Reagan National Airport Black Hawk-CRJ crash

by philg

Friends have been asking me about this evening’s crash between a U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter and a Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) that was on final approach to DCA (Reagan National).

It’s a terrible tragedy, of course, and has led to speculation on X regarding terrorism. A review of the ATC recording shows that there was plenty of room for human error. Because the liveatc.net server is overwhelmed right now, I copied over the relevant recording of DCA Tower. Note that military aircraft communicate via UHF and, therefore, we will hear Tower talk to the Black Hawk, but not the Black Hawk talking to the Tower.

Below is the airport diagram. The Potomac River is to the right and above. Runway 33 begins at the center right of the drawing near the “Elev 10” (10′ above sea level) and “EMAS” (Engineered Materials Arresting System, designed to stop a plane overrunning opposite-direction Runway 15). The runway name of “33” indicates that an aircraft landing on it would be pointing roughly magnetic 330 (333 in this case) or northwest.

At 12:20 Bluestreak 5307, a CRJ-700, checks in and is cleared to land Runway 1 after rejecting an ATC-proposed change to 33 (“unable”). At 12:57 Bluestreak 5342, another CRJ-700, checks in and accepts a modified clearance to land Runway 33 (helps ATC get more departures out). At 13:50, the Tower says that winds are from 330 (northwest) at 15 knots, gusting 25 knots (will be bumpy in a helicopter).

At 15:05 there is some communication with PAT25 (the Black Hawk). At 15:50, Tower tells PAT25 about the CRJ’s lateral and vertical location and also where it is heading (“PAT25 traffic is south of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge a CRJ at 1200′ [landing?] Runway 33”). After an inaudible-to-us reply from the Black Hawk on UHF, the Tower says “visual separation approved” (this approval can be given in Class B airspace only if an aircraft says that it has positively identified another aircraft; we were given this approval every 5 minutes or so when operating our Robinson R44 helicopters in Boston Class B airspace for photo and sightseeing tours over the city; it was necessary because we were within a certain number of miles of the airliners even though we were never anywhere near the approach or departure paths of the jets).

At 17:25, DCA Tower asks PAT25, “Do you have the CRJ in sight?” (in hindsight, would have been much better if Tower had asked “Do you have the CRJ at your 10 o’clock in sight?”) Presumably the Black Hawk pilots answer in the affirmative, having seen or continuing to see what they believe to be the CRJ that ATC is talking about, but we can’t hear this on a recording of the VHF traffic. DCA Tower then instructs the Black Hawk to pass behind the CRJ (might require a slight turn or slowdown).

At 17:47, we hear background conversation in the Tower (a reaction to the crash, perhaps).

At 18:10, American Airlines 3130 is told to go around. The recording for the next few minutes indicates some rough times inside the Tower.

It’s too early to say definitively what caused the crash, of course. However, it seems that there were multiple jets in the air and even multiple CRJs. It is easy to see airplanes, especially airlines, at night, but not necessarily easy to tell a CRJ from an ERJ or a CRJ from an Airbus A319. A two-pilot crew in a Black Hawk would almost surely be able to avoid a crash with an airliner had they seen it more than 1.5 minutes earlier, which they say they did. Thus, the most plausible explanation is that the Black Hawk crew and DCA Tower were talking about two different airliners (i.e., talking past each other).

So… there were some excellent humans with excellent training in the airliner, in the Tower, and in the Black Hawk. Everyone was operating in the most restrictive low-altitude airspace (Class B) that we have in the U.S. and under time-tested rules that have ensured safety despite congestion. At the same time, however, we have the limitations of a natural language (English) and the human brain, which may latch onto and commit to the first plausible airliner that it sees.

A few potentially complicating factors:

  • Black Hawk pilots will fly with helmets, which reduce peripheral vision.
  • Black Hawk pilots may use night vision goggles (NVGs), which make it easier to see dark stuff on the ground but harder to see brightly lit objects, such as a CRJ in landing configuration. NVGs dramatically reduce peripheral vision (Update: Pete Hegseth says that they were using NVGs)
  • Military aircraft sometimes use modern standard ADS-B transponders that transmit x,y,z position, airspeed, and direction, but perhaps not always, and therefore the collision warnings provided by modern avionics might not be triggered
  • Airliner Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) has some inhibitions below 1000′ and below 500′ so as not to distract pilots during landing, so even if the Black Hawk had its ADS-B transponder on the airliner’s avionics might have inhibited a collision warning
  • Visual clutter from all of the city lights; it’s easier to pick out airports and aircraft at night in places where there aren’t brightly lit buildings, parking lots, and towers

For those who aren’t regular readers of this blog: I’m an FAA-certificated helicopter instructor as well as a former CRJ pilot for a Delta Airlines subsidiary. Landing and taking off at DCA were part of the Delta job. I also teach an aeronautical engineering class at MIT. I have never flown a Black Hawk, but I have trained experienced Army Black Hawk pilots to fly the Robinson R44. I have spent hundreds of hours in Class B airspace, the same kind of airspace that surrounds DCA, in helicopters while airliners were landing at Boston’s Logan Airport (it was very rare for us to need to cross the final approach course, for the jets, though; we typically avoided airliners by flying over the top of the airport at 1,500′ or above or by staying as low as 300′ above the ground when underneath the final approach course to an active runway).

What could have prevented the accident?

First, let’s reflect on the fact that last night’s situation was a common one for the past 60 years or so and there weren’t any previous accidents. So the interaction among river-following helicopters and landing/departing airliners wasn’t obviously unsafe. On the other hand, safety rested on human excellence and vigilance and none of us can be vigilant 24/7.

The easiest way to have prevented the accident would have been to eliminate the Army aviation unit involved in favor of Singapore-style congestion pricing for surface transport in the D.C. area. The aviation unit exists primarily to ferry around senior military personnel who don’t want to sit in traffic like the peasants must. As D.C. traffic has intensified over the decades and helicopters have become safer (twin engines; everything precision-machined; two pilots) more VIPs have decided that they’d rather get around by helicopter than by car. But let’s assume for this post that congestion pricing can’t happen and military brass won’t use Zoom and, therefore, what is essentially an air taxi operation is required.

