Not that being near DC affords me any kind of right to an opinion, but:
Given the uptick in near miss incidents across the US the last few years, this is the kind of incident that should've been entirely avoidable through changes in policy from these past events but is also apparently the only kind that can spur along policy changes. I can see a world where the fault is on the VH-60, but absent more information, it would surprise me less to hear that it's the fault of the tower.
Knowing where AA5342 was in its approach, I see no possibility of the jet being at fault.
I just listened to the ATC recording from immediately before the collision. ATC instructs the helicopter to pass behind the CRJ. I’m fairly certain a few minutes before that, ATC instructed the helicopter to maintain visual separation, which is common. They typically ask, “do you have the aircraft in sight” and if you respond in the affirmative they rely on you to maintain safe distance.
I should mention that in the recording you can only hear one side of the conversation, so I don’t know whether or not the helicopter said whether or not they had visual contact with the plane they collided with.
Either way it doesn’t seem to be the fault of ATC. Of course we’ll know more as additional information becomes available.
Here is the ATC audio between the Tower and PAT-25. Helos that transition DCA's airspace use a separate VHF frequency from traffic landing and departing, but talk to the same tower controller.
* At 5:41 - 5342 is given instructions for circling to 33.
* At 6:45 - PAT-25 reports Memorial
* At 7:06 - tower gives PAT-25 traffic advisory about 5342 and PAT-25 reports traffic in sight and requests visual separation
* At 8:12 - tower asks PAT-25 if they have the CRJ in sight and tells him to pass behind the CRJ. PAT-25 again reports traffic in sight and again requests visual separation.
* At 8:28 - crash occurs, exclamations, go arounds issued
This is wild to listen to.
A) this is a busy atc channel and it's amazing how much complexity is coordinated over noisy radio.
B) within minutes of the accident happening (at 11:48) the ATC controller is calmly asking helicopters in the air if they can assist in search rescue operations asking, if they have search lights and direction them. This is whilst diverting and grounding flights.
I've been told the noise on the recordings is always a lot worse than in practice due to the location of the recording antenna not being ideal. I have no idea if this is correct or not. Maybe someone can enlighten this.
Yes, having tried to listen to ATC with an SDR— the public recordings are made from antenna that placed near the airport, while the official recordings are made from the feeds that the ATC is listening to— and those antenna have their lobes pointed toward the sky.
In the video from the webcam there's another plane which is much easier to see. Could they have asked about "the aircraft" and the helicopter pilot mistook which one they referred to? "yes I can see the plane flying much higher"
It's possible but generally there's implied context to ATC. ATC would only instruct you to watch out for possible vector interceptions. flying over an approach path, the context would be that you would look for aircraft on approach, not ones in holding or other patterns above.
That said, it's possible they mistook which aircraft to look for, but it's unlikely imho and we will likely never know for sure, as I would presume the pilots are deceased.
I got a lesson in how ATC works with helicopters up close and personal on a helicopter tour. ATC had the helo pilot hold position while an airplane was on final approach. I asked the pilot why we needed to hold as we could clearly see the aircraft and were to my lack of knowledge on the subject "plenty" far away. (It actually took me a second to locate the airplane as my sense of scale was not expecting the plane to be so small which is part of why I made the assumption we were plenty far away.) That's when the pilot told me we were not in the way of the approach but if the pilot had to declare a miss (or whatever they call it) and climb to circle around. The helo was near the path for the plane on the abort flight path. Once the plane was on the ground, ATC allowed us to continue.
It was my first experience in an aircraft seeing how ATC controlled the airspace directly. Lots of respect to the folks in ATC with a fraction of understanding in just how much they have to deal with other than the obvious take-off/landings.
No, that aircraft (having taken off from Reagan, visible in the full not-cropped videos) is close to the Kennedy Center camera but is nowhere near where the CRJ and helicopter were.
In any event, unless the weather was IMC, where neither aircraft can see because of weather/cloud, which I'm deducing is not the case if they were allowed to maintain visual separation, the ultimate responsibility for maintaining separation is with the pilot(s) .. But as I posted, we should not have this happen anywhere in the United States in 2025 & much less the nation's capital. Hopefully DOT and FAA get to work, but I have a feeling that will be the end of DCA's usefull life as a major passenger airport.
Just so ya know, "get to work" is the opposite of what the federal agencies are being told just at the moment.
I'm sure the accident investigators are very compassionate and dedicated to their jobs, and will do everything they can to resolve this and prevent future accidents. But overall the mood in DC isn't great just at the moment, as everyone is expecting to be fired regardless of their experience and skill.
> US President Donald Trump has offered federal workers the option to resign and receive pay for eight months, in a major effort to shrink and reform the US government.
"Mary Schiavo — former Dept. of Transportation inspector general — with a reality check on CNN:
“Air traffic controllers do not come and go with the change of an administration … The politics of the situation should have had no impact whatsoever on air traffic controllers”"
That had always been the case. The new administration has already done a lot of things differently from previous administrations.
It was largely a matter of precedent, rather than law. It's unclear how much of the current path is legal. And, of course, whether it's good judgment is completely orthogonal to whether it's legal.
In the opinion of one person who has a grand total of zero minutes of experience of all US Gov. employees being offered resignation leters.
The GP comment was about accident investigators rather than air traffic controllers but the consquences are the same, a lot of regular gov. employees are distracted by a current situation with no prior occurrence.
FAA-employed ATCs are like any other non-appointed federal employees - politics should have no impact on their employment and this arrangement is protected by federal civil service laws.
Which Trump is roundly ignoring because he wants to appoint every agency with burrowed MAGA loyalists, top to bottom.
If you haven't been following what this administration has said and done with a painful degree of critical focus, it's probably bleaker than you imagine.
> The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.
This time around it seems less targeted, which gives the perception that it is not really about streamlining, feel free to prove me wrong though.
From the document you linked:
> The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.
The Westminster tradition is for the public service to give "frank and fearless advice" [1] in the interests of the nation. It's still democratic, as a minister can choose to ignore this advice, at their own peril, and issue orders. As hinted at by their name, a public servant's first loyalty should to the public/nation rather than their Minister/Master. Maybe the US has a different system?
Of course the above is theoretical. In practise governments demand loyalty to themselves and there is little peril to Ministers as there now seems to be little repercussion for denying responsibility.
> As hinted at by their name, a public servant's first loyalty should to the public/nation rather than their Minister/Master. Maybe the US has a different system?
Both systems rely on the people in charge being told okay with being told "no, this is a bad idea".
The Ministers/Secretaries/Executive may think their plan(s) are a good idea and the civil service are being obstructionist.
(Of course the civil service could be wrong as well.)
The US system relies on them informing the public, or in case of say the ATF they make quasi law through opinions and then arrest the public and put them in tiny cages.
The public can decide to elect someone to shit can them. We have voted to liberate many of them from service. Obviously some wont like that, but they are servants to the people not peers.
The American people are tired of cleaning up the messes the bureaucracy has made. They've broken the rules, and it is time for the mess to be cleaned up and ejected from their jobs.
Many who have more HN-like peers and communities may not realize this is the opinion of the people, but the awakening is coming when the paychecks stop.
> It's still democratic, as a minister can choose to ignore this advice, at their own peril, and issue orders
Whilst this is true, the civil service has been alleged to leak/ brief against such orders, not to mention be obstructive about their implementation.
The hard part for me at least is telling whether this is because eg "ordering us to make buildings out of compacted sand is hard" or "we are going to drag our feet as much as we can because this is dumb"
I think you mean civil servants. There should be nothing we all want more than to have a professional--and more importantly--apolitical civil service whose members are empowered to do their jobs.
it’s actually really hard for private jets / charter (whether part 91 or part 135) to use dca. requirements include having an armed officer on board. as a result almost nobody flies charter into dca.
Regulations are written in blood, which is why it's such a disservice to indiscriminately tear it all down. We will re-learn the same lessons and people will pay for those lessons with their lives.
Some regulations are written and blood but some regulations are written to cover someone's ass and the two should not be treated equally. We shouldn't give equal respect to the Federal Aviation Regulations and to OPM's Qualification Standards for Federal Jobs; doing so deligitamizes the importance of the former.
Why don’t you identify all these easily found regulations then?
There’s a whole YIMBY movement, for example, that has identified specific regulations that are no longer valid and have made tremendous strides in proving and changing these regulations for almost universally better outcomes.
So where are all these specific regulations that are so terrible and the evidence that they are indeed net negatives.
I absolutely believe such regulations exist. But that’s not what these people care about. They simply care about trashing the govt to make it easier to drown, otherwise they would actually act like the YIMBY movement and identify specific regulations and work on changing those.
> Why don’t you identify all these easily found regulations then?
That was rude, and didn't at all speak to OP's point. They indicated that not all regulations are equal. Some are important and put into place because people died without them. Others are put into place for less important reasons. And the fact that _some_ regulations were removed doesn't mean that "ones written in blood" necessarily were.
There are definitely regulations out there written by people that have no idea what they are talking about, and that are a net negative on the area(s) they impact. Does that mean we should remove Chesterton's Fence? No. But it does mean that, if you see someone removing a fence, you shouldn't immediately accuse them of causing harm.
FAA is however an agency that regularly tangles with SpaceX and could be seen as slowing them down. Seems like a conflict of interest for the guy tasked with government efficiency.
You mean the same FAA people that allowed Boeing to self certify? The FAA is not spotless. I can only imagine how much worse air travel would be without them, but they are only run by humans trying to work in a political controlled environment.
> You mean the same FAA people that allowed Boeing to self certify?
Reputation lags reality.
Boeing used to be a product-first organization, and the FAA relied on that. However Boeing changed and put other priorities first and started cutting corners but their reputation was still good. After all, why would Boeing (unlike, say, tobacco) sell products that would kill their customers: it would be against Boeing's own interests.
In the 1980s and 1990s Boeing could be trusted to have less oversight, but since the 2000s that was no longer true, but no one noticed that. Now everyone recognizes that Boeing needs a babysitter.
Congress directed the FAA--by law--to delegate certain aspects of certification to non-FAA entities. This directive was issued by H.R. 302 - FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, 115th Congress.
The FAA is pretty bonkers; Rayiner is right here. Besides, what other system beyond "humans trying to work in a political controlled environment" are you advocating here?
> Regulations are written in blood, which is why it's such a disservice to indiscriminately tear it all down. We will re-learn the same lessons and people will pay for those lessons with their lives.
And which regulation was eliminated that caused this?
I have a feeling from your comment that you know more about aviation than you are letting on, and the part about being in DC not giving you a right to an opinion seems pretty silly in that context.
I fly out of DCA and IAD frequently (and JFK and LGA). I’ve gone through the process next to politicians, though I’ve never recognized any highly ranked ones (e.g. Pelosi, McConnell, etc.).
A lot of people here like to go on about security. I agree there's a certain amount of theater, and I try to avoid really peak times, but with pre-check I do tend to arrive early because I don't want stress but, as you say, it's rarely more than a few minute wait and I pretty much toss my bag on the carousel and walk through the metal detector. It's really not a big deal if you're prepared.
DCA is great to fly in and out of (I live in DC proper), as it's close, isn't hard to get to, and has a Metro (our subway) station right in front of the terminal, and the airport is fairly easy to navigate once you're in. Dulles now has a Metro station, but it's still far away from the terminal and it's hard to navigate, with gates very far away from the terminal; other than the Saarinen architecture, everything else about Dulles is awful. BWI is even further from most parts of DC; there's an AmTrak station where you can catch a bus, but pretty much you're driving an hour+ and it's in the middle of exurban hell.
DCA is challenging for flights, though, as the approach from upriver over the Potomac requires a sudden bank to the right just before landing and the runway's a bit short (tonight's flight was coming in from the southern approach). The Potomac also has a lot of helicopter traffic, between the military (including POTUS/VPOTUS), US Park Police, DC Police, and civilian flights. DCA's natural advantages have put the screws to Dulles the last 20 years, and Dulles's inability to not suck hasn't helped. As a result, people (including Members of Congress) want more flights out of DCA, so flight traffic has steadily increased. There were two near-misses last spring: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/faa-investigating-colli....
Tonight's crash seems like a colossal screwup by the helicopter. DCA is too popular for flight traffic to cease, but I wouldn't be surprised by further restricting the flight corridors and helicopter traffic, more funding/staffing for ATC, and maybe a small reduction in flights.
Thank's for the detailed explanation! I have a warm spot in my heart for Dulles, because it's my first memory of American (we flew into Dulles from Bangladesh in 1989). It's really convenient if you live in Great Falls or Reston. And I loved what was then the semi-rural Virginia around the airport. But agreed, it's a huge pain in the butt to navigate.
More funding? From an administration that is currently doing its best to get rid of as many federal employees as possible and has an extra "department" (led by you-know-who) dedicated to that? What they will probably do with ATC is privatize it (which is actually a reasonable thing to do - it's private in most of Europe, but if the intention behind it is to save money, it will probably not improve the system).
I would not be surprised if ATC _at DCA_ gets some more funding given the complicated air traffic environment and its unique position as Congress’s second-favorite airport.
From what I've heard, it's a challenging airport to land at, particularly because one of the approaches has two sharp turns in it, and I think the main winds tend to be annoying crosswinds for the main runway. Also, the airport is surrounded by lots of restricted airspace because, you know, seat of federal government and all that.
