Mechanical failure or human error? What might've caused the D.C. plane crash that killed 67 people
The fatal midair collision on Wednesday evening between an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet moments away from landing at Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport was a shocking and extremely rare occurrence, according to experts who believes human error is the likeliest explanation behind the tragedy that claimed dozens of lives.
In audio of the tower at Reagan communicating with the helicopter crew, a controller can be heard asking if they have the airplane in visual range, telling the chopper to pass behind the jet. Moments later, the two smacked into one another, killing all 64 people on the plane, which was flying in from Wichita, Kansas, and the three service members aboard the Black Hawk. On Thursday, officials with the National Transportation Safety Board told reporters they were not yet certain of the tragedy’s root cause.
Philip Greenspun, an MIT professor and former Delta pilot who flew the same Canadair Regional Jet involved, touched down at the same airport countless times. To his mind, the crash was most likely the result of human error stemming from a confluence of factors. Chief among the possibilities, he surmised, could have been a misunderstanding between air traffic controllers and the Black Hawk pilots. Further compounding factors may have included visual distractions, mistaken assumptions by controllers about the Black Hawk’s intentions, and idiosyncrasies inherent in the collision warning devices aboard both aircraft.
Greenspun — who is also an FAA-certificated helicopter instructor and has trained Black Hawk pilots to fly civilian choppers — has spent hundreds of hours piloting helos around Boston’s Logan Airport, and said it “would be very rare to need to cross the approach or departure corridor.”
“You usually do try to avoid it, if possible,” he told The Independent, while noting that helicopters in the D.C. area still “inevitably cross the paths of airliners,” and have for decades, without colliding. (Nevertheless, roughly two-thirds of the rare midair collisions that do occur, happen during final approach.)
Among the additional issues that could have contributed to Wednesday’s collision, Greenspun pointed to a potential misunderstanding between air traffic controllers and the Black Hawk pilots, who were instructed to keep sight of the American Airlines CRJ, one of several in the area at the time, and maintain visual separation.
However, Black Hawk pilots fly wearing helmets, and often, at night, using night vision goggles. Helmets significantly reduce peripheral vision, as do the goggles, which can also make it harder to see brightly-lit objects against dark backgrounds, like an airliner in a dark sky with its landing lights blazing. As the airliner was lined up on a glide path, ready to land, the helicopter should have had an easier time getting out of the way, but didn’t, according to Greenspun.
“I’m 99 percent sure the Black Hawk [crew] was confused about which airliner they were talking about,” Greenspun said.
On that note, he wondered why the control tower failed to warn the Black Hawk that it needed to immediately deviate from the course it was on, and give them a stronger warning than simply asking, about 20 seconds before impact, if it had the CRJ in sight. The Black Hawk crew answered that yes, it did, but there were multiple aircraft in the vicinity and Greenspun thinks they were likely referring to the wrong plane.
The controllers at such a busy airport “are about as good as you can get,” according to Greenspun, who said the pilots at the controls of an airliner are also top tier, and that Army Black Hawk pilots “are well above average.”
The situation on Wednesday was “totally routine,” and one that air traffic control, or ATC, was almost certainly “very comfortable with.”
“It’s a shame, because air traffic controllers really are excellent people, but, after 70-plus years of trials, maybe human excellence just isn’t enough,” Greenspun said, noting that those working in ATC towers are “working, basically, with 1950s technology.”
Likewise, Greenspan believes aircraft cockpits are in need of a major refresh, as well. A number of factors, among them the long development cycles involved in manufacturing commercial and military aircraft, mean the systems used typically lag behind even inexpensive consumer-grade ones available to the masses.
To that end, Matt Cox, who flew F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets for the U.S. Navy before transitioning into private industry, said his Volvo is “a lot more advanced, in terms of technology” than the $70 million airplane he piloted while serving in the military.