Winston Churchill defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. That’s certainly me when it comes to the crying shame of modern software capabilities not making it into the cockpit or onto the workstations of air traffic controllers. Our desire for FAA-certified perfection makes it prohibitively expensive to put the kind of intelligence that we expect from a $500 drone into a $30 million airliner or $20 million Black Hawk. Imagine if the Black Hawk had an onboard assistant that could have said to the pilots “There’s an airliner at your 10 o’clock that you’ll hit if you don’t slow down to 50 knots.” That would, presumably, have redirected their attention away from whatever airliner they thought they were supposed to focus on and prevented the accident. All of the data necessary for such an assistant are available in any non-antique aircraft: position, velocity, track over the ground, position and velocity of other aircraft (broadcast via ADS-B, which is its own disappointment). The only thing that was missing on the Black Hawk was a $1,000 computer wired to the audio panel and a straightforward-to-write-but-ruinously-expensive-to-certify computer program. Similarly, ATC could have benefitted from a program that spoke “It doesn’t seem as though the Black Hawk is doing anything to avoid the CRJ, despite your instruction.” The controllers will, no doubt, share some blame for not noticing an alert on their screens, but these types of alerts are too common and insufficiently specific for humans to deal with reliably hour after hour day after day.

(Check out Beacon AI for an example of a company that is trying to deliver smarter in-flight software to deal with the fact that we demand ever higher levels of safety in a world where humans aren’t getting smarter or more vigilant. Beacon AI has some military contracts and things may move faster in that domain because the military is not bound by FAA certification rules.)

What about “Trump blames DEI for weakening FAA in aftermath of Reagan National plane crash” (The Hill)? Although the FAA has invested heavily in DEI, I don’t think that was the proximate cause of this accident. There will inevitably be a distribution of ability among air traffic controllers. DEI-based hiring will sadly increase the number of those with lower ability, just as in any other field of endeavor. On the other hand, there are only 37 Class B airports in the U.S. out of roughly 500 airports with control towers. Thus, these 7 percent most-critical airports are going to draw their tower controllers mostly from the top 7 percent of all tower controllers. A mediocre or low-performing controller can be parked at an out-of-the-way airport that has just a fraction of KDCA’s roughly 800 operations per day (Westover, Massachusetts is a civilian-military airport that has a control tower and only about 50 operations per day, for example). In 1996, the FAA was trying to bend its rules to favor women (report). In 1999, the FAA was working on bending the rules to favor “African-Americans” (report). See also “Obama-era FAA hiring rules place diversity ahead of airline safety” (Fox News, 2018) and this undated recruiting video. Perhaps it would be fair to blame the FAA’s focus on DEI as a factor in slowing the agency’s ability to adopt innovation simply because time and money spent on DEI can’t be spent on improving operations.

Some previous articles that I’ve written about the negative impact on safety of the financial and calendar obstacles to certification (perfection is the goal and it becomes the enemy of near-perfect solutions that would be huge safety improvements):

The classic paper on our limits as humans: “Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events” (1999). The video that was part of the experiment (see if you can spot the gorilla, which roughly 50 percent of the experiment subjects (super smart undergrads?) missed):

Next steps for the NTSB and FAA

A reporter asked me what happens next. My answer:

  • I don’t think that there will be anything interesting to learn from the cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders other than, perhaps, a precise altitude for the crash (Update: the CRJ’s black box places the jet at 325′ MSL (NBC).)
  • the NTSB and FAA will pull the tapes (maybe they’re still actual tapes) from DCA Tower so that they can can hear both the UHF (Black Hawk transmissions) and VFR communications
  • they’ll look at whether the Black Hawk was cleared to fly a specific route and altitude over the river (see the DCA helicopter chart below, which would have restricted the Black Hawk to 200′ and below; the accident has been reported to have occurred at 300-400′ MSL/AGL ) and, if so, whether the Black Hawk had deviated from its assigned altitude (updates: NYT says that the helicopter was assigned Route 4 and Pete Hegseth says that there was an altitude deviation)

Here’s the DCA helicopter chart section:

These routes are optional for helicopters to request and for ATC to assign, so it wasn’t initially clear that they were involved (the Tower could have simply cleared the helicopter to follow the river at 500′ and below, but the NYT update above says that the Black Hawk was assigned Route 4). We see from the chart that the route over the top of the airport is at a rigid 1500′ (above sea level, which is almost the same as above ground level since DCA is only 14′ above sea level) while “Route 4” hugs the far shore of the Potomac and the pilots are restricted to 200′ and below (the horizontal bar on top of the “200”).

Here’s some more of the helicopter-specific chart, for context (from skyvector.com):

As you can see, the helicopter routes are designed for a combination of avoiding the heart of DC, e.g., the Capitol and and White House and reducing noise disturbance for the public. The river route is ideal in many ways because a low-flying helicopter isn’t going to hit a building or tower that has been constructed in the middle of the river and there aren’t people trying to sleep in houses built in the middle of the river. Other routes may follow busy highways in which the additional noise of a helicopter won’t be objectionable on top of the regular noise of cars and trucks.

95 thoughts on “Reagan National Airport Black Hawk-CRJ crash”

  1. How did Tower allow the helicopter cross the short final at the altitude he was at? In the Patomac TRACON there is a dedicated position to monitor parallel runway landings and if any aircraft goes into transgression zone they brake off others from the approach to prevent the midairs. This was much worse than violating the transgression zone, by letting the helicopter to cross perpendicular to the final approach course. Why did they not give them an immediate vector.

    https://imgur.com/pIXdWTE

  3. Is this the first time the “have the CRJ in sight” method has failed and caused a crash? It seems like this would be a common occurrence in busy airspace for the air traffic controller and pilot to mix up planes. Is there no better method?