Short runway too. 9/11 restrictions only made it that much worse.
It was discussed post 9/11 about closing National Airport, but congress wouldn't hear it. It was too convenient from DC. (At a time when IAD was way the hell out there, rather than being 1/2 the way out the sprawl.)
I won't fly through DCA in the winter, because when I was a kid there was the Air Florida crash. I'd much prefer IAD with it's 3 mile runways and straight approaches.
It wasn't a police chopper, it was a military VH-60, also known as a "White Hawk" [1]. It's a VIP transport helicopter, the same type that is used to transport the president.
~The flight track of the helicopter [2] starts at a property in McLean, VA (edited to remove likely inaccurate info)~
The chopper was based out of Fort Belvoir, and based on similar past flight tracks, looks like it probably took off from there too. CNN is reporting that there were 3 soldiers onboard, and no VIPs.
> The flight track of the helicopter starts at a property in McLean, VA
that's almost certainly not where the flight started, due to intricacies of how this sort of flight tracking works.
if you look at [0] it has tracks of both flights. toggle the right-hand sidebar, if it's not open already, and you'll see a table containing both planes. the helicopter (PAT25) is yellow, the plane (JIA5342) is blue. the legend right below that explains the color-coding - the plane's data came from ADS-B, while the helicopter's data came from multilateration (MLAT).
MLAT [1, 2] works by having multiple ADS-B feeder stations cooperate in real-time and deduce an aircraft's position based on timestamps of when the signal is received. it allows tracking aircraft that only broadcast the more limited Mode S data, instead of the newer and more detailed ADS-B.
because it requires multiple cooperating receivers, the start of the track in suburban McLean does not mean it took off from there. it just means that was the point in its flight where it became visible to enough receivers that MLAT was able to pin down a position.
you can also see this difference just by looking at the tracks - the plane is broadcasting its own position continuously, so its track is nice and smooth. meanwhile the helicopter's flight looks "jagged" in a way that does not match what its actual flight path would have been. this is an artifact of the small errors introduced by MLAT.
That's a nice website, but from a layman's perspective it seems odd that everybody with an internet connection could have seen the imminent crash except the pilots ...
once you know to look at those two specific flights it probably gets easier, yeah. if you were looking at everything in the air at the time I think less so?
[2] shows the helicopter taking off 2 miles away from the old saudi embassy in McLean marked “permanently closed” on google maps. (The current embassy is in DC proper, directly across the river from DCA airport)
I don’t think thats strong evidence that it took off from the old Saudi Embassy - thats pretty far away even given your caveat about accuracy.
Edit: it looks to me like the black hawk was coming from somewhere else with its ADS-B turned off entirely, and then turned on ADS-B once it reached the potomac to approach DCA. The first two datapoints of that flight already show it going 110mph, which its unlikely to be able to accelerate to in just 0.2miles after take off.
Edit 2: The route also looks very similar to this flight from 11 days earlier (but reversed in direction): https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/PAT25 This shows the Blackhawk at 300 feet passing by DCA on what seems like a routine or training flight? I don't know how to look up historical flights to see if this is a commonly-flown route. On that flight, the Black Hawk flew past DCA at 300 feet of altitude, and the last FlightAware data for the American Eagle passenger flight showed 400 feet of altitude.
Note that that track is not ADS-B at all. It’s triangulated from mode S pings (“MLAT”, https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/mlat/). I don’t know how accurate these are.
I didn't say it took off from the old embassy. The flight track starts at the backyard of a house that is currently owned by the embassy. You can see the owner of that property by searching that address here (the site doesn't support a direct link): https://icare.fairfaxcounty.gov/ffxcare/search/commonsearch....
Regarding your edit: that's a good point, but the vertical ascent rate of the chopper at those first few data points shows 400-800 feet per minute, which is consistent with a chopper taking off...'
edit: your second edit makes me think you're right though, tonight's flight track was pretty consistent with the past flight track where it looks like it both took off from and landed at Fort Belvoir.
The helicopter seems like it is typically stationed at Fort Belvoir. Does "out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia" strictly mean that the helicopter's flight started at Fort Belvoir, or that the helicopter itself is considered to be "out of Fort Belvoir" in a similar manner that LeBron James could be said to be "out of Akron, OH"?
This comment was written by a US Coast Guard helicopter pilot. It gives a lot of information on how the two aircraft should have been able to share the space and some speculation on what went wrong:
A helicopter instructor suggests that possibly the helicopter pilots, who were told to go behind an aircraft that was landing, were looking at the previous aircraft that was landing.[1] That's just speculation at this point.
I thought it was a VH-60 given that it was callsign PAT25 (PAT is Priority Air Transport and they use the VH-60 for those flights), but if this was a training flight, they may have still used the PAT callsign while flying a UH-60.
To put this in perspective, this is the first fatal crash of a US commercial airliner in 16 years (Colgan Air Flight 3407 on February 12, 2009) and the first fatal commercial airliner crash in the United States in 12 years (since Asiana Airlines Flight 214 on July 6, 2013).
We like to throw shade at Boeing, the FAA etc, but this is still an incredible accomplishment, especially given the explosive growth of traffic over those years. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were far fewer flights but multiple crashes every year was the norm.
The real question, I feel, is whether the current U.S. government as it exists in 2025 is still capable of continuing to improve things, and whether it's still putting all the lessons of the past into practice - or whether we were just coasting on a combination of luck and the vestigial safety left to us by the diligence of the past.
Considering that the head of the FAA and TSA were forced to resign, and a hiring freeze on air traffic controllers is suddenly in effect, I don't think the current government wants to improve flight safety.
That was my thought exactly when I heard of this. I trust that like other major accidents, that we will learn from this and make the skies safer. Sixteen years without a major airline crash was an incredible accomplishment. It's a tragedy it couldn't have gone on longer.
> We like to throw shade at Boeing, the FAA etc, but this is still an incredible accomplishment, especially given the explosive growth of traffic over those years
To be fair to them, the Boeing-related incidents could have well happened in the US and killed Americans too. And the FAA absolutely refused to do their job until their hand was forced by everyone else - they refused to ground the Maxes until all other major air authorities did. That's also why EASA is involved in the Max recertification, and the 777X certification. Nobody trusts the FAA anymore.
And the fact that the door blowout didn't damage any part of the plane is miraculous - if it had hit the vertical stabiliser, the plane would have been a total loss.
DCA has two runways. The longer runway is aligned with the river’s north/south direction at that point, so planes flying the approach to this runway from the south track along the western shore of the river, leaving the eastern shore clear for other aircraft like helicopters. The vast majority of flights on approach from the south [1] use this longer runway.
The secondary runway is set at a diagonal NW/SE. Planes flying an approach from the south follow the river at first, but then loop out over the eastern shore of the river to line up on that runway. To my eye the radar track of the downed flight follows this path. It’s possible since it was a small plane and only small planes can use the diagonal runway—it’s shorter.
I mention this because this track takes planes into airspace that is a) usually clear of commercial airplane traffic, and b) directly over military facilities like Naval Research Lab and Joint Base Bolling, which have significant military helicopter travel.
Basically, I wonder to what extent the helicopter pilot was surprised to find an airplane descending in that location.
[1] When flights are approaching from the north, the main runway requires a pretty sharp right turn seconds before touching down. Approaches to the diagonal runway from the north take planes almost directly over the Pentagon.
The press conference this morning mentioned that this was a new flight path. I wonder if the helicopter crew were not fully briefed on the new path, if that is the case.
~5:41 mark 5342 is given instructions for circling to 33.
~6:45 mark PAT-25 reports Memorial
~7:06 mark tower gives PAT-25 traffic advisory about 5342 and PAT-25 reports traffic in sight and requests visual separation
~8:12 mark tower asks PAT-25 if they have the CRJ in sight. PAT-25 again reports traffic in sight and again requests visual separation.
~8:21 mark, crash occurs, exclamations, go arounds issued
I'm impressed by your, and their, hearing comprehension here! Granted, English isn't my native language but even with concentration I struggle to hear what they say.
Obviously it will take some time for the full accident analysis but there have been quite a few near misses lately due to air traffic controller errors. Flight volume has been growing, airspace near airports is more congested, and controllers are overworked. Eventually all of the "Swiss cheese" holes line up. We're going to need to hire more controllers.
Also, it appears that one of the aircraft was a military (not police) H-60 Blackhawk helicopter.
Hiring controllers is not easy. A friend's daughter just went through the hiring process. She graduated from college with an appropriate degree right as COVID hit. Her FAA application wasn't accepted for four years.
This past summer she did the four-week interactive online courses. Applicants must pass this and may not re-enter the program if they do not. After that she did the six-week courses in Oklahoma City. Again, applicants must pass this and may not re-enter the program if they do not. She passed. Only half her class of 20 passed. In the prior class, only 4 of 15 passed.
She declined the position when they could not offer a position within reasonable proximity of her family. She, too, may not re-enter the program. On top of all that, the program has strict age requirements because there's a mandatory retirement age (55, I believe).
There isn't a large pool of applicants and the percentage of successful ones is not high. Considering the amount of lives on the line, it's understandable the hiring criteria is strict. All told, it's not an easy position to fill and even explicit efforts to increase the number of applicants will take years. Just like many other skilled fields.
Isn't it a reasonable filter? I'd (naively) assume that all things being equal, a person who passes a test on the first attempt, is more likely to have a higher innate ability than one who doesn't.
No college degree is officially required. Candidates with aviation related degrees probably have a better chance of making it through. But there are plenty of working controllers who have only a high school diploma or learned the job as enlisted military personnel.
"Have either one year of general work experience or four years of education leading to a bachelor’s degree, or a combination of both"
In her case it was a Bachelors in Aviation and Aerospace Science with an Air Traffic Control Concentration. There may be other programs or concentrations which are acceptable.
Since the chances of landing an ATC job are so slim with the degree, what kind of job options does that degree afford you? What kind of job did she end up taking (or doing while waiting on the FAA)?
While waiting for the FAA and since declining the ATC position she's worked at her family's auto repair shop. Pre-FAA she did repair work and for the last few months since returning she's more on the management side. She hasn't yet decided if the family business or something else is the career she wants.
A friend of mine found out he is color blind that way. Not the most common one which you can detect by the tests which are in every biology book here but a rarer variant which is immediately disqualifying. He had to go through weeks of testing as well if that was not the case. Though here you'd be place within 300km of your home so less issues of closeness to family.
Practically all laws, rules, and regulations in aviation were written with the blood of those who, well, sadly had to embrace the Earth so to speak.
On the face of it they may look discriminatory, especially the age restrictions, but the FAA will be more than happy to cite objective and scientific evidence supporting them which were, again, written in blood.
Maybe. The article talks about "how the Obama-era FAA practiced discrimination in its hiring processes," which wouldn't apply to the woman I know. But it's not an in-depth article so it is possible such practices were still in place through Trump's first term and post-COVID when FAA hiring ramped up and would have affected the person I know.
> In addition, the White House has put a hiring freeze in place, prohibiting the replacement of open government positions or the creation of new ones while the administration evaluates reductions in the workforce. The White House plans to release a memorandum with further guidance within 90 days. This has drawn criticism from lawmakers as the FAA has been ramping up controller hiring.
"The FAA has awarded a new contract for air traffic services at SQL to Robinson Aviation (RVA). However, the contract does not include locality pay to account for the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a result, RVA’s employment offers to current SQL controllers were significantly lower than their current compensation under SERCO. Understandably, all current controllers have declined RVA’s offers."
"Given that the FAA is ultimately responsible for ensuring air traffic services at SQL, we requested temporary FAA staffing for the tower—a solution currently being implemented at Eagle Airport in Colorado during its transition from SERCO to RVA. However, the FAA informed us this morning that they will not provide temporary personnel for SQL"
Doesn't that just mean there will be no taxi control? My understanding is that ATC isn't in the tower. The tower staff just give clearances for take-off and directions on which runway to land/take-off. In radio clips, you can hear ATC hand-off a plane to tower.
No, ATC here refers to ground and tower controllers. They give taxi, takeoff, landing, and close in maneuvering instructions.
When you say ATC I believe you’re thinking of tracon controllers, a level of airspace up from towers who control approach and departures and then hand you off to/from the tower. Above them there’s yet another level, center controllers. All of these are ATC though.
The "ground" controller manages taxing around the "movement areas" (i.e. taxiways) on the ground. This notably does not include the runways. And it depends how much of the actual ramp and parking area they control (those are sometimes non-movement area and it's the pilots job to not hit anything).
The "tower" controller manages the actual runways, and the airspace within several miles of the airport laterally and a few thousand feet vertically (varying at each airport). This includes sequencing all the planes that want to take off of land there, and everybody maneuvering around that immediate area.
For the large airports that mostly big airliner flights, that sequencing is largely worked out by the approach controllers dozens or hundreds of miles ahead of time. So there's a steady stream of planes following standardized approach procedures at just the right distance apart.
