I've read state that air traffic control received no response from the helicopter when queried in the leadup to the crash, so that probably fuels the speculation.

This is wrong. Helicopter was communicating with tower. Tower was transmitting on VHF, and helicopter on UHF. There is no recording of helicopter yet because we only VHF ones now. Within a couple of days/weeks we’ll have recording including heli pilot responses.

The sober investigation is usually too late. First impressions matter.

You saw a very similar phenomenon re: the Grenfell tower in London, which burnt down and killed many poor immigrants living in it: the final report (produced 2 years later) primarily blamed the companies who supplied inflammable cladding while secretly faking the standard fire-safety tests. But the initial publicity blamed the local council, because it was Conservative, and the council didn’t realise how much they needed a good PR game until a few days in, when it was far too late.

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