    Much appreciated, Dr. Greenspun

    • Let’s say that it’s possible to discriminate visually between various aircraft types of similar size even at night/with helmet/with NVG to a safe level.

      How can ATC rely on one aircraft confirming sight of another specific aircraft identified by flight number when there could be multiple similar (or even essentially identical) aircraft in visible range? Even if you might expect a Blackhawk to have some fancy kit for identifying nearby aircraft (I read that it had Mode S enabled but not ADS-B), am I right that ADS-B will just reproduce what ATC is telling the pilot, such as a display with other aircraft tagged by flight number? And so if two similar aircraft are approaching from the same general direction this doesn’t really help the pilot to match the display to the view from the cockpit. Should ATC procedure be to warn the pilot when there could be confusion, rather than just “Have you spotted the CRJ?”?

    • I’ve been a controller for 22 years. Just withe the little bit of transcript that has come out there were some errors;
      1. Messed up the type aircraft in the traffic call
      2. Used non-standard phraseology when controller approved visual separation
      3. Understaffing probably played a part in this scenario

      With that being said; the technique the controller used was a common technique. There is a better technique which is commonly referred to as proactive control instructions. The controller could have given altitude restrictions, instructing Blackhawk to maintain VFR BELOW 500 feet, and instructing CRJ to maintain ABOVE 1000 feet until traffic passed each other.

      Only a thorough investigation and time will tell us what could have been done to have prevented this terrible aviation miss hap.

      Please with hood judgement of those involved until the facts are known.

  4. https://x.com/kardashevmaxi/status/1884805868363153859

    If this graphic is accurate the Blackhawk was zigzagging South over the Potomac, almost crashed into a departing aircraft AA4758, swerved away from the departure path at the last second, and then swerved back into final approach path for AA5342 instead.

    I am out of my league here, but the graphic is helpful to those of us who cannot understand the ATC communication.

  5. If they did confirm they had the CRJ in sight the logical explanation does seem to be black hawk pilot mistook it for a different airplane. To me it’s crazy to have a busy airport right next to an air force base.

  6. One of my nephews’ wife was on the flight. She was texting him as they were on approach and the conversation was interrupted, his first inkling that something was terribly wrong. Horrible, horrible day.

  7. Re the TCAS being disabled below 500′

    Isn’t there airport radar to fill this gap ? Maybe the collision alerts it generated weren’t shown to anyone who can act in a timely manner ?

    • It is very common to see the collision alerts go off even when aircraft aren’t this close in proximity. Being that the helicopter said he would maintain visual separation from the traffic, the responsibility is now on the pilot to see and avoid that traffic. The controller probably didn’t want to issue a control instruction contrary to what the pilot intends to do to avoid the traffic which is probably why he reiterates “Do you have the RJ in sight?” once he sees the helicopter appears to continue towards the traffic. At that point, the helicopter again says he does and the controller again approves visual separation, trusting that the helicopter pilot has the RJ in sight.

    • OC: The controllers’ screens indeed can show conflicts, but the alerts are raised so frequently that people tend to ignore them. I often hear urgent beeping in the background when I’m talking to an ATC facility and the controllers are completely calm through it because they know that they’re not being alerted to a real issue. A robot that said “I’m not sure the helicopter actually sees the CRJ because the helicopter hasn’t changed speed or course” would be a lot better than a familiar annoying beep.

    • 22 year controller here…

      Even if the aircraft called each other insight, the controller should have informed them that their “targets are likely to merge” on the radar display. One way around this call would be to visually see the two aircraft out the window of the tower cab and be reassured that the aircraft were visually separated. This is difficult to impossible to do at night when judging distance.

      Wonder if something or someone was distracting the controller from his job.

  9. Phil,
    As usual, your write up is extremely helpful. This tragedy occurs in the same month that Air Florida hit the bridge and went into the Potomac River, January 1982. While those ivolved in the effort are not thinking beyond the current crisis, are their any tips that helicopter pilots should be aware of or technology needed to avoid this from occurring ever again?
    I remain befuddled as to how our transportation system can’t implement something similar to an Eternet network for CSMA/CD.

    Footnotes: (https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=297&q=air+florida+flight+90+crash&cvid=1d867171c30c4791a190dd1a3ba7df7a&gs_lcrp=EgRlZGdlKgYIARAAGEAyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQABhAMgYIAhAAGEAyBggDEAAYQDIGCAQQABhAMgYIBRAAGEAyBggGEAAYQDIGCAcQABhA0gEJMTA0NDNqMGoxqAIAsAIA&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=EDGEBRV

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_(networking)

  10. Why would military ‘training flights’ be done in such a congested and constricted air space, with catastrophic implications that could affect national security?

    • TJO: I guess the military folks go out for practice and familiarization regularly. Nearly all of their flights are classified as “training”. I don’t think we will learn that anyone on board the Black Hawk actually needed training or wasn’t fully qualified. It’s just that they were flying without an operational mission.

  11. I re-ran the sequence on Flight Radar 24 this morning. Obviously PAT 25 doesn’t show up but AAL 3130 looks to be directly in front of the Blackhawk 2.5 miles away at 1000′, probably in a landing configuration for runway 01 (landing light on), and with some line-of-sight apparent to the Blackhawk pilots’ view point. I have over 2400 hours in fighter aircraft with and without night vision goggles. I’m guessing the Blackhawk pilots never saw the CRJ due to being stationary (collision course) on their canopy and slightly belly up (left hand turn away). They probably honed in on AAL 3130 which would have looked even closer on night vision goggles.

    • Thanks for sharing, Tom. I have almost no experience with NVGs. Do they make it tougher to see and understand brightly illuminated objects such as other aircraft, airport beacons and PAPIs, etc.?

  12. Lots of turnover of pilots in the last 2 years, lots of inexperience, lots of near misses, nothing we didn’t know was coming. Midair collisions are going to be a lot more common & no-one really has any solutions. NASA used to sell an air traffic research program that was going to allow more packed airspace, but nothing ever came of it.