Outside of the ~30 busiest airports in the country though, there is also a lot of general aviation in small planes. They want to transition through that airspace, or do a dozen laps around the "pattern" to practice landings, etc. Even at fairly major airports, there's plenty of GA activity. For example at Burbank, Ontario, John Wayne, Long Beach, San Jose, Oakland, etc in California. It's only really SFO and LAX where that doesn't really happen, because they set fees to shoo the peons away.
SQL is a small but very busy airport that is almost exclusively GA. There are several flight schools there with multiple planes each, and it's sandwiched in complicated airspace between SFO, SJC, OAK, and open bay.
The tower at this kind of airport is doing a delicate dance keeping multiple planes buzzing around in a rectangular pattern all day every day. Some of which are faster than others. Less frequently a larger much faster plane wants to get in or out and they're getting handed off from approach. Helicopters are doing tours and wanting to cross through. And a lot of the people flying are students that are new at this, don't know how to talk or listen on the radio right yet, make mistakes following directions, etc.
With the tower closed, all those people have to coordinate on a party-line radio with each other about where they are, what they're doing, etc to hopefully not hit anyone. So yeah... it's possible, but it's going to be a mess, and that's why tiny airports like this with virtually no commercial passenger service have a tower.
Also if you're leaving the immediate area, someone at the airport (ground, tower, or "clearance delivery", depending) normally will coordinate putting your destination (for visual/VFR flight following) or full route (for IFR/instruemnt) into the ATC systems before you takeoff so that you can talk to the approach controllers once you leave and they can provide you traffic advisories, etc.
With nobody at the tower to do that, you have to "cold call" approach once already airborne. Or if your route allows, just not get flight following at all (and then ATC has no way to reach you). So SQL tower closing will also add to the workload for the SFO/OAK approach area.
Honest question: are air traffic controllers at risk for being replaced with AI systems? My initial thought is no, there is too much complexity, but AI could help ease the load. I'm not really informed about air traffic systems, just curious.
Tower systems are the last place in the world you would want a 97% accurate large language model, and the very last place we would culturally tolerate this sort of thing. Innate conservatism is what happens when deviations from perfection lead to collisions, and for the most part "AI" success remains a stochastic matter, gigabyte to terabyte sized tensors that are not human-intelligible. A black box which cannot be readily, safely validated in the real world.
With that said - algorithmic, automated, and digital systems for collision avoidance at the very minimum have and could continue to make ATC jobs significantly easier. The radio voice channel is a particularly low fidelity, low bandwidth way to mete out information and directives.
There will be a list of scenarios competing for that "last place".
Operating rooms, certain military/police situations and self driving cars come to mind. A shared characteristic here is that errors lead to fatal outcomes exacerbated by unclear accountability.
No. We use some deterministic automation on the backend for helping with traffic management and rerouting flight paths, but the communication with aircraft is mostly done via voice. Everything happens too fast to insert a keyboard in the middle (*), and voice recognition would be too error prone for something safety critical.
(* CPDLC does allow ATC to send texts to/from larger aircraft, but this is only used for things that aren't time sensitive. Voice is still the primary method of control.)
It also has to listen, and accept complex requests and demands from pilots over a scratchy and occasionally garbled radio link.
Have you ever gotten frustrated because Alexa/Siri/etc completely misinterpreted a voice request? Or looked at the quality of YouTube subtitles? That’s still lots of inaccuracy with AI speech recognition. There’s no room for that up there.
And yes, the non-deterministic nature is a huge problem given this is the very definition of a life-critical system.
I know, but these things can be trained for. Siri/Alexa is 2010 tech, not 2025. And the big benefit is that there's a pretty limited vocabulary and phraseology in aviation.
I don't see ATC being replaced yet but in the future perhaps something more automated could happen including more visual instructions.
Ages ago, I watched a documentary about ATC that showed a drill involving ATC work under power failure (mains and generator). I'm probably misremembering some details but there were battery-operated radios and little tablets being passed around with scribbled information.
I guess AI can work while the lights are on, but if this is your backstop scenario, you still need the meat ATC controllers, and they really need to know their stuff.
The SOTA is augmented ATC displays and digital towers, which basically use object recognition to label planes on cameras, and the controllers sit somewhere else.
Usually this is done for rural airports, where you have one controller potentially managing multiple low traffic airports, and it’s tough to get ATC willing to move to remote locations. The only busy airport doing this kind of thing is London City Airport, but that has 3M passengers a year and DCA has 25M. That was motivated by the lack of space at London City Airport, so they demolished the traditional tower to reallocate space.
Why would it need to even be AI? Why not just regular software? Couldn't airplanes just send a message that they want to land and the Air Traffic Control software sees where they are and what other aircraft are around and sends everyone the appropriate messages?
The human ATC system is very good at handling exceptions, including various kinds of emergencies, pilot errors, and reasons to prioritize one plane over another. The human controllers also typically have a good understanding of the details of airspace, regulations, policies, aviation customs, and the capabilities of various kinds of aircraft.
So for example, a plane can have a "missed approach and go around" when trying to land. I was once on a plane that did that because of extremely high winds. In that case, the plane that was supposed to be on the ground is suddenly climbing again and is going to need to turn in order to repeat the approach.
A plane can have a medical emergency onboard, so it needs to land at an unexpected airport, possibly faster than a normal landing, or starting from a somewhat atypical position. I was once on a plane that did that because someone onboard had a seizure.
A plane can have damage or equipment failures that the pilots find it hard to assess directly, so it needs to fly around for a while to give the pilots time to "run checklists" or perform various tests, or sometimes to let a ground-based observer report on something about the plane (!), or just to develop their intuition about how functional the plane is. It might then need to land at an unintended airport or return unexpectedly to its takeoff airport. I was once on a plane that did that because of bird strikes during departure, where the plane was damaged but the pilots were unsure how seriously.
A pilot might misunderstand something or disobey regulations, and that pilot or another pilot might be told to take some unexpected evasive action to avoid a collision. (This is one area that has been productively automated in some cases via TCAS, where the aircraft themselves can sometimes figure out what an appropriate maneuver would be before a controller tells them one.) I haven't personally experienced that.
There might be another kind of emergency where a runway is closed and a large number of planes need to be diverted (like right after this collision where DCA was abruptly closed).
There might be negotiations with an uncooperative or mentally ill pilot (like the tragic story of Richard Russell in 2018, but also a number of incidents that had happier endings).
Pilots might also negotiate more cooperatively with ATC related to diversions and priority in situations like bad weather, where the airport has less capacity than originally expected and the pilots need to determine whether they will divert to a different airport. In this case the air traffic controllers may talk to different pilots about their fuel levels and other factors that make them better and worse candidates for changing flight plans. En-route (ARTCC/ACC) controllers will also negotiate with pilots about changing altitude to reduce or avoid turbulence.
There are occasionally cases where a pilot is incapacitated and someone with less training and experience needs to be advised remotely on how to land a plane. (This is mostly very small planes but ATC will still ultimately deal with these emergencies.) In that case other planes also need to be kept away from the incident aircraft and maybe diverted elsewhere.
Specifically for takeoff and landing, there are often multiple planes using the same runway (for takeoff, landing, or both) in relatively quick succession, or possibly using runways that cross each other. In this case, a controller needs to keep an eye on how quickly pilots have (or haven't) complied with specific clearances, e.g. to cross a runway on the ground, because the clearances may need to be revoked or modified if they aren't used quickly enough (because of the presence of other aircraft that have also received clearances that will soon start to conflict with the older clearances). This also includes checking whether planes that have landed have vacated the runway expeditiously (since if they haven't done so, for whatever reason, other planes may soon need to be told to go around).
There are also cases where military or law enforcement authorities may ask or demand to modify normal ATC procedures or clearances because of some special operation or problem. The simplest case is that they might ask to prioritize a government aircraft over civilian flights for some reason, or ask certain other operations to stop e.g. during a takeoff or landing of Air Force One. (I just watched this a few days ago with an Air Force One departure from Las Vegas, where other departures and landings were temporarily but briefly suspended. So that had to be planned and communicated to various pilots, some of whom then had follow-up questions about what they were or weren't allowed to do.)
Pilots are also considered to have ultimate responsibility for the safety of their flights and passengers, and they can also refuse some ATC instructions, or deviate from some normal procedures, in emergencies. So for example, a controller might believe it's safe to land in certain weather conditions and might give a pilot a certain clearance, but the pilot might not feel up to completing the landing and might then refuse to do so. The controller will have to understand the pilot's intentions as best as possible, and deal with the consequences of those intentions (e.g., once again, keeping other planes out of the way, or trying to find a new routing that the pilot will be willing to accept).
ATC is also responsible for passing some kinds of information to and from other parties, like in case of an emergency landing communicating with emergency responders so that they understand the nature of the emergency and whatever facts will help them respond more effectively. And they have to tell other ATC facilities about problems and situations that will affect them, like in-flight emergencies, closed airspace, closed runways, closed airport, etc.
Many of these things can and should be more automated than they are, but humans in these jobs are doing enormous amounts of reasoning, improvisation, and even social negotiation.
(I'm not a pilot or air traffic controller, just a former frequent flyer who liked listening to ATC communications and sometimes listens to liveatc.net when friends' flights are arriving or departing, or watches video recaps of various aviation incidents.)
Edit: Another case that I thought of: during an emergency landing, a pilot might be given either a shorter (more direct) or longer (more indirect) route than usual, in response to the pilot's assessment of which would be safer. The pilot could also be given a longer route than usual in order to have time to "work checklists" in preparation for the landing, or in order to burn off fuel so that the plane will weigh less (and be less likely to cause a huge fire) upon landing.
If some navigation equipment is broken, the ATC facility could help with navigation or with diagnosing the problem (by describing visual landmarks, or by estimating the plane's current speed and heading based on ATC radar).
Replaced, no. ATC, at least while we still have human pilots, is a system for instructing, organizing, and responding to humans, with all their flexibility and foible.
Now a copilot e.g. ATC audio parsed by an LLM into intended tracks, requests from traffic, integrated into the scope with projections for future separation etc…
> Thanks for reaching out! As you probably know, crashing an aeroplane is not generally recommended. There are many factors that may contribute to a crash, such as weather, technical malfunction or human error. Appropriate training, regular maintenance and flight planning are some of the best practices which help minimise the likelihood of a crash. I recommend revisiting these factors. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
There's no good excuse, other than cost and training and equipment integration (which are massive costs, i know) for not having some kind of learning or at a minimum high levels of automation in 2025.
In fairness to the current administration, while the hiring freeze may have impacted ATC hiring, that is not causal here. No one hired last week would have been running things today (if they were hit with the freeze).
Someone that was hired weeks or months ago, but scheduled to start last week, could* have been included in the hiring freeze. There's examples here of rescinded offers after doing irs on-boarding: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2025/jan/executive...
(Not that there's information that suggests this caused the incident)
If someone in your scenario had accepted the offer and was going to start last week, they would not have been included in the hiring freeze and would have been able to start.
> Job offers made prior to noon on January 20, 2025, for which the individual has accepted the position and has a designated start date on or before February 8, 2025. Those
individuals should report to work according to their respective designated start date.
They were replying to a comment that said "We're going to need to hire more controllers."
So I took their comment to be forward-looking.
It's worth adding that Elon Musk's email that had the supposed "buyout" went to ATC folks -- however management was telling them they'd need to work through their resignation date, regardless, removing the point of it. Then again, Musk denied the buyout will work this way, that agencies can just do whatever they want on this and OPM seems to agree, so who knows.
Is there an actual reason why the control tower work can't be fully automated? For train control lights we almost don't rely on human operators anywhere.
> For train control lights we almost don't rely on human operators anywhere.
Trains are on tracks. They basically move in one dimension. And the tracks can have (near) contact-based sensors along the way where the exact distance is known. (And in the US, there still is human conducting in a lot of the US)
That’s a very different problem space than the three dimension, unattached, space that air traffic moves in.
Because things can go from routine to multiple simultaneous life-threatening failures very quickly. Something like one flight declaring a mayday while another one just lost communication, all while the radar just started glitching in a weird way. Human intuition and common sense can sort it out. Deterministic algorithms would not.
I Googled about this. London Heathrow is widely regarded as the busiest two runway airport in the world. They allow less than 50 arrival per hour. Are there any airports in the world that can have "hundreds of arrivals per hour"? Conservatively, 200 can be considered "hundreds", then you would need 8x runways operating at max capacity. That seems hard to imagine. Google also tells me that Atlanta (normally the business airport in the US) can handle about 250 "operations" per hour, so let's say half for arrivals.
Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.
I should have said “arrivals and departures”. KATL has 2,100–2,700 arrivals and departures per day. Even if we assume those are equally spaced throughout the day (they aren’t) we’re over 100/hour.
But sure. It’s a mild exaggeration. It still doesn’t change the core point.
3D isn’t just “magically hard” for computers, but the process for routing traffic is wildly complex and a bunch of planes arriving and leaving at semi-random times, directions, and with different requirements and capabilities is where the problem starts not finishes.
The happy path is relatively easy. The exceptions are innumerable.
I think the 3D part is fine, it's more "all of physics" coming into play with a plane. Like bird strikes, engine failures, trying to decide how to handle that. What is the loss function the AI is supposed to apply if an emergency landing is needed?
And then if you have people flying the planes, you have to deal with people mostly _but not always_ doing the right thing. So now you build out a plan and have to deal with consequences of that.
