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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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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.

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