  14. Great post. I have no interest in flying, helicopters, etc. but this post is fascinating and presents the facts clearly and separates speculation from facts.

  15. Given the number of bad things that happen around airports (collisions, famous actors landing on taxiways, bird strikes, drone incursions) I wonder if a more assertive approach doesn’t make sense? Could the entire airspace around the airport be scanned by lidar, with algorithms tracking and scoring all the activity, ready to break in and alert controllers or local pilots anytime anything looks unusual? (Aircraft in the wrong spot, converging, flocks of birds, errant drones, Chinese weather balloons, etc)

    I feel like the government can’t do this, but a good software company might be able to.

  16. Helicopter Route 4 should have been treated as a virtual intersecting runway for landings on 33 and 22 and departures from 15 and 4.

    See: Virtual Runway Intersection Points (VRIP) for non-intersecting converging runways. That’s the easiest solution.

  17. > Thus, these 7 percent most-critical airports are going to draw their tower controllers mostly from the top 7 percent of all tower controllers.

    You’re assuming that the people in charge of staffing assignments aren’t themselves DEI hires.

    • Ryan: That’s a good point. Once an organization buys into the #Science of DEI there is no logical stopping point (diversity is our strength and one can never have too much strength). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristin_Crowley who presided over the torching of Los Angeles gave an interview, I think, where she said that LAFD could never have enough diversity, e.g., in the hiring and promotion of the 2SLGBTQQIA+.

  18. The father of one of the pilots on the CRJ is a former Army helicopter pilot named Timothy Lilley.

    From a local report:

    Timothy, who served 20 years as a helicopter pilot in the Army, is familiar with the complexities of such operations. “In the ’90s, I used to fly in and out of the Pentagon regularly, and I can tell you if you are flying on the route over the Potomac and wearing night vision goggles, it’s going to be very hard to see that plane. If you’re not wearing the goggles, then you might have a chance,” he explained.

    He believes the commercial PSA jet was following proper procedures, but the military helicopter made a tragic error. “From what I can see, those guys turned right into the jet. I think the PSA jet was doing everything right. The Army pilot made a grave error. It hurts me because those are my brothers, and now my son is dead,” Timothy said.

    • So it is common knowledge that military helicopter pilots on that route at night might not see civilian planes?

  19. What about reports that the tower was severelly understaffed? Supposedly there were 18 controllers guiding the traffic vs minimally recommended 30 or 32 and same controller handled crashed military helicopter and another civilian liner, on different frequencies? This is based on audio reporting so details may be a little off. It looks to me that this points to low morale among the controllers, when high-paying positions are badly understaffed.

    • The latest news seems to be that the helicopter pilots were on NVGs, a disaster for peripheral vision, and that the helicopter was assigned Route 4 but failed to follow it laterally or vertically (see https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/army-helicopter-dc-plane-crash.html ).

      I doubt that there were more than a handful of controllers in the tower at the time of the crash. Normal peak-hour ops would require one for DCA Ground, one for DCA Tower, and, I’ve recently learned, one for a special UHF helicopter frequency (see https://www.airnav.com/airport/DCA ). https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/business/air-traffic-control-staffing-plane-crash.html talks about how the FAA and union wanted to have 30 controllers total assigned to work at DCA but instead had 19 and, therefore, there was some overtime involved to meet the 24/7 staffing requirement (a single controller might be able to handle all frequencies in the middle of the night).

    • Listened while working, did the pilot had only 500 hours? Equivalent of less the a year of driving experience for a regular commuter. There is a reason new drivers pay higher insurance premium. I had fender benders and worse first 100,000 miles of driving experience

    • perplexed: In the civilian world, 500 hours is the bare minimum necessary to fly FAR 135 charter operations (essentially what this aviation unit was doing; ferrying people from Point A to Point B so they didn’t have to suffer with the traffic jams that plague the peasants).

      Someone who earned a CFI and then worked as an instructor at a busy flight school for a year would probably have at least 1,000 hours of flight experience, much of it facing the challenge of identifying and fixing student mistakes.

    • Philip – typical military experience. Unless we are in a war, the military pilots do not get a lot of hours. We typically cannot hire military pilots coming out because they don’t have the PIC hours required for the civilian job.

    • Agreed. I wish the military supplemented its too-expensive-to-fly machines with some Robinson R44s so that their personnel could get a lot more time.

  20. There have been near misses almost every day since 2022. The level of excellence just isn’t what it was before the lockdowns & mass layoffs in aviation. Maybe when the government has an economic stand down, they could require everyone to play flight simulator scenarios or get AQP.

  21. Another anomly is not a technical one but an emotional one. Literally the day before, all people working at the FAA got notice that their jobs and pensions were at risk, and they were encouraged to leave—this by the doge team. The chaos happening around this and many other announcements is making it difficult for many, many people to focus on jobs that literally save lives. People who do air traffic control should not be subjected to this.

    • @Anonymous, in August of 1981, Ronald Reagan fired air-traffic controllers who were on strike and were replaced with new hires — yet there was no fatal crash or accident.

    • And to add some more context to the firing of air-traffic controllers by Ronald Regan, here is a quick read [1].

      “On August 5, an angry President Reagan carried out his threat, and the federal government began firing the 11,359 air-traffic controllers who had not returned to work. In addition, he declared a lifetime ban on the rehiring of the strikers by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). On August 17, the FAA began accepting applications for new air-traffic controllers, and on October 22 the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified PATCO.”

      [1] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reagan-fires-11359-air-traffic-controllers

    • George: It’s interesting that Democrats construe the offer of 8 months of pay for doing no work as a threat or a “risk”!

      https://www.opm.gov/fork/faq

      says that federal workers don’t have to work and can take a second job if they want. “You are most welcome [to] stay at home and relax or to travel to your dream destination. Whatever you would like.”