So at the end of the day you're still looking at funneling humans into a thing. At worst you could consider ATC as "customer support", there to press buttons on machines to actually handle a bunch of logistics because the pilots need to figure things out.
On top of all of this, airports are trying to get through a lot of flights quickly. So people can make snap judgements about whether planes can or cannot advance, what they should do, etc. No matter how well your plan is, the instant a pilot mishears something it's over.
If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. But in the meantime there's somebody not following the plan often enough.
This does lead to an interesting question for me, though: what is the biggest "human movement" system that is actually entirely hands-off logistics? I would imagine that postal service companies are doing a lot but every major person moving operation seems pretty hands-on from the outside.
> If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs.
There's currently a human in the loop at almost all times but a great many planes are already self-flying. Autopilots are a thing, and have been for decades. Modern airliners routinely land themselves, and Garmin have developed an emergency landing system for general aviation aircraft which can handle everything including selecting an airport and communicating with ATC in the case of the pilot being incapacitated.
In many ways a self-piloting plane is an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars. Every plane has (or will have in the near future) a beacon on it transmitting it's location to every other plane around it to allow collision avoidance, and the procedure for getting from one major airport to another is pretty much prescribed in the form of standard departures, arrivals, and airways. The big difference of course is that if a car on the road breaks down and the AI can't handle it then the car can just stop, and baring someone not noticing and plowing into the back of them everyone will be fine, while if that happens in a plane it's a matter of time until the thing falls out of the sky killing everyone on board.
It's not just a 3D problem. It's all of the management in the air and on the ground. Could a computer eventually do it autonomously? I would think eventually, but the problem is handling exceptions. The Navy has been experimenting for years with a digital replacement of their Ouija board analog flight deck management tool for carriers [1]. And even then, people are still making most of the decisions.
And ATL is a crazy busy airport (there's an old doc on Netflix I think which is interesting). To confirm your question, ATL can run 5 runways nearly continuously[2]. It would be interesting to know what they peak at during a busy Monday morning, but my guess is they are more constrained by gate space at this point.
> Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.
Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe it is a more modern phenomena, enabled by a steady diet of 30 second videos.
Either way, I'm quite disturbed, regularly, recently, by the # of people who breezily stumble through quarter-baked thoughts while speaking dismissively, as if they've covered the surface of a complex universe that has been worked on very many smart people for decades, and now we can get to the real singular problem that'd fix everything, the one thing they've identified.
I don't even know where to begin trying to interlocute when the starting premise is "3D is hard for modern computers."
So I speak straightforwardly, in a way that I wish wouldn't be seen as rude, but it is.
So it goes.
You're right about the arrivals, but you missed the forest for the trees in the comment you're replying to.
Four Dimensional Navigation, actually! X, Y, Z, plus Time. By incorporating strict time constraints, air traffic controllers can schedule and merge arriving aircraft more precisely, reducing holding patterns and optimizing fuel usage.
>4D AREA NAVIGATION SYSTEM DESCRIPTION AND FLIGHT TEST RESULTS
>A 4D area navigation system was designed to guide aircraft along a prespecified flight path
(reference path) such that the aircraft would arrive at the approach gate at a time specified by
the ATC controller. Key components to achieve this requirement were:
>(1) stored reference trajectories;
>(2) a continuously recomputed capture trajectory to a selected waypoint on the reference trajectory so as to achieve the desired time of arrival;
>(3) electronic situation displays; and (4) a control system to follow the overall trajectory in space and time.
>Four-dimensional guidance algorithms for aircraft in an air traffic control environment
>Theoretical development and computer implementation of three guidance algorithms are presented. From a small set of input parameters the algorithms generate the ground track, altitude profile, and speed profile required to implement an experimental 4-D guidance system. Given a sequence of waypoints that define a nominal flight path, the first algorithm generates a realistic, flyable ground track consisting of a sequence of straight line segments and circular arcs. Each circular turn is constrained by the minimum turning radius of the aircraft. The ground track and the specified waypoint altitudes are used as inputs to the second algorithm which generates the altitude profile. The altitude profile consists of piecewise constant flight path angle segments, each segment lying within specified upper and lower bounds. The third algorithm generates a feasible speed profile subject to constraints on the rate of change in speed, permissible speed ranges, and effects of wind. Flight path parameters are then combined into a chronological sequence to form the 4-D guidance vectors. These vectors can be used to drive the autopilot/autothrottle of the aircraft so that a 4-D flight path could be tracked completely automatically; or these vectors may be used to drive the flight director and other cockpit displays, thereby enabling the pilot to track a 4-D flight path manually.
>4D-TBO: a new approach to aircraft trajectory prediction
>How four-dimensional trajectory data could contribute to aviation decarbonisation targets
>The real-time transmission of four-dimensional trajectory data has the incredible potential to greatly improve an aircraft’s trajectory prediction. By reducing the inaccuracy of current air traffic management (ATM) prediction models by approximately 30-40%, the Trajectory Based Operations in 4 Dimensions (4D-TBO) project is helping to pave the way to a more sustainable management of tomorrow’s air traffic.
>The 4D trajectory of an aircraft consists of the three spatial dimensions plus time as a fourth dimension. This means that any delay is in fact a distortion of the trajectory as much as a level change or a change of the horizontal position. Tactical interventions by air traffic controllers rarely take into account the effect on the trajectory as a whole due to the relatively short look-ahead time (in the order of 20 minutes or so).
>The implementation of 4D trajectory management is being researched by SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) in the EU and NextGen in the US.
>The 4D trajectory concept is based on the integration of time into the 3D aircraft trajectory. It aims to ensure flight on a practically unrestricted, optimum trajectory for as long as possible in exchange for the aircraft being obliged to meet very accurately an arrival time over a designated point.
Yes, this multiplies the complexity. When you talk to ATC you always need your tail number and airplane model. Why? Because a landing Cessna 150 is moving at 70mph. An incoming jet is moving at 130mph. And the jet can’t just slow down to 70 or it will fall out of the sky. They need to consider aircraft performance in all aspects of planning.
E.g. On 9/11 ATC had to land almost 3000 planes in 1 hour. I'm not sure if that sort of national coordinated grounding is part of ATC training, but it's certainly not something I'd want to leave to some code that has never needed to run in production before.
It just seems like software could pretty easily compute non-intersecting flight paths for all planes and assign them accordingly. As well it could real time monitor all trajectories and continue to give out the updated flight paths. I don't see why you also couldn't run a trillion tests using real and simulated flight data to make sure it works well.
Air traffic control has a lot more things to deal with. There are scenarios like runway closed and all traffic has to be diverted. Loss of communication. Various emergencies. Weather changes. It's not just a question of 3D motion planning. Controllers in the tower also use their eyes.
In your imaginary system how is the software "tower" communicating with airplanes, using voice? I don't think we even have software that can reliably decode the variety of human voices over radio that a controller can respond to.
One can imagine a digital protocol to all airplanes but technology works its way really slowly into aviation.
Yes, it would require a piece of hardware, but that seems easy to regulate and wouldn't need to be very expensive certainly not in relation to the costs of owning and operating an airplane.
Seems like you’ve stumbled onto a very obvious solution that would be easy to implement and that no one else has ever managed to see, but which would totally revolutionize the airline industry. Time to start a business!
Because right now airplanes are flown by humans. A large part of atcs jobs is dealing with humans. Not every pilot will be able to fly the optimum flight path.
How would you deal with all sorts of emergencies involving human pilots? For unmanned aircraft(aka drones) it’s a lot easier to implement unmanned traffic management (UTM).
Direct them to land in the best location and make sure all other aircraft are on non-intersecting flight paths. What exactly is ATC doing that software isn't able to?
How many options are there for handling emergencies with aircraft now? You pretty much just have either land ASAP or circle to burn fuel and then land.
Not an expert but I can't imagine that would go very well. Trains have a single axis of movement that sometimes cross or combines with others. Aircraft have three axes of movement all under human control.
I mean this sincerely. What is more likely: that we've spent several decades ignoring very real automation solutions to this problem, or that it's a really, really hard problem that could get people killed?
not a bad question honestly.. I'd want some highly skilled humans there monitoring things but, yes. The air traffic control system of the US is absolutely incredibly amazing, but their entire mission, technology and equipment used to accomplish that mission, etc need to be reviewed, maybe rebuilt to be even safer.
> President Trump signed an executive order instituting the freeze on Monday shortly after his inauguration, but allowed for exceptions for positions related to immigration enforcement, national security or public safety.
Important to read the details! There will be lots of misinformation as people invoke the minority of critical jobs as cover to defend the less critical ones.
> This order does not apply to military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.
ATC surely falls under public safety. Additionally, the ATC issues stretch well back into the Biden term, and you can find plenty of articles discussing the controversy elsewhere.
I get a strong sense that they don't actually know what they cut as they stopped paying to guard ISIL prisoners. I could very easily see ATC getting hit by accident. Generally this administration neither thinks nor plans before acting
That article is propaganda from the same people who brought you the Iraq War. That’s exactly the sort of funding spigot we should be stopping so we can figure out what the hell is going on. Why the hell are we paying for prison guards in Syria? At one point CIA backed militias in Syria were fighting DOD backed militias: https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-...
Everyone obviously wants to use critical services as a shield to avoid scrutiny on them. But by all indications the administration was ready to go on day 1, and insofar as stuff is being cut or halted a decision was made to allow that to happen.
So the LA Times is not part of the propaganda that brought us the Iraq War? And the US must, must at all cost, stop paying for prison guards to figure it out?
There's no other way to just ... figure it out? You know, by studying the situation?
And when has “studying the situation” ever worked to make the government stop wasting money destroying the Middle East? Obama promised to change this stuff, and he couldn’t do it, because he innately trusted the same people who made the mistakes to “study” how to fix them.
I don't know what was going on with Syria, sounds real bad, but your claim about the administration having clear plans they're executing from day 1 is clearly false. This is sourced reporting, not analysis:
And we also did make it basically impossible for ATC workers to strike, so its not like the ATC workers could have said "fix this shit so people don't die or we will strike" because they can't really and anyone who says it anyways alone is going to be given the boot and blacklisted from the job. Not to mention the amount of training and effort needed to become one in the first place with basically zero job security or recourse if you make the wrong person angry.
If you listen to the ATC recording, around 15:50, they instruct the helicopter to watch for traffic, specifically this flight, and clears them for virtual separation.
It's the helo's fault. They likely misjudged the plane due to assuming it was a large jet but it was a regional jet, so it was way closer than they thought it was.
It's a tragedy, but I don't see how it would be ATC's fault. But that's just my 2 cents.
It could be that the right call was for ATC to deny the request for visual separation and for them to do the deconflicting themselves. Not saying that's the case, I don't know, but that's one way it could be (partially) ATC's fault.
It's way to early to say but one of the threads seemed to indicate the helicopter pilot was told about the airplane and instructed to maintain visual separation. I used to be a military air traffic controller and that was fairly common practice but I wasn't aware this is something that happens in civil aviation where usually the margins should be much higher.
Crazy and sad. I guess we'll learn more over the next few days. Going into the water is maybe better than crashing on land. Hopefully some people make it.
It's very common for civilian ATC to instruct pilots to maintain visual separation, especially when they're both in the approach pattern. For airliners, TCAS gives an extra level of safety to guard against pilot errors. But I think many military aircraft lack TCAS.
> When visual approaches are allowed, controllers can tell pilots to maintain visual separation from other aircraft, so they don’t have to leave as much of a buffer as with an instrument landing (where it’s entirely on the controllers to provide proper spacing).
From an incident at SFO where a Luftansa plane was not allowed to perform a landing using visual separation at night, and therefore was delayed interminably:
TCAS is always active if your transponder mode dial is in such a position, so it always calls out other aircraft that are nearby and could pose a threat of mid-air collision. However, resolution advisories are inhibited near the ground. The last thing you want to be telling a pilot to do is to increase their descent when they're only a thousand feet above terrain -- this would at the very least trigger a more serious GPWS callout, the response to which is drilled into pilots during training -- pull up, directly into the path of the thing TCAS would want you to avoid. If the other aircraft also has TCAS equipped and enabled, and their RAs aren't inhibited, they will still get a climb instruction (both crews usually get opposite instructions in order to maximise the vertical separation).
Correct. At that altitude TCAS RAs were almost certainly inhibited. They might have gotten a TA.
On the tapes, the military helicopter was warned about the airliner. They replied that they had the traffic in sight and requested to maintain visual separation.
It is so incredibly tiring that you dweebs try to blame every single bad outcome in the world on cough minorities cough "DEI", with zero evidence.
In fact, literally when you posted this comment there were already ATC recordings floating around of the controller telling the helicopter pilot to maintain separation from the exact airliner they crashed into.
Here we get air traffic controller recordings, and people who are ammeter pilots. It is more informed speculation than my "normal" friends or co-workers.
Anything about civilian air safety is like catnip for nerds. It is the ultimate armchair nerd sport -- speculating about reasons for a civilian air crash. I guess this discussion will be more than 1,000 comments before its heat-death.
Yes, tons of speculation, and very little clear basic facts.
When I clicked, I expected to find the comments interesting (since I worked in a small corner of flight safety), but, skimming through, I kept feeling aversion to threads.
