Originally Posted by
FullWings
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...
The day before the crash, there was a similar situation, an airliner RPA4514 and a helo PAT11. PAT11 causes a CA on the controllers scope with SWA3565. Then PAT11 causes a CA on the controllers scope with RPA4514. RPA4514 gets an RA. RPA4514 then goes around, subsequently control ask "what was the reason for the go around?".
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