I’ve been listening to the NTSB hearings while doing other things last couple of days. All I can say is the FAA testimony is wild.
Normalisation of deviance doesn’t even come close.
- Airspace design. The heli route stepping down to 200ft max lead some army pilots to believe it gave clearance from DCA traffic. Spoiler. It did not.
- Controller workload “Just make it work” was a common attitude at DCA
- FAA not actively tracking TCAS RA “incidents” as it could skew data.. maybe it was correctly applied visual separation etc. Need to look at the background etc. Yeah. But it generated an RA 🤬
- FAA refusing requests for traffic “hot spots” on low level VFR charts as “hot spots” are on ground charts only.
- PAT25 wanted visual separation from the CRJ. ATC was required to inform the CRJ crew another aircraft was applying visual separation to them. They didn’t.
Honestly from a European perspective. It’s quite bone chilling.
I feel this was a systemic failure. Airspace design and Risk Normalisation.
And my heartfelt condolences for the pilots, of both aircraft, and everyone else involved including the ATCOs. Not that there weren’t issues… but in the Swiss cheese model, the FAA bought the cheese, drilled holes in it, and invited everyone to take a look inside.
Slightly surprised by some NTSB comments as well… they were presented that the heli was straight ahead on the CRJ TCAS simulation presentation. But in actual fact the CRJ was circling in a left turn for runway 33. It was stable at 500ft but in a left turn to line up with the runway… wings level at 300ft. It was challenged by the airline/ALPA but I would hope the NTSB would have picked up on that.
Low point of the whole hearing was Jennifer Homendy halting proceedings and moving witnesses to different seats, as one of the FAA managers elbowed a colleague while she was giving testimony - at which point she went quiet. Infernce being she was being reminded to stop talking.