Most modern news organizations aren't much better.
I've seen at least one "why don't you just <misunderstanding of how aviation works>" upthread already. Can't believe this flavor of tech hubris is running the country now. No wonder the goddamn planes are falling out of the sky...
As someone working in aviation safety, this is heartbreaking and awful to watch. The efforts of CAST and ASIAS in reducing aviation safety accidents have been very successful, but of course we still have so much to do.
Although Air Canada Flight 759 was far too close for comfort and should be classified as a failure of the system, even if it did not result in an accident.
This will be the worst disaster since Colgan in 2009 which is the crash that upped the hours requirement for ATP pilots from 250 to 1500 even though both pilots had over 1500 hours. I think this is going to be a very big deal and very quickly become a political football. Regardless, this is absolutely awful and extremely unfortunate.
This is an often repeated misconception. ATP always needed 1500 hours. What wasn’t required is for both pilots to have an ATP, just the captain - the flight officer only needed a commercial certificate. Airlines would hire with lower hours and train on the job.
While both pilots in the crash did have over 1500 hours, the flight officer did not in fact hold an ATP. The rule also changed some of the ATP training requirements, and there were other regulation changes on duty cycles, etc.
It’s very possible we’ve had a run of good luck since 2009. It’s also possible some of the rule changes helped. I wouldn’t dismiss that possibility too quickly.
On the ATC radio archive you can hear the tower asking aircraft if they have lights, can the circle over the east side of the field to help locate survivors
It’s probably really early to ask, but in case anyone here is knowledgeable and has any idea: why didn’t TCAS help avoid the accident? Isn’t it designed for such situations where 2 aircrafts collide? Do military crafts not have it or something?
It’s likely both the helicopter and the jet received a TCAS warning. In dense airspaces, those alerts tend to trigger frequently, so there’s a strong chance they may have dismissed it. The CRJ crew might have been aware of the Blackhawk’s presence, but if the other crew had visual contact with the approaching traffic (the CRJ), they might not have felt the need to take further action.
as others have said, likely too low. tcas is pretty awesome (and yes, most military flights will use it), but it is (deliberately) muted/degraded at low altitudes (i think around 1500feet).
Anecdotally, the amount of helicopter & air traffic going on around DC has been absurd this month.
My house in DC has calmed down some but we had a bunch of low flying fighters jets & helicopters for a bit. It's been wild having the house shaken at noon or 1:00 from pairs of fighter jets!
I've had an in-week around Tysons this week, and it's been wild seeing pair after pair after pair of helicopter flying east towards the city this week. I'm normally up there once or twice a week and usually there's nothing like this.
Does anyone have the flight path for the helicopter? (Tail number PAT25). FlightAware doesn't show it but it might have been tracked by open source ADS-B receivers.
This helicopter was often utilized for VIP transport.
PAT25 would be a temporary military flight call sign, not a tail number. US military aircraft don't have FAA "N" registration numbers like civilian aircraft do. Military aircraft do have official numbers but those aren't used for ATC or radio communications.
In this particular case it appears that the "PAT" part is an acronym for Priority Air Travel. In other words, it was a VIP transport flight (there may not have been any VIPs actually on board at the time).
How do you figure? The videos of the crash that I can find on X just show a small airline light suddenly turning into a low-res explosion. (Edit: ah. yes.)
You see the helo coming from the left on the screen while the airliner appears to be descending. The helo must have gotten in the way (as opposed to catching up from behind). The airliner's lights are unmistakable, so how did the helo pilot not notice them? The airliner's pilots might not have had a chance to notice the helo. Since the helo was crossing an active runway approach the fault has to be with them.
Landing lights are very focused. They're only noticeable if they're pointed towards you (but then they're very bright). They were visible to the camera but perhaps not to the heli.
Of course the plane would have anti-collision lights as well though, those are omnidirectional.
My only thought is that it's a regional jet, so it's smaller than a "normal" commercial flight. At night, if you expect it to be a big jet and it looks small, you presume it's just further away. I think they saw it, saw it small and presumed they had enough time to make it in front of it.
Anyone that can explain what the people on X mean when they comment that it was "intentional"? I'm probably out of the loop but this feels super out of place to me.
These are only a small amount directly from the replies to the tweet you shared, you can find many more if you keep scrolling.
We really can't have this type of accident, a midair collision happen anywhere in the United States, much less the nation's capital, especially considering the Washington area is some of the highest controlled airspace in the country. DCA has been a high-risk airport really since the jet-age, and I have a feeling this might be the end of it as a major passenger airport (at least for Part 121 operations). DOT/FAA are really going to need to step up after this and figure it out, for good.
I hope there are survivors but it is really cold in that water right now, look up Air Florida flight 90 for a completely different accident, but in a similar time of the year.
Unfortunately it's not gonna happen. The traffic at DCA only keeps going up, and I've heard chatter that it's because a lot of congressman and senators prefer taking flights from DCA instead of driving to Dulles or BWI.
> DOT/FAA are really going to need to step up after this and figure it out, for good.
Yeah. First, we should fill the currently vacant US Secretary of Transportation role. Then we should fill the currently vacant FAA Administrator role. Then we should fill the FAA Deputy Administrator role [0]. Then we should fill the currently vacant DoT Inspector General role that Trump just opened up by illegally firing this watchdog without the required 30 days notice to Congress [1]. Then we can start investigating.
I know that everyone crosses all altitudes during landing. But why don't ATC / FAA stratify aircraft type and use by altitude.
Like all commercial traffic is put in even thousands altitudes. And the Military / EMS gets the odd thousands.
Route 4 (the helicopter route along the river) has a maximum altitude of 200 feet for helicopter. From the crash it seemed like the helicopter pilot wasn't strictly following the ceiling.
Everything eventually needs to land, so when you’re talking about an area around an airport, at low altitudes, that’s going to be a difficult thing to do. If you mix in helicopter traffic that needs to run at lower altitudes anyway, that is also near an airport, it becomes a much more difficult scenario to control.
If they can get out, they have a chance. There was a crash on the Potomac in January 1982 and there were several survivors. The video of the rescue is pretty crazy.
There was a truck that crashed on bridge right next to lincoln memorial and then veered off roadway into bridge, and both were deceased. Its very cold in DC right now and an airplane crashing is much more catastrophic.
It was very cold in DC until recently but it's 45°F right now at 11:21. I was walking & biking around in a sports jacket today with a winter coat strapped onto the outside of my bag.
I'm going to head this off right now: This was between the pilots of the American Airlines flight and the Blackhawk, and the ATC at Reagan. Short of the controllers being literally understaffed, which I assume is not the case, the focus of this investigation should be what the sincere hell happened in the air there.
This was a wholly preventable incident, hell this should have not happened period. Something likely very basic and fundamental failed catastrophically, and we need to figure out what and why. Bringing politics into this at this stage is unnecessary and deleterious noise unless findings implicating politics come to light.
Yeah, it's just a mountain of coherent circumstantial evidence at this point. We can infer that liquidation of leadership and oversight in the agencies responsible for the safety of air travel might distract and strain remaining operational staff, but we don't know for a fact yet that that's the case. Maybe we'll find that all relevant pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance people, etc were all completely insulated from and oblivious to the active public campaign to eliminate their roles including the emails they would have received on Tuesday from the US Govt Office of Personnel Management [0].
I really don't see a way to eliminate Trump's chaos as at least a partial cause, and it could only be ruled out if the investigators are cognizant of political context.
Given the strange way the helicopter appeared to fly right into the jet there will be no end to the speculation. Already people on social media are claiming that the helicopter originated near the CIA or that there was someone important flying on the plane.
As fullshark commented above, there is no value to wild speculation. Wait for the facts, avoid the noise and wild speculation. We do not have many facts as of 1/29 overnight.
(Next thing is how would we ever falsify a wild theory like that to the satisfaction of all speculators, given we only have the ATC recording, not the audio from the helicopter (assuming the Black Hawk didn't have a black box, as seems to be the case from what I've read so far)).
People who take UAP seriously still will speculate, especially since drones can relay audio from controllers to talk to ATC as if they were onboard. People on the internet speculate about things that are a lot more clear than this case.
If you think a recording of ATC saying 'keep an eye out for that plane coming in to land' is going to end speculation then you have no understanding of how people behave on social media. For some reason people are upset about me pointing out the reality that this will generate lots of conspiracy theories. I invite you to consider this example of a prominent public figure engaging in exactly the sort of speculation I described.
Yes, I research and write on extremists and have become depressingly familiar with conspiratorial narrative formation in real time, as well having read a huge number of research papers into social media dynamics. I used to spend a lot of time and effort debunking CTs but frankly it seems increasingly pointless to do so nowadays.
Your first sentence, being startled to learn about remote-controlled flying, gives the impression that you're one of those conspiracy theory hobbyists (a term I'm conjuring for idjits who speculate conspiracies when anything happens)...
Not that being near DC affords me any kind of right to an opinion, but:
Given the uptick in near miss incidents across the US the last few years, this is the kind of incident that should've been entirely avoidable through changes in policy from these past events but is also apparently the only kind that can spur along policy changes. I can see a world where the fault is on the VH-60, but absent more information, it would surprise me less to hear that it's the fault of the tower.
Knowing where AA5342 was in its approach, I see no possibility of the jet being at fault.
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/AAL5342
I'm drawing a lot of early conclusions but it's mostly because I'm just not surprised. Angry as someone who flies a bunch, but not surprised.
I just listened to the ATC recording from immediately before the collision. ATC instructs the helicopter to pass behind the CRJ. I’m fairly certain a few minutes before that, ATC instructed the helicopter to maintain visual separation, which is common. They typically ask, “do you have the aircraft in sight” and if you respond in the affirmative they rely on you to maintain safe distance.
I should mention that in the recording you can only hear one side of the conversation, so I don’t know whether or not the helicopter said whether or not they had visual contact with the plane they collided with.
Either way it doesn’t seem to be the fault of ATC. Of course we’ll know more as additional information becomes available.
Here is the ATC audio between the Tower and PAT-25. Helos that transition DCA's airspace use a separate VHF frequency from traffic landing and departing, but talk to the same tower controller.
https://archives.broadcastify.com/44114/20250129/20250129200...
* At 5:41 - 5342 is given instructions for circling to 33.
* At 6:45 - PAT-25 reports Memorial
* At 7:06 - tower gives PAT-25 traffic advisory about 5342 and PAT-25 reports traffic in sight and requests visual separation
* At 8:12 - tower asks PAT-25 if they have the CRJ in sight and tells him to pass behind the CRJ. PAT-25 again reports traffic in sight and again requests visual separation.
* At 8:28 - crash occurs, exclamations, go arounds issued
This is wild to listen to. A) this is a busy atc channel and it's amazing how much complexity is coordinated over noisy radio. B) within minutes of the accident happening (at 11:48) the ATC controller is calmly asking helicopters in the air if they can assist in search rescue operations asking, if they have search lights and direction them. This is whilst diverting and grounding flights.
> over noisy radio
I've been told the noise on the recordings is always a lot worse than in practice due to the location of the recording antenna not being ideal. I have no idea if this is correct or not. Maybe someone can enlighten this.
Yes, having tried to listen to ATC with an SDR— the public recordings are made from antenna that placed near the airport, while the official recordings are made from the feeds that the ATC is listening to— and those antenna have their lobes pointed toward the sky.
In the video from the webcam there's another plane which is much easier to see. Could they have asked about "the aircraft" and the helicopter pilot mistook which one they referred to? "yes I can see the plane flying much higher"
It's possible but generally there's implied context to ATC. ATC would only instruct you to watch out for possible vector interceptions. flying over an approach path, the context would be that you would look for aircraft on approach, not ones in holding or other patterns above.
That said, it's possible they mistook which aircraft to look for, but it's unlikely imho and we will likely never know for sure, as I would presume the pilots are deceased.
I got a lesson in how ATC works with helicopters up close and personal on a helicopter tour. ATC had the helo pilot hold position while an airplane was on final approach. I asked the pilot why we needed to hold as we could clearly see the aircraft and were to my lack of knowledge on the subject "plenty" far away. (It actually took me a second to locate the airplane as my sense of scale was not expecting the plane to be so small which is part of why I made the assumption we were plenty far away.) That's when the pilot told me we were not in the way of the approach but if the pilot had to declare a miss (or whatever they call it) and climb to circle around. The helo was near the path for the plane on the abort flight path. Once the plane was on the ground, ATC allowed us to continue.
It was my first experience in an aircraft seeing how ATC controlled the airspace directly. Lots of respect to the folks in ATC with a fraction of understanding in just how much they have to deal with other than the obvious take-off/landings.
It's pretty dang easy to misjudge distances and closing rates in a plane or helicopter, especially at night.
Is this true for the trained pilots as well?
No, that aircraft (having taken off from Reagan, visible in the full not-cropped videos) is close to the Kennedy Center camera but is nowhere near where the CRJ and helicopter were.
Do you want to post a link the recording?
it's linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874330
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In any event, unless the weather was IMC, where neither aircraft can see because of weather/cloud, which I'm deducing is not the case if they were allowed to maintain visual separation, the ultimate responsibility for maintaining separation is with the pilot(s) .. But as I posted, we should not have this happen anywhere in the United States in 2025 & much less the nation's capital. Hopefully DOT and FAA get to work, but I have a feeling that will be the end of DCA's usefull life as a major passenger airport.
