Originally Posted by
parabatix
deltafox44
Not at all. The briefing indicated there may be a possibility that the altimeter in the BlackHawk displayed an inaccurate altitude reading and that the discrepency was in the order of approx 100' given the height at which the collision is known to have occurred.
Briefing the RT comms, NTSB stated that a portion of the ATC instruction to the BlackHawk to 'pass behind the CRJ' was received in the Blackhawk (according to the CVR), truncated due to the BlackHawk keying the mic at the same time. Apparently, the words 'pass behind the' were missing from the BlackHawk CVR.
I'm not sure they did say that about the altimeter, they said that there was bad pressure altitude data recorded on the FDR. That's not the same as saying the altimeter display was wrong, although it does mean that it's going to be hard to infer what was actually displayed on the Baro Alts. I would have thought a military crew would be pretty solid on altimeter cross checks though so I think that's all a bit of a red herring. The Potomac is (give or take the tide) at sea level so I think we can be pretty confident that the RadAlt figure of 278ft is good for an altitude too.