      That said, I don’t think ATC employees will take this offer, if indeed it is open to them, because any private sector job would likely pay much less. Total comp for an experienced controller is well over $200,000 per year and maybe just the cash pay is over $200,000 per year for most (see https://www.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/17w6za1/how_does_the_pay_scale_work/ for how overtime works). From a year ago: “My base salary is $128,000. We’re on 6 day work weeks which means one overtime day (paid at 1.5x) per week. On top of my base, I make about $40,000 in overtime, $5,000 in Sunday pay, $5,000 in OJTI (training) pay, $4,000 in night differential, $4,000 in CIC (supervisor) pay, and $6,000 in Holiday pay, and $5,000 in CIP pay. I should make about $195,000 this year.” (with Bidenflation, health insurance, and pension this would be more like $300,000/year?).

    • The funding/hiring freeze probably did not help much in hiring an additional person. I am all for cutting government bloat, but services like air traffic control should be handled with care. Air traffic control likely has way more traffic to deal with than in the 80s.

    • Anon: A hiring freeze leading to more overtime opportunity would upset existing air traffic controllers? Because they couldn’t bear to approach Spanish ATC levels of income? (via overtime-for-everyone, the energetic Spanish ATC was earning $1 million/year in pre-Biden dollars; see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1244156/Spanish-air-traffic-controllers-earn-800-000–replaced-automatic-systems.html )

      Most workers would be delighted when competition for their services is eliminated (see also, all of the working class folks who voted for Donald Trump due to his promise of reducing low-skill immigration).

      (Separately, Trump’s hiring freeze contains exceptions for “public safety” and, therefore, ATC might well be exempt. Also, the FAA hires for ATC in big crops and then puts them into scheduled training programs. You don’t walk in off the street at any random time of year and start training at your own pace. https://www.faa.gov/be-atc says “The Fall 2024 application window is now closed” and the next one is not anticipated to start until April or May of 2025)

    • According to the Newspaper of Record (TM), “285 of 313 Air Traffic Control Facilities Are Understaffed” (see https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/business/air-traffic-controllers-understaffed.html ): More than 90 percent of the country’s 313 air traffic control facilities operate below the Federal Aviation Administration’s recommended staffing levels, according to an analysis of staffing data from the union representing controllers obtained by The New York Times.

      Presumably this has been going on for a while and yet controllers haven’t quit en masse. Mostly they work more hours per week and get 1.5-2X through the magic of overtime.

    • Thanks. I don’t see any relationship between that article and the FAA’s ATC staff (who are considered “essential” and thus have to work even when the government is theoretically shut down (my friends at the FAA work desperately to be classified as “non-essential” so that they can enjoy weeks of paid vacation during these shutdowns)).

      I can see why some federal employees are nervous. A friend of a friend was doing a few hours/week of accounting work for the Feds in a DC office (mostly surfing hte web, reading books, etc.). During coronapanic he switched to “pretend to work from home” and then moved to a low-cost state. Currently he gets paid about $250,000/year (total comp) to work half an hour per week, which works out to $10,000 per hour. He’s nervous about the back-to-the-office rule.

  23. “Dr” Phil:

    You quoted Musk’s X in saying that it was a terrorist attack. Then Pres Trump that it was due to DEI. At least you correctly realized these conservative “news sources” are (of course) wrong. You proceeded to mostly quote nytimes.com and other MSM sources to get the actual facts.

    • Mike: The article to which I linked quotes Donald Trump as saying that the FAA has been weakened by DEI, not that DEI caused this specific crash. He says that doing a good job as a controller is intellectually demanding and, therefore, hiring by skin color won’t yield a fully competent workforce. He also says that FAA needs a better clean-sheet computer system (which circles back to my point in the original post about how ATC could use more intelligent software support).

      I’m not sure what “quoted Musk’s X” means. Each individual X user is accountable for his/her/zir/their post and, as far as I know, there is no relationship between what that user posts and Elon Musk (unless you’re talking about @elonmusk). If I quote a Democrat thought leadership account such as https://x.com/RashidaTlaib or https://x.com/IlhanMN that isn’t quoting Elon Musk or X per se, I don’t think.

    • I do not think it matters at all.

      There were two male pilot idiots who decided to fly 175′ higher than they should have.

    • Of course. She’s a woman, so she’s a product of DEI in someone’s eyes. And even though she was not the lead pilot, her family does not want her to be featured as the DEI pilot-failure poster child for this politicized tragedy. They also don’t need the media barrage. Wise move on their part and good on the Army for honoring that. One does wonder if this flight was on its way to pick up a government official. I recall a very low-flying helicopter over my friend’s apartment in Georgetown at night. My friend said that was the vice president getting flown home, and that it occurred regularly.

    • Carol, Phil says her 500 hours of flight time would be a “bare minimum” in the commercial world. Not someone I’d want flying me around.

    • It seems like this disaster required five mistakes:

      1- Unsafe airspace around DCA
      2- Unclear instruction about the “CRJ” from ATC.
      3- Helo fails to achieve visual separation from generic “CRJ”
      4- Helo (narrowly) fails to stay in designated lateral corridor.
      5- Helo exceeds altitude ceiling by 150-200 feet.

      It seems like 3 of the 5 mistakes came from the Helo, and only the last one was truly fatal.
      Let’s see what the black boxes say, especially any communication from the instructor to the helo pilot.