Just so ya know, "get to work" is the opposite of what the federal agencies are being told just at the moment.
I'm sure the accident investigators are very compassionate and dedicated to their jobs, and will do everything they can to resolve this and prevent future accidents. But overall the mood in DC isn't great just at the moment, as everyone is expecting to be fired regardless of their experience and skill.
> everyone is expecting to be fired regardless of their experience and skill.
How do you know this?
Because I live here.
Presumably because Trump just offered an 8month severance package to all fed workers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvqe3le3z4o
> US President Donald Trump has offered federal workers the option to resign and receive pay for eight months, in a major effort to shrink and reform the US government.
Has nothing todo with it..
https://x.com/PeterHamby/status/1884827909954621502
"Mary Schiavo — former Dept. of Transportation inspector general — with a reality check on CNN:
“Air traffic controllers do not come and go with the change of an administration … The politics of the situation should have had no impact whatsoever on air traffic controllers”"
That had always been the case. The new administration has already done a lot of things differently from previous administrations.
It was largely a matter of precedent, rather than law. It's unclear how much of the current path is legal. And, of course, whether it's good judgment is completely orthogonal to whether it's legal.
In the opinion of one person who has a grand total of zero minutes of experience of all US Gov. employees being offered resignation leters.
The GP comment was about accident investigators rather than air traffic controllers but the consquences are the same, a lot of regular gov. employees are distracted by a current situation with no prior occurrence.
Trump's written order threatening the jobs of FAA employees does exist.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/keep...
And this is in the context of a Republican argument that DEI hiring at the FAA for Air Traffic Controllers is a big problem.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240308145022/https://ag.ks.gov...
I don't believe the environment Mary Schiavo experienced in the 1990s was the same as today's environment.
Ronald Reagan?
"A reality check"?
FAA-employed ATCs are like any other non-appointed federal employees - politics should have no impact on their employment and this arrangement is protected by federal civil service laws.
Which Trump is roundly ignoring because he wants to appoint every agency with burrowed MAGA loyalists, top to bottom.
If you haven't been following what this administration has said and done with a painful degree of critical focus, it's probably bleaker than you imagine.
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> The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.
this isn't how it's being done now
This time around it seems less targeted, which gives the perception that it is not really about streamlining, feel free to prove me wrong though.
From the document you linked: > The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.
This is a disgusting attempt to use ATC to attack efforts to cut non safety critical government jobs.
> Hopefully DOT and FAA get to work
they were just told to resign en masse as a loyalty test (the memo literally uses the word "loyal"), so yeah, no
I didn’t know. this line is really upsetting people tonight.
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The Westminster tradition is for the public service to give "frank and fearless advice" [1] in the interests of the nation. It's still democratic, as a minister can choose to ignore this advice, at their own peril, and issue orders. As hinted at by their name, a public servant's first loyalty should to the public/nation rather than their Minister/Master. Maybe the US has a different system?
Of course the above is theoretical. In practise governments demand loyalty to themselves and there is little peril to Ministers as there now seems to be little repercussion for denying responsibility.
[1] https://vpsc.vic.gov.au/about-vpsc/updates-from-the-commissi...
> As hinted at by their name, a public servant's first loyalty should to the public/nation rather than their Minister/Master. Maybe the US has a different system?
Both systems rely on the people in charge being told okay with being told "no, this is a bad idea".
The Ministers/Secretaries/Executive may think their plan(s) are a good idea and the civil service are being obstructionist.
(Of course the civil service could be wrong as well.)
The US system relies on them informing the public, or in case of say the ATF they make quasi law through opinions and then arrest the public and put them in tiny cages.
The public can decide to elect someone to shit can them. We have voted to liberate many of them from service. Obviously some wont like that, but they are servants to the people not peers.
Yeah, bureaucrat equals evil is an easy position to take:
No one likes following the rules until they are responsible for cleaning up after the people who didn’t follow the rules.
The American people are tired of cleaning up the messes the bureaucracy has made. They've broken the rules, and it is time for the mess to be cleaned up and ejected from their jobs.
Many who have more HN-like peers and communities may not realize this is the opinion of the people, but the awakening is coming when the paychecks stop.
> It's still democratic, as a minister can choose to ignore this advice, at their own peril, and issue orders
Whilst this is true, the civil service has been alleged to leak/ brief against such orders, not to mention be obstructive about their implementation.
The hard part for me at least is telling whether this is because eg "ordering us to make buildings out of compacted sand is hard" or "we are going to drag our feet as much as we can because this is dumb"
I think you mean civil servants. There should be nothing we all want more than to have a professional--and more importantly--apolitical civil service whose members are empowered to do their jobs.
I’m curious, how many people in your business were elected to their jobs?
Do you think people should be electing the ATC agents?
Also, what’s your opinion about the entire cabinet, Elon Musk, and the likes, all of whom are also unelected?
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A coup by whom against whom ?
By MAGA against everyone who wants democracy?
- "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote."
Weather was fine tonight.
Also DCA is the most popular airport and congress would stage their own revolution if they had to go further.
I definitely think it’ll stay open for charter flights (part 135)
it’s actually really hard for private jets / charter (whether part 91 or part 135) to use dca. requirements include having an armed officer on board. as a result almost nobody flies charter into dca.
Regulations are written in blood, which is why it's such a disservice to indiscriminately tear it all down. We will re-learn the same lessons and people will pay for those lessons with their lives.
Some regulations are written and blood but some regulations are written to cover someone's ass and the two should not be treated equally. We shouldn't give equal respect to the Federal Aviation Regulations and to OPM's Qualification Standards for Federal Jobs; doing so deligitamizes the importance of the former.
Why don’t you identify all these easily found regulations then?
There’s a whole YIMBY movement, for example, that has identified specific regulations that are no longer valid and have made tremendous strides in proving and changing these regulations for almost universally better outcomes.
So where are all these specific regulations that are so terrible and the evidence that they are indeed net negatives.
I absolutely believe such regulations exist. But that’s not what these people care about. They simply care about trashing the govt to make it easier to drown, otherwise they would actually act like the YIMBY movement and identify specific regulations and work on changing those.
> Why don’t you identify all these easily found regulations then?
That was rude, and didn't at all speak to OP's point. They indicated that not all regulations are equal. Some are important and put into place because people died without them. Others are put into place for less important reasons. And the fact that _some_ regulations were removed doesn't mean that "ones written in blood" necessarily were.
There are definitely regulations out there written by people that have no idea what they are talking about, and that are a net negative on the area(s) they impact. Does that mean we should remove Chesterton's Fence? No. But it does mean that, if you see someone removing a fence, you shouldn't immediately accuse them of causing harm.
There was an awful lot of complaining about rolling back regulations in the first Trump term, so maybe the administration does care about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-envir...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-regulatory-chang...
^^ includes Trump's first term and Biden's term.
FAA is however an agency that regularly tangles with SpaceX and could be seen as slowing them down. Seems like a conflict of interest for the guy tasked with government efficiency.
That's entirely true. Thank you for the correction. I spoke overly broadly.
Ooh… which ones?
Classic Edgerton’s Fence: If you don’t know why someone put up a fence, don’t take it down.
Typically, the ones that protect me are good, the ones that slow me down are bad. Easy!
Chesterton's Fence
Oof. Correct.
If everyone writing regulations were as rigorous as the FAA people wouldn’t be clamoring to reduce regulations.
You mean the same FAA people that allowed Boeing to self certify? The FAA is not spotless. I can only imagine how much worse air travel would be without them, but they are only run by humans trying to work in a political controlled environment.
> You mean the same FAA people that allowed Boeing to self certify?
Reputation lags reality.
Boeing used to be a product-first organization, and the FAA relied on that. However Boeing changed and put other priorities first and started cutting corners but their reputation was still good. After all, why would Boeing (unlike, say, tobacco) sell products that would kill their customers: it would be against Boeing's own interests.
In the 1980s and 1990s Boeing could be trusted to have less oversight, but since the 2000s that was no longer true, but no one noticed that. Now everyone recognizes that Boeing needs a babysitter.
Congress directed the FAA--by law--to delegate certain aspects of certification to non-FAA entities. This directive was issued by H.R. 302 - FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, 115th Congress.
Is that the 49 USC 44736 Organization designation authorizations part?[1]
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/302/...
The FAA is pretty bonkers; Rayiner is right here. Besides, what other system beyond "humans trying to work in a political controlled environment" are you advocating here?
The existence of all the "FAA: We are not happy until you are not happy" funny t-shirts seems to disagree with that observation.
> Regulations are written in blood, which is why it's such a disservice to indiscriminately tear it all down. We will re-learn the same lessons and people will pay for those lessons with their lives.
And which regulation was eliminated that caused this?
This seems to be a resolved problem and one that we shouldn't have in this era. An unnecessary tragedy.
I have a feeling from your comment that you know more about aviation than you are letting on, and the part about being in DC not giving you a right to an opinion seems pretty silly in that context.
Reagan should have been shut down for commercial use many moons ago.
It will never be shut down because it's got all the exceptions so that Congresscritters don't have to be treated the same as us plebians.
>It will never be shut down because it's got all the exceptions so that Congresscritters don't have to be treated the same as us plebians.
DCA is open to the public.
DCA is open to the public. But it has lots of ways for Congressmen to avoid the inconveniences that you and I have to endure.
The other airports in the area do not have those.
Please expand.
I fly out of DCA and IAD frequently (and JFK and LGA). I’ve gone through the process next to politicians, though I’ve never recognized any highly ranked ones (e.g. Pelosi, McConnell, etc.).
What’s the difference they experience?
Not OP but the only thing I'm aware of is new Senator Jim Justice who seems to use a private plane to get to the airport which seems relatively rare.
https://punchbowl.news/article/senate/jim-justice-takes-priv...
> the inconveniences that you and I have to endure.
What are those? With pre check you just more or less walk through and use a metal detector.
A lot of people here like to go on about security. I agree there's a certain amount of theater, and I try to avoid really peak times, but with pre-check I do tend to arrive early because I don't want stress but, as you say, it's rarely more than a few minute wait and I pretty much toss my bag on the carousel and walk through the metal detector. It's really not a big deal if you're prepared.
Not disagreeing, but is there something particularly wrong with DCA?
DCA is great to fly in and out of (I live in DC proper), as it's close, isn't hard to get to, and has a Metro (our subway) station right in front of the terminal, and the airport is fairly easy to navigate once you're in. Dulles now has a Metro station, but it's still far away from the terminal and it's hard to navigate, with gates very far away from the terminal; other than the Saarinen architecture, everything else about Dulles is awful. BWI is even further from most parts of DC; there's an AmTrak station where you can catch a bus, but pretty much you're driving an hour+ and it's in the middle of exurban hell.
DCA is challenging for flights, though, as the approach from upriver over the Potomac requires a sudden bank to the right just before landing and the runway's a bit short (tonight's flight was coming in from the southern approach). The Potomac also has a lot of helicopter traffic, between the military (including POTUS/VPOTUS), US Park Police, DC Police, and civilian flights. DCA's natural advantages have put the screws to Dulles the last 20 years, and Dulles's inability to not suck hasn't helped. As a result, people (including Members of Congress) want more flights out of DCA, so flight traffic has steadily increased. There were two near-misses last spring: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/faa-investigating-colli....
Tonight's crash seems like a colossal screwup by the helicopter. DCA is too popular for flight traffic to cease, but I wouldn't be surprised by further restricting the flight corridors and helicopter traffic, more funding/staffing for ATC, and maybe a small reduction in flights.
Thank's for the detailed explanation! I have a warm spot in my heart for Dulles, because it's my first memory of American (we flew into Dulles from Bangladesh in 1989). It's really convenient if you live in Great Falls or Reston. And I loved what was then the semi-rural Virginia around the airport. But agreed, it's a huge pain in the butt to navigate.
> more funding/staffing for ATC
More funding? From an administration that is currently doing its best to get rid of as many federal employees as possible and has an extra "department" (led by you-know-who) dedicated to that? What they will probably do with ATC is privatize it (which is actually a reasonable thing to do - it's private in most of Europe, but if the intention behind it is to save money, it will probably not improve the system).
I would not be surprised if ATC _at DCA_ gets some more funding given the complicated air traffic environment and its unique position as Congress’s second-favorite airport.
What is Congress' favorite airport?
It's in the middle of a city, with lots of restricted airspace just _seconds_ of flight time from it.
From what I've heard, it's a challenging airport to land at, particularly because one of the approaches has two sharp turns in it, and I think the main winds tend to be annoying crosswinds for the main runway. Also, the airport is surrounded by lots of restricted airspace because, you know, seat of federal government and all that.
Short runway too. 9/11 restrictions only made it that much worse.
It was discussed post 9/11 about closing National Airport, but congress wouldn't hear it. It was too convenient from DC. (At a time when IAD was way the hell out there, rather than being 1/2 the way out the sprawl.)
I won't fly through DCA in the winter, because when I was a kid there was the Air Florida crash. I'd much prefer IAD with it's 3 mile runways and straight approaches.
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what a revolting comment.
