Originally Posted by
dr dre
The helicopter pilots were a qualified instructor pilot with 7 years experience and a pilot under check who graduated in the top 20% of her class. The CRJ pilots were quite experienced for an regional crew. Nothing to suggest the controller did not maintain the standards required of an air traffic controller.
These were 5 aviation professionals who had gotten their roles through hard work and perseverance (like all aviation professionals) and fell victim to the circumstances they found themselves in that night.
The amazing thing is that there wasn’t an accident like this every month at DCA with the procedures and environment as they were. I suspect that there have been a lot of close calls and they’ll find a filing cabinet worth of reports but likely not much was done. If you continuously set up a dangerous scenario that in the end relies for safety on a procedure that is known to be unreliable (visual ID at night in a city environment), then statistics eventually intervene. This has likely been mitigated over the years by awareness, training, professionalism and sheer will to survive but when you are dealt the perfect bad hand and the last of the barriers to MAC fail, this is the result. Another factor pointed out recently is the “mission” status of military flights: someone with more gold on their uniform and a bigger hat than you has said to go and do this task with that equipment, so you do it.
Speaking to some of my colleagues who have used NVGs operationally, they say they do reduce your field-of-view and flatten depth perception - one said he had mistaken a star for another aircraft for a while; it was only further away than he thought by a factor of ten trillion...