    • Anon: Both you and Carol are right, I think. The 500-hour female was the pilot-in-command but there was also a 1000-hour instructor on board. If she was on the controls, it’s actually more the instructor’s fault in the event of an altitude deviation because he’s the “pilot monitoring” and is supposed to notice what’s on the instruments while she’s looking out the window (unfortunately, maybe through the tunnel vision of NVGs). I guess it is also fair to call it a DEI story since the military hasn’t made a secret of its work to get rid of white heterosexual males in favor of any other type of human.

      https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2021/Garrett-Military-Diversity/

      says “Without diversity, a homogeneous team of soldiers would lack the resilience, perspective, and growth offered by teammates from different backgrounds. … This makes diversity not only a right but also a strategic military asset—essential to meet today’s security challenges.” (i.e., the Chinese are no threat because they don’t have diversity by our standards)

      Here’s the DC National Guard celebrating two pilots for their gender IDs rather than their skill at aviation:

      https://dc.ng.mil/Public-Affairs/News-Release/Article/3795435/dcarng-all-female-flight-crew-commemorates-50-years-of-women-in-modern-aviation/

    • Steve: I think you’ve summarized this pretty well. Like most accidents, there were multiple mistakes in the chain and it wouldn’t have happened if one link had been severed. The first ATC instruction about the CRJ was quite clear, in my opinion (position relative to the bridge). The second one shortly before the crash was where an o’clock position would have been a huge improvement.

    • @Phil what you are saying is when you see any non white(pure Caucasian) male job holder, assume it is a DEI hire till proven otherwise. With this logic may be we should go back to olden days, take away all rights from all these group so that this DEI concept does not occur again. As you know once they get rights they might ask for this again or even worse they may vote for someone supporting DEI. What do you say?

    • Any kind of prejudice in hiring or selection leads to inferences. Because Asians are discriminated against by Ivy League schools, for example, if we don’t know anything else we can infer that an Asian graduate of Harvard is likely intellectually superior to a non-Asian graduate. Now that liberal arts colleges discriminate against women (so as not to develop a large gender ID imbalance that will discourage applicants) we can assume that men who graduate from these colleges are intellectually inferior to women. See https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/magazine/men-college-enrollment.html

      It’s a longstanding fear among enrollment officers that if the gender ratio becomes too extreme at a given school, students of all genders will start to lose interest in attending (an idea that persists even if none of the admissions experts I spoke to could point to research about college enrollment supporting it). “Gender parity is something that’s an institutional priority for most private colleges and universities in the United States,” says Sara Harberson, a former dean of admissions and financial aid at Franklin & Marshall and the founder of Application Nation, an online college-counseling community. “Whether it’s fair or not, colleges with gender parity or close to gender parity have been viewed as the most desirable.”

      … the easiest way for many competitive schools to fix their gender ratios lies in the selection process, at which point admissions officers often informally privilege male applicants, a tendency that critics say amounts to affirmative action for men. … That Title IX exemption still stands, allowing private colleges and universities to privilege men during the admissions process. Marie Bigham, the executive director of ACCEPT, a group that works to improve equity in college admissions, said that until the pandemic, when many schools stopped requiring standardized tests, she considered the boost for being male to be about “equal to an extra 100 points on their SATs.” .. For the sake of a well-rounded student body, Wesleyan leadership still believes in making choices that yield an even ratio, even if it sometimes means passing over an exceptionally qualified girl in favor of a boy whose application is not quite as strong.

      [Me: “not quite as strong” can be translated as “comparatively stupid”]

    • @anon, you summarized things perfectly! Now that we have DEI, the clear message to anyone of even modest IQ is to *avoid* hiring or trusting anyone that fits into the DEI categories. One needs to look no further than Obama and Kamala to have learned this lesson.

    • @phil lets agree with you on people of color and other groups given preference in collage admissions instead of looking at their credentials like SAT scores.. which is not good. But you never mention legacy admissions. May be you are thinking , as most of these legacy admissions are white they should/must be superior .

    • Anon: Success seems to be heritable (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/01/15/son-also-rises/ ) and, therefore, if a “legacy applicant” comes from a highly successful family that would be a rational reason for a college or university to admit the applicant (though it is irrational to insist that the parent of the legacy applicant went to the exact same school; a purely rational system would just look for parents who themselves had completed challenging educational programs and who had been successful in life/career/etc.). I don’t know what the practical value would be of having a theory about people who got into college via a legacy preference. First, there aren’t many colleges that offer that. Second, and more importantly, how would you ever find out? If you’re interviewing someone for a job it wouldn’t make sense to ask “Where did your parents go to college?” If you’re trying to find a competent doctor you might be able to find out where the doctor went to undergrad and med school, but it seems doubtful that you’d be able to learn what colleges, if any, the prospective doctor’s parents had attended.

    • @phil lets look at “success heritable theory” so if a white rich superior male person who went to an ivy collage and marries a not so intelligent women. In this case you are saying we should always assume all their children get only the dad’s genes not mothers and admit them through legacy.
      the other way to look at is we should never see success full children from unsuccessfully family, incase you see then it should be because DEI

    • Anon: The colleges have already answered your specific question about genes. A “double legacy” (both parents went to Harvard, e.g.) gets preference over a “single legacy” (one parent attended).

      I invite you to read Professor Clark’s The Son Also Rises, which follows families through hundreds of years in the UK and in India. Prof. Clark does acknowledge that sometimes an unsuccessful family will have a successful member, but found that there will usually be reversion to the family’s mean level of success in the next generation or two. https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/01/16/the-son-also-rises-tips-for-optimizing-your-life/

      Excerpt:

      But the law of mobility tells us that the rags-to-riches path is the anomaly and the exception. The elite of any generation typically come from families only modestly less elite. On average, the fabulously rich and the extravagantly talented are the offspring of the moderately rich and moderately talented. The truly poor and completely talentless are the children of the modestly poor and somewhat untalented.

    • Philip, not sure that there is logical chain in your statement. “Because Asians are discriminated against by Ivy League schools, for example, if we don’t know anything else we can infer that an Asian graduate of Harvard is likely intellectually superior to a non-Asian graduate. ”
      If Ivy League school treat excellence as something not very important, isn’t it make more likely that people form discriminated category who gets in ore more street-smart clever and less scrupulous, not necessary intellectually superior? I.e. represented himself of herself as right category of DEI in their essay, got into right athletic program, had right connections, etc…

    • perplexed: Is your 4D Chess-level reasoning necessary? Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard had higher SAT scores and grades than non-Asians. That was proven at trial in Boston (though, of course, the federal judge said that there was nothing wrong with Harvard’s race-based discrimination). A higher SAT score combined with better grades is an indication of intellectual superiority (though maybe not street smarts; Ibram X. Kendi (born “Ibram Henry Rogers”) says that he had SATs of around 1,000 with a GPA of 3.0 and yet managed to garner $millions for some fairly standard observations about the evils of white people, Jews, and Israelis).