It wasn't a police chopper, it was a military VH-60, also known as a "White Hawk" [1]. It's a VIP transport helicopter, the same type that is used to transport the president.
~The flight track of the helicopter [2] starts at a property in McLean, VA (edited to remove likely inaccurate info)~
The chopper was based out of Fort Belvoir, and based on similar past flight tracks, looks like it probably took off from there too. CNN is reporting that there were 3 soldiers onboard, and no VIPs.
1: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_VH-60N_White_Hawk
2: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae313d&lat=38.952&lon=-...
> The flight track of the helicopter starts at a property in McLean, VA
that's almost certainly not where the flight started, due to intricacies of how this sort of flight tracking works.
if you look at [0] it has tracks of both flights. toggle the right-hand sidebar, if it's not open already, and you'll see a table containing both planes. the helicopter (PAT25) is yellow, the plane (JIA5342) is blue. the legend right below that explains the color-coding - the plane's data came from ADS-B, while the helicopter's data came from multilateration (MLAT).
MLAT [1, 2] works by having multiple ADS-B feeder stations cooperate in real-time and deduce an aircraft's position based on timestamps of when the signal is received. it allows tracking aircraft that only broadcast the more limited Mode S data, instead of the newer and more detailed ADS-B.
because it requires multiple cooperating receivers, the start of the track in suburban McLean does not mean it took off from there. it just means that was the point in its flight where it became visible to enough receivers that MLAT was able to pin down a position.
you can also see this difference just by looking at the tracks - the plane is broadcasting its own position continuously, so its track is nice and smooth. meanwhile the helicopter's flight looks "jagged" in a way that does not match what its actual flight path would have been. this is an artifact of the small errors introduced by MLAT.
0: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae313d,a97753
1: https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/mlat/
2: https://adsbx.discourse.group/t/multilateration-mlat-how-it-...
That's a nice website, but from a layman's perspective it seems odd that everybody with an internet connection could have seen the imminent crash except the pilots ...
once you know to look at those two specific flights it probably gets easier, yeah. if you were looking at everything in the air at the time I think less so?
[2] shows the helicopter taking off 2 miles away from the old saudi embassy in McLean marked “permanently closed” on google maps. (The current embassy is in DC proper, directly across the river from DCA airport)
I don’t think thats strong evidence that it took off from the old Saudi Embassy - thats pretty far away even given your caveat about accuracy.
Edit: it looks to me like the black hawk was coming from somewhere else with its ADS-B turned off entirely, and then turned on ADS-B once it reached the potomac to approach DCA. The first two datapoints of that flight already show it going 110mph, which its unlikely to be able to accelerate to in just 0.2miles after take off.
Edit 2: The route also looks very similar to this flight from 11 days earlier (but reversed in direction): https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/PAT25 This shows the Blackhawk at 300 feet passing by DCA on what seems like a routine or training flight? I don't know how to look up historical flights to see if this is a commonly-flown route. On that flight, the Black Hawk flew past DCA at 300 feet of altitude, and the last FlightAware data for the American Eagle passenger flight showed 400 feet of altitude.
Note that that track is not ADS-B at all. It’s triangulated from mode S pings (“MLAT”, https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/mlat/). I don’t know how accurate these are.
I didn't say it took off from the old embassy. The flight track starts at the backyard of a house that is currently owned by the embassy. You can see the owner of that property by searching that address here (the site doesn't support a direct link): https://icare.fairfaxcounty.gov/ffxcare/search/commonsearch....
That house doesn't seem to have enough clearance vs the trees to land a helo. Note that Langley (CIA) is nearby.
Thank you!
Regarding your edit: that's a good point, but the vertical ascent rate of the chopper at those first few data points shows 400-800 feet per minute, which is consistent with a chopper taking off...'
edit: your second edit makes me think you're right though, tonight's flight track was pretty consistent with the past flight track where it looks like it both took off from and landed at Fort Belvoir.
811 Lawton St, Mc Lean, VA 22101 Name: SAUDIA ARABIA ROYAL EMBASSY OF, Mailing Address: 8500 HILLTOP RD STE 301 C/O FINANCIAL DIRECTOR FAIRFAX VA 22031 4310
CNN is reporting the helicopter came from Fort Belvoir.
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/plane-crash-dca-potomac-was...
The helicopter seems like it is typically stationed at Fort Belvoir. Does "out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia" strictly mean that the helicopter's flight started at Fort Belvoir, or that the helicopter itself is considered to be "out of Fort Belvoir" in a similar manner that LeBron James could be said to be "out of Akron, OH"?
The current embassy is indeed in DC proper, but it isn't directly across the river from DCA.
It's about a mile upriver, near the Watergate.
Military flights do not fly ADB hot outside of the DC FRZ. It was also clearly exactly following flight route 4.
There are a few locations in that area it could have been coming from. Anything else would have made no sense flying through the FRZ from/to Belvoir.
What is "flight route 4"?
The FAA publishes supplemental charts specifically for helicopters in areas with high concentrations of helicopter activity: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/productc...
Specifically the Baltimore-Washington route chart was relevant for these flights: https://aeronav.faa.gov/visual/10-31-2024/PDFs/Balt-Wash_Hel...
If you find the DCA airport on that chart, you’ll find routes 1 and 4 which roughly correspond to the helicopter’s flight path.
Right.
Helicopter was on Helicopter Route 4, per the map, apparently on course.
Aircraft was on approach to Runway 33, apparently on course.
That helicopter route crosses the approach to runway 33.
That's controlled airspace. How did they both have clearance to be there?
We'll know more tomorrow as all the audio and radar recordings are examined.
They were almost certainly both cleared to maintain visual separation.
> They were almost certainly both cleared to maintain visual separation.
DCA TWR: PAT25, traffic just south of the Woodrow Bridge, a CRJ, it's 1200 feet setting up for runway 33.
PAT25: PAT25 has the traffic in sight, request visual separation.
DCA TWR: Visual separation approved.
Audio of MID-AIR CRASH into Potomac River: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiOybe-NJHk
This comment was written by a US Coast Guard helicopter pilot. It gives a lot of information on how the two aircraft should have been able to share the space and some speculation on what went wrong:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1idba8i/comment/m...
That makes sense.
A helicopter instructor suggests that possibly the helicopter pilots, who were told to go behind an aircraft that was landing, were looking at the previous aircraft that was landing.[1] That's just speculation at this point.
[1] https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2025/01/29/reagan-national...
They could use the car autopilot solution: simply negotiate your coordinates with nearby traffic instead of trying to parse malformed visual data.
That was clearly a training flight
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It's a "Gold Top", callsign PAT25
https://helicoptersofdc.com/helicopters/5-us-army-12th-aviat...
BBC is reporting that the Army has confirmed that it was a UH-60, not a VH-60, ie: not a VIP transport: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cy7kxx74yxlt?post=asset%3A62b9...
Although it's early on and these communications are often chaotic/inaccurate.
I thought it was a VH-60 given that it was callsign PAT25 (PAT is Priority Air Transport and they use the VH-60 for those flights), but if this was a training flight, they may have still used the PAT callsign while flying a UH-60.
To put this in perspective, this is the first fatal crash of a US commercial airliner in 16 years (Colgan Air Flight 3407 on February 12, 2009) and the first fatal commercial airliner crash in the United States in 12 years (since Asiana Airlines Flight 214 on July 6, 2013).
We like to throw shade at Boeing, the FAA etc, but this is still an incredible accomplishment, especially given the explosive growth of traffic over those years. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were far fewer flights but multiple crashes every year was the norm.
The real question, I feel, is whether the current U.S. government as it exists in 2025 is still capable of continuing to improve things, and whether it's still putting all the lessons of the past into practice - or whether we were just coasting on a combination of luck and the vestigial safety left to us by the diligence of the past.
Considering that the head of the FAA and TSA were forced to resign, and a hiring freeze on air traffic controllers is suddenly in effect, I don't think the current government wants to improve flight safety.
https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2025-0...
Honestly I'm expecting an executive order banning left wings at this rate.
Our presidents social media commentary on this issue reads, and this is the only way I can phrase this, like a child wrote it. It's embarrassing.
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I think Boeing specifically attracts criticism due to all the fatalities outside of the US in that time period.
That was my thought exactly when I heard of this. I trust that like other major accidents, that we will learn from this and make the skies safer. Sixteen years without a major airline crash was an incredible accomplishment. It's a tragedy it couldn't have gone on longer.
> We like to throw shade at Boeing, the FAA etc, but this is still an incredible accomplishment, especially given the explosive growth of traffic over those years
To be fair to them, the Boeing-related incidents could have well happened in the US and killed Americans too. And the FAA absolutely refused to do their job until their hand was forced by everyone else - they refused to ground the Maxes until all other major air authorities did. That's also why EASA is involved in the Max recertification, and the 777X certification. Nobody trusts the FAA anymore.
And the fact that the door blowout didn't damage any part of the plane is miraculous - if it had hit the vertical stabiliser, the plane would have been a total loss.
So you're giving credit where very little is due.
Why is this being framed as airliners fault to begin with.
When a fishingboat gets rammed by an cruise ship it's not "cruise ship collides with fishingboat", its the reverse.
One is a big civilian aircraft thats being tracked and has no way of making sharp course adjustments the other is a 'VIP' with potentially ADS-B off.
Heads should fly at whatever military branch the hellicopter was operated at... but they wont.
DCA has two runways. The longer runway is aligned with the river’s north/south direction at that point, so planes flying the approach to this runway from the south track along the western shore of the river, leaving the eastern shore clear for other aircraft like helicopters. The vast majority of flights on approach from the south [1] use this longer runway.
The secondary runway is set at a diagonal NW/SE. Planes flying an approach from the south follow the river at first, but then loop out over the eastern shore of the river to line up on that runway. To my eye the radar track of the downed flight follows this path. It’s possible since it was a small plane and only small planes can use the diagonal runway—it’s shorter.
I mention this because this track takes planes into airspace that is a) usually clear of commercial airplane traffic, and b) directly over military facilities like Naval Research Lab and Joint Base Bolling, which have significant military helicopter travel.
Basically, I wonder to what extent the helicopter pilot was surprised to find an airplane descending in that location.
[1] When flights are approaching from the north, the main runway requires a pretty sharp right turn seconds before touching down. Approaches to the diagonal runway from the north take planes almost directly over the Pentagon.
The press conference this morning mentioned that this was a new flight path. I wonder if the helicopter crew were not fully briefed on the new path, if that is the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-30/washingto... | https://archive.today/n1ark
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/plane-crash-dca-potomac-was... (CNN live updates)
https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1idbkyd/crash_at_dc...
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1idba8i/plane_cra...
https://x.com/aletweetsnews/status/1884789306645983319
https://archive.liveatc.net/kdca/KDCA1-Twr-Jan-30-2025-0130Z... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250130025411/https://archive.l... (event starts at 17:25)
https://archives.broadcastify.com/44114/20250129/20250129200... contains the ATC feed in addition to the PAT-25 (helo) radio.
~5:41 mark 5342 is given instructions for circling to 33. ~6:45 mark PAT-25 reports Memorial ~7:06 mark tower gives PAT-25 traffic advisory about 5342 and PAT-25 reports traffic in sight and requests visual separation ~8:12 mark tower asks PAT-25 if they have the CRJ in sight. PAT-25 again reports traffic in sight and again requests visual separation. ~8:21 mark, crash occurs, exclamations, go arounds issued
I'm impressed by your, and their, hearing comprehension here! Granted, English isn't my native language but even with concentration I struggle to hear what they say.
BBC live updates: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cy7kxx74yxlt
Obviously it will take some time for the full accident analysis but there have been quite a few near misses lately due to air traffic controller errors. Flight volume has been growing, airspace near airports is more congested, and controllers are overworked. Eventually all of the "Swiss cheese" holes line up. We're going to need to hire more controllers.
Also, it appears that one of the aircraft was a military (not police) H-60 Blackhawk helicopter.
Hiring controllers is not easy. A friend's daughter just went through the hiring process. She graduated from college with an appropriate degree right as COVID hit. Her FAA application wasn't accepted for four years.
This past summer she did the four-week interactive online courses. Applicants must pass this and may not re-enter the program if they do not. After that she did the six-week courses in Oklahoma City. Again, applicants must pass this and may not re-enter the program if they do not. She passed. Only half her class of 20 passed. In the prior class, only 4 of 15 passed.
She declined the position when they could not offer a position within reasonable proximity of her family. She, too, may not re-enter the program. On top of all that, the program has strict age requirements because there's a mandatory retirement age (55, I believe).
There isn't a large pool of applicants and the percentage of successful ones is not high. Considering the amount of lives on the line, it's understandable the hiring criteria is strict. All told, it's not an easy position to fill and even explicit efforts to increase the number of applicants will take years. Just like many other skilled fields.
And current controllers are often working 60-70+ weeks because of the understaffing...
Another problem is the maximum entry age for the ATC school - if you are over the age of 31 you can't apply.
In addition, ATC is not allowed to go on strike, limiting the degree to which they can bargain for better working conditions, pay, etc.
Then why is there an ATC union if, apparently, it can't affect any change?
Not being allowed to re-enter the program is just insane.
Isn't it a reasonable filter? I'd (naively) assume that all things being equal, a person who passes a test on the first attempt, is more likely to have a higher innate ability than one who doesn't.