      See https://mariashriver.com/my-racist-introduction/ for Ibram X. Kendi’s tale of navigating a world of white people who couldn’t shovel money in his direction fast enough.

    • @phil if you look at the initial European migration to USA, most of the people were poor and un successful coming here to find the success and running away from European elites and they were successful here in USA

    • Anon: The American rabble might be descended from the European rabble, but there are at least some examples of continuity. The successful American du Ponts were descended from successful European du Ponts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Pont_family

      Google AI: “Historically, many wealthy Europeans, like the Dutch “patroons,” came to the U.S. seeking to establish large landed estates and exploit economic opportunities, particularly in areas like the Hudson River Valley in present-day New York, where they brought in farmers to work on their land; notable examples include families like the Du Pont (French origin) who built a successful gunpowder manufacturing company, and the Busch family (German origin) who founded the Budweiser brewery, contributing significantly to the American economy and becoming some of the wealthiest families in the country.”

      Separately, there are a few standard explanations for how a modestly successful family in Europe could be fabulously successful in the U.S. First, many of the best assets and opportunities in Europe were reserved to a hereditary aristocracy. It didn’t matter how smart or hard-working a peasant was. He or she was never going to become a noble (there were only two gender IDs at the time). Europe had run out of natural resources due to overpopulation while the stolen-from-the-natives North American continent had vast natural resources per person (no longer, of course, now that we’re at 340 million people). Finally, the New York Times explains it all with their 1619 project. America is rich today because of Black slave labor a few hundred years ago.

    • Philip, your reasoning may work for medical school.admissions but not for Harvard undergraduate admissions. There is no comprehensive examinations required to enter Harvard and no defined merit requirement. It easy to falsify your argument: SAT, which I believe is no longer a requirement to enter Ivy League schools, has absolute maximum score of 1600, which is easy enough to achieve and by your reasoning all Asian Harvard students who are not winners of International Mathematical Olympiad should have SAT score of 1600, which is easy to achieve. But this is not the case Everyone knows that lying on entrance essay is the pre-requisite to enter Harvard. I observed national essay competition winner with, per your logic minimally acceptable SAT score of 1600, and top position in a national science Olympiad, not being accepted to Harvard. He was not even Asian. Everyone thought it was because he did not lie on his essay.

    • Perplexed: interesting comments on college admissions…for those of us not steeped in this process in recent years, could you please expand a bit on what you mean by “lie” on the admissions essay? Are you saying they need to pretend to be woke/DEI adherents? Thanks much.

    • perplexed: Of course, you’re mostly right. The handful of Asians who overcame Harvard’s race discrimination also would have known how to shape their applications to appeal to the progressive Democrats reading the applications. But that’s also true of everyone else who got into Harvard. Nobody dumb enough to write “I don’t care about social justice” was going to be admitted. So the school is filled with liars of all skin colors and the Asian-American liars have the highest SAT scores and grades among the general population of liars (plus a few sincere social justice warriors?).

    • here is what i understood from this DEI discussions and @phil’s thoughts.
      Success and Talent is Hereditary. So we should go back to Monarchy/Kings family rule so that we always get good talented kings through family Hereditary. Where as in Democracy poor, non talented , inferior(DEI people) have the same voting power as elites and majority of the society is filled with non talented , inferior(DEI people) . As you know they may not think as good as elites and vote for a weak candidate (non elite or un talented) or God forbid vote for a DEI candidate and then society downfall will start. Centuries back we determined that women as inferior species and treated them as such. They did not had a voting rights till 1920 then it took another decade or so for even inferior women of color to get voting rights. This also nothing but DEI, We also determined that black people are inferior species and enslaved them. As democratic society we elected some non talented presidents and they gave black people some rights, which is nothing but DEI. So every black person is where he/she in the society because of DEI. @phil did i get this right.

    • Anon: You did not get this right. There is no reason for a hereditary aristocracy to have a high quality genotype because an aristocrat with low-quality genes can have the same fertility as an aristocrat with high-quality genes (fertility being limited, perhaps, by land ownership, which need not be earned in any way). We can see the same mechanism operating in the Palestinian territories. A Palestinian who never works can have 10 children, all of whom will be fed, clothed, educated, sheltered, etc. by US and EU taxpayers (through UNRWA). Thus, an entire population of people who aren’t interested in working can be produced after a few generations and there is no selection pressure to raise either IQ or conscientiousness (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289614001093 says “The Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM) was standardized in Palestine in 2011 on a sample of 257 children aged 6.0 to 11.5 years, tested individually. The sample obtained a British IQ of 85” though, of course, the propensity to be successful involves more than IQ). Palestinians are the 21st century aristocrats because they can’t go hungry no matter how little they work or produce and even if every family decides to have 8 or 10 children.

      (Note that the British aristocracy wasn’t purely hereditary. Commoners who had been successful in various fields of endeavor could be knighted by the monarch. The current “House of Lords” is mostly, I think, people born common who hold “life peerages” in which achievements were recognized and whose noble titles cannot be passed down to children.)

    • @phil Point 1. As we already termed black people as inferior and if they are replaced by immigrants, if immigrants better then black people then it is good thing for society. If immigrants are inferior to blacks then society is going to shits.
      for point 2. Lets replace the term women with female which is defined term

    • Anon: If you believe Black people to be academically inferior and want to write about it nonstop, there is a place for you at the New York Times. As noted above, due to Black Americans being reduced to economic irrelevance by open borders, it is not a topic that I want to think or write about.

      Example from 2002: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/arts/why-are-black-students-lagging.html

      2016: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html

      2017: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html

      2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/learning/lesson-plans/still-separate-still-unequal-teaching-about-school-segregation-and-educational-inequality.html

    • The poor, unskilled European immigrants who came to the U.S. most arrived through Ellis Island, where anyone with poor health was turned away back to Europe. Those who were admitted had to fend for themselves, facing a do-or-die reality. To survive, they embraced American culture, which contributed to the idea of America as a “melting pot.”

      In contrast, today’s illegal migrants face far fewer hardships and, in many cases, do not fully assimilate into American culture. Their overall economic contribution is questionable, as while they provide low-cost labor, the financial impact on the U.S. debt is ignored. For every $1 in saving they provide, there is a $2 cost incurred to U.S. debt because of subsidies and because they send $ back home.

    • Anon, here is the point of view of a high achieving person, one of the modern intellectual leaders, who knows the subject intimately https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iyrrmSqQZQ You can google more works of professor Sowell, he returns to the topic time and time again.
      There are many black individuals who are very smart and contribute a lot and who not necessary attended Ivy League school. America used to be a free country, grit, hard work and open mind used to matter more then Harvard admissions in how successful individual gets.
      I am quite sure that modern Harvard admission process would not necessary select such individuals, although I do believe that Ivy League school would fight for them.

  25. Anon: when i select a doctor, I always follow this practice, because I have nothing else to go on regarding who the best physician might be. So I just pick whoever had the hardest time getting admitted to medical school. Asian doctor it is!

  26. I noticed that the woman who was the pilot had recently been working as a social aide in the Biden White House. I assume this cut into her flying time.

    What are the currency rules for night flying with passengers in a helicopter? Is it the same 3 landings after dark in the past 90 days that it is for airplanes? And beyond the rules, what would you consider to be appropriate for conducting low altitude flights in a challenging urban environment?

    • Dave: In addition to being a “social aide” (whatever that is) for Biden, “she was a victim advocate for the Army’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention program and hoped to become a physician after she left the Army, her family said.” (https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/durham-county/article299571934.html#storylink=cpy ) The same article says “Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach had served as an aviation officer since January 2019, according to the Army.” (i.e., she had flown about 80 hours per year, which is not much for someone trying to build experience as a pilot; 200-800 hours per year would be the norm in the civilian world).

      The night currency rules are the same as for planes… 3 takeoffs and landings.

      Two pilots with 1,500 hours of experience seems like enough for them to have handled the mission. The night vision goggles are a complication. I guess they make flying over the dark river easier and safer, but it also seems that they would make the spotting of traffic much tougher.

      I should note that the Black Hawk is a lot more stable and easier to fly than a lighter helicopter. In addition to the inherent stability from being heavy it has a stability augmentation system (see https://www.spinningwing.com/the-helicopter/sas-scas ) that will keep restoring the helicopter to a pre-set attitude. So a lower time pilot would be able to hold altitude precisely in a Black Hawk than in a Robinson R22 or R44 (and the light Robinsons will be much more affected by wind gusts and turbulence).

    • These new pieces of information are pointing very clearly towards DEI as a reason this woman was at the controls and therefore a cause of the tragedy.

    • And we also now know why they waited days to release her name…so that they had time to scrub/delete all her woke/DEI/socialist social media and other posts.

  28. Phil, your comments on the heritability of IQ are strongly supported by the Biden family apple tree. Start with someone who flunked a law school course for plagiarism, then graduated third from the bottom, then went on to continue plagiarize, lie and cheat throughout his entire career. Then, marries someone who was apparently sufficiently dim-witted that she didn’t recognize he was a fraud and proceeds to have children…resulting in Hunter, who arguably has even lower IQ than his father. To say nothing of Joe’s second wife Dr. Jill, who never learned basic arithmetic in second grade (see math in opening paragraph in her doctoral “thesis”).

  29. So we now know that the Blackhawk pilot Rebecca Lobach was exactly the DEI hire that many had surmised, and this is why her DEI friends and family didn’t want her name released. It gave them time to delete most of her DEI/woke history, but not all. There is plenty still remaining to paint a picture of her. Among the most damning is that she actually worked for Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who is the absolute perfect DEI poster child (out of many) in the administration. Pierre checked so many DEI boxes it is really impressive. No doubt, she also fit in very well with Biden because she lied almost every time she did a press briefing. Particularly galling were her repetitive comments that Biden was “sharp as ever.” Elon Musk and many others have said that DEI kills people. Here, we witnessed it first-hand.

    • She may be no a DEI hire, but she was definitely a DEI worker. With, as estimated by Philip, 80 hours of annual flight hours, she would be at home in airforce of a poor third world country. May God have mercy on her soul.

  30. I assume that this crash was a tragic accident, but I morbidly wonder how difficult it would be for a malevolent helicopter pilot to disable his fellow crewmembers, track a random (or not) descending passenger jet as a target of opportunity via ATC chatter and other information, and then collide with that jet in a catastrophic suicide event.

    Aerial ramming is apparently a thing:

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

    • A helicopter pilot who can intercept a jet would be someone with an unusually high level of skill. The big problem with this plan, I think, is that in most situations the jet would be too high for the helicopter to get near and/or be alerted to the presence of the malevolent helicopter by ATC and told to go around.

    • I guess we can then rule that out because Rebecca Lobach didn’t have “an unusually high level of skill”?

  31. It seems like the collision was inside the helicopter corridor about 4000′ from the aiming point of runway 33, and the standard approach is a 3 degree glideslope. At that distance, if he was on the glideslope the plane would only have been about 210′ high. (tan(3) * 4000 =210).

    NTSB says the plane was at 325′ +/-25′ at the point of impact. so if anything the plane was a little high (not a problem) but why would a helicopter corridor have a ceiling that touches the standard glideslope of approaching aircraft? Is this the case at any other airport you know of?

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