Is this wrong?
> appropriate degree
what's considered an appropriate degree for ATC?
No college degree is officially required. Candidates with aviation related degrees probably have a better chance of making it through. But there are plenty of working controllers who have only a high school diploma or learned the job as enlisted military personnel.
"Have either one year of general work experience or four years of education leading to a bachelor’s degree, or a combination of both"
https://www.faa.gov/be-atc
In her case it was a Bachelors in Aviation and Aerospace Science with an Air Traffic Control Concentration. There may be other programs or concentrations which are acceptable.
> Bachelors in Aviation and Aerospace Science with an Air Traffic Control Concentration
I’m not that far removed from my time in college, but I’m shocked by the specificity of that.
Here's the FAA overview of what the agency calls the Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) Program:
https://www.faa.gov/jobs/students/schools
Since the chances of landing an ATC job are so slim with the degree, what kind of job options does that degree afford you? What kind of job did she end up taking (or doing while waiting on the FAA)?
While waiting for the FAA and since declining the ATC position she's worked at her family's auto repair shop. Pre-FAA she did repair work and for the last few months since returning she's more on the management side. She hasn't yet decided if the family business or something else is the career she wants.
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Requirements are strict in other countries as well. It comes with the nature of the job.
A friend of mine found out he is color blind that way. Not the most common one which you can detect by the tests which are in every biology book here but a rarer variant which is immediately disqualifying. He had to go through weeks of testing as well if that was not the case. Though here you'd be place within 300km of your home so less issues of closeness to family.
Practically all laws, rules, and regulations in aviation were written with the blood of those who, well, sadly had to embrace the Earth so to speak.
On the face of it they may look discriminatory, especially the age restrictions, but the FAA will be more than happy to cite objective and scientific evidence supporting them which were, again, written in blood.
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Except that she was not rejected - she rejected them. She simply couldn't get a match with a job that worked for her.
She was not rejected.
I think they're talking about her application being ignored for four years.
Maybe. The article talks about "how the Obama-era FAA practiced discrimination in its hiring processes," which wouldn't apply to the woman I know. But it's not an in-depth article so it is possible such practices were still in place through Trump's first term and post-COVID when FAA hiring ramped up and would have affected the person I know.
> In addition, the White House has put a hiring freeze in place, prohibiting the replacement of open government positions or the creation of new ones while the administration evaluates reductions in the workforce. The White House plans to release a memorandum with further guidance within 90 days. This has drawn criticism from lawmakers as the FAA has been ramping up controller hiring.
https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2025-0...
Meanwhile, San Carlos Airport (KSQL, near San Francisco) is going ATC-zero on February 1st. The tower will be unstaffed.
https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/CASMATEO/bulletins/...
"The FAA has awarded a new contract for air traffic services at SQL to Robinson Aviation (RVA). However, the contract does not include locality pay to account for the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a result, RVA’s employment offers to current SQL controllers were significantly lower than their current compensation under SERCO. Understandably, all current controllers have declined RVA’s offers."
"Given that the FAA is ultimately responsible for ensuring air traffic services at SQL, we requested temporary FAA staffing for the tower—a solution currently being implemented at Eagle Airport in Colorado during its transition from SERCO to RVA. However, the FAA informed us this morning that they will not provide temporary personnel for SQL"
> The tower will be unstaffed.
Doesn't that just mean there will be no taxi control? My understanding is that ATC isn't in the tower. The tower staff just give clearances for take-off and directions on which runway to land/take-off. In radio clips, you can hear ATC hand-off a plane to tower.
No, ATC here refers to ground and tower controllers. They give taxi, takeoff, landing, and close in maneuvering instructions.
When you say ATC I believe you’re thinking of tracon controllers, a level of airspace up from towers who control approach and departures and then hand you off to/from the tower. Above them there’s yet another level, center controllers. All of these are ATC though.
The "ground" controller manages taxing around the "movement areas" (i.e. taxiways) on the ground. This notably does not include the runways. And it depends how much of the actual ramp and parking area they control (those are sometimes non-movement area and it's the pilots job to not hit anything).
The "tower" controller manages the actual runways, and the airspace within several miles of the airport laterally and a few thousand feet vertically (varying at each airport). This includes sequencing all the planes that want to take off of land there, and everybody maneuvering around that immediate area.
For the large airports that mostly big airliner flights, that sequencing is largely worked out by the approach controllers dozens or hundreds of miles ahead of time. So there's a steady stream of planes following standardized approach procedures at just the right distance apart.
Outside of the ~30 busiest airports in the country though, there is also a lot of general aviation in small planes. They want to transition through that airspace, or do a dozen laps around the "pattern" to practice landings, etc. Even at fairly major airports, there's plenty of GA activity. For example at Burbank, Ontario, John Wayne, Long Beach, San Jose, Oakland, etc in California. It's only really SFO and LAX where that doesn't really happen, because they set fees to shoo the peons away.
SQL is a small but very busy airport that is almost exclusively GA. There are several flight schools there with multiple planes each, and it's sandwiched in complicated airspace between SFO, SJC, OAK, and open bay.
The tower at this kind of airport is doing a delicate dance keeping multiple planes buzzing around in a rectangular pattern all day every day. Some of which are faster than others. Less frequently a larger much faster plane wants to get in or out and they're getting handed off from approach. Helicopters are doing tours and wanting to cross through. And a lot of the people flying are students that are new at this, don't know how to talk or listen on the radio right yet, make mistakes following directions, etc.
With the tower closed, all those people have to coordinate on a party-line radio with each other about where they are, what they're doing, etc to hopefully not hit anyone. So yeah... it's possible, but it's going to be a mess, and that's why tiny airports like this with virtually no commercial passenger service have a tower.
Also if you're leaving the immediate area, someone at the airport (ground, tower, or "clearance delivery", depending) normally will coordinate putting your destination (for visual/VFR flight following) or full route (for IFR/instruemnt) into the ATC systems before you takeoff so that you can talk to the approach controllers once you leave and they can provide you traffic advisories, etc.
With nobody at the tower to do that, you have to "cold call" approach once already airborne. Or if your route allows, just not get flight following at all (and then ATC has no way to reach you). So SQL tower closing will also add to the workload for the SFO/OAK approach area.
Surely the FAA would just shut the airport down in that eventuality, no?
Seems tenable for a GA airport in rural Wyoming but that is far too close to a major hub.
Honest question: are air traffic controllers at risk for being replaced with AI systems? My initial thought is no, there is too much complexity, but AI could help ease the load. I'm not really informed about air traffic systems, just curious.
Tower systems are the last place in the world you would want a 97% accurate large language model, and the very last place we would culturally tolerate this sort of thing. Innate conservatism is what happens when deviations from perfection lead to collisions, and for the most part "AI" success remains a stochastic matter, gigabyte to terabyte sized tensors that are not human-intelligible. A black box which cannot be readily, safely validated in the real world.
With that said - algorithmic, automated, and digital systems for collision avoidance at the very minimum have and could continue to make ATC jobs significantly easier. The radio voice channel is a particularly low fidelity, low bandwidth way to mete out information and directives.
There will be a list of scenarios competing for that "last place".
Operating rooms, certain military/police situations and self driving cars come to mind. A shared characteristic here is that errors lead to fatal outcomes exacerbated by unclear accountability.
No. We use some deterministic automation on the backend for helping with traffic management and rerouting flight paths, but the communication with aircraft is mostly done via voice. Everything happens too fast to insert a keyboard in the middle (*), and voice recognition would be too error prone for something safety critical.
(* CPDLC does allow ATC to send texts to/from larger aircraft, but this is only used for things that aren't time sensitive. Voice is still the primary method of control.)
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It also has to listen, and accept complex requests and demands from pilots over a scratchy and occasionally garbled radio link.
Have you ever gotten frustrated because Alexa/Siri/etc completely misinterpreted a voice request? Or looked at the quality of YouTube subtitles? That’s still lots of inaccuracy with AI speech recognition. There’s no room for that up there.
And yes, the non-deterministic nature is a huge problem given this is the very definition of a life-critical system.
I know, but these things can be trained for. Siri/Alexa is 2010 tech, not 2025. And the big benefit is that there's a pretty limited vocabulary and phraseology in aviation.
I don't see ATC being replaced yet but in the future perhaps something more automated could happen including more visual instructions.
Ages ago, I watched a documentary about ATC that showed a drill involving ATC work under power failure (mains and generator). I'm probably misremembering some details but there were battery-operated radios and little tablets being passed around with scribbled information.
I guess AI can work while the lights are on, but if this is your backstop scenario, you still need the meat ATC controllers, and they really need to know their stuff.
The SOTA is augmented ATC displays and digital towers, which basically use object recognition to label planes on cameras, and the controllers sit somewhere else.
Usually this is done for rural airports, where you have one controller potentially managing multiple low traffic airports, and it’s tough to get ATC willing to move to remote locations. The only busy airport doing this kind of thing is London City Airport, but that has 3M passengers a year and DCA has 25M. That was motivated by the lack of space at London City Airport, so they demolished the traditional tower to reallocate space.
London City implementation: https://www.nats.aero/news/london-city-is-first-major-airpor...
The FAA adopts new technologies at a glacial pace, for good reason. But AI has been mentioned in the planning of the next generation of ATC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Wide_Information_Manage...
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/atiec/me...
Perhaps some day, I would hope that we make a lot of progress before we look towards the current form of AI in such a critical spot.
Why would it need to even be AI? Why not just regular software? Couldn't airplanes just send a message that they want to land and the Air Traffic Control software sees where they are and what other aircraft are around and sends everyone the appropriate messages?
The human ATC system is very good at handling exceptions, including various kinds of emergencies, pilot errors, and reasons to prioritize one plane over another. The human controllers also typically have a good understanding of the details of airspace, regulations, policies, aviation customs, and the capabilities of various kinds of aircraft.
So for example, a plane can have a "missed approach and go around" when trying to land. I was once on a plane that did that because of extremely high winds. In that case, the plane that was supposed to be on the ground is suddenly climbing again and is going to need to turn in order to repeat the approach.
A plane can have a medical emergency onboard, so it needs to land at an unexpected airport, possibly faster than a normal landing, or starting from a somewhat atypical position. I was once on a plane that did that because someone onboard had a seizure.
A plane can have damage or equipment failures that the pilots find it hard to assess directly, so it needs to fly around for a while to give the pilots time to "run checklists" or perform various tests, or sometimes to let a ground-based observer report on something about the plane (!), or just to develop their intuition about how functional the plane is. It might then need to land at an unintended airport or return unexpectedly to its takeoff airport. I was once on a plane that did that because of bird strikes during departure, where the plane was damaged but the pilots were unsure how seriously.
A pilot might misunderstand something or disobey regulations, and that pilot or another pilot might be told to take some unexpected evasive action to avoid a collision. (This is one area that has been productively automated in some cases via TCAS, where the aircraft themselves can sometimes figure out what an appropriate maneuver would be before a controller tells them one.) I haven't personally experienced that.
There might be another kind of emergency where a runway is closed and a large number of planes need to be diverted (like right after this collision where DCA was abruptly closed).
There might be negotiations with an uncooperative or mentally ill pilot (like the tragic story of Richard Russell in 2018, but also a number of incidents that had happier endings).
Pilots might also negotiate more cooperatively with ATC related to diversions and priority in situations like bad weather, where the airport has less capacity than originally expected and the pilots need to determine whether they will divert to a different airport. In this case the air traffic controllers may talk to different pilots about their fuel levels and other factors that make them better and worse candidates for changing flight plans. En-route (ARTCC/ACC) controllers will also negotiate with pilots about changing altitude to reduce or avoid turbulence.
There are occasionally cases where a pilot is incapacitated and someone with less training and experience needs to be advised remotely on how to land a plane. (This is mostly very small planes but ATC will still ultimately deal with these emergencies.) In that case other planes also need to be kept away from the incident aircraft and maybe diverted elsewhere.
Specifically for takeoff and landing, there are often multiple planes using the same runway (for takeoff, landing, or both) in relatively quick succession, or possibly using runways that cross each other. In this case, a controller needs to keep an eye on how quickly pilots have (or haven't) complied with specific clearances, e.g. to cross a runway on the ground, because the clearances may need to be revoked or modified if they aren't used quickly enough (because of the presence of other aircraft that have also received clearances that will soon start to conflict with the older clearances). This also includes checking whether planes that have landed have vacated the runway expeditiously (since if they haven't done so, for whatever reason, other planes may soon need to be told to go around).
There are also cases where military or law enforcement authorities may ask or demand to modify normal ATC procedures or clearances because of some special operation or problem. The simplest case is that they might ask to prioritize a government aircraft over civilian flights for some reason, or ask certain other operations to stop e.g. during a takeoff or landing of Air Force One. (I just watched this a few days ago with an Air Force One departure from Las Vegas, where other departures and landings were temporarily but briefly suspended. So that had to be planned and communicated to various pilots, some of whom then had follow-up questions about what they were or weren't allowed to do.)
Pilots are also considered to have ultimate responsibility for the safety of their flights and passengers, and they can also refuse some ATC instructions, or deviate from some normal procedures, in emergencies. So for example, a controller might believe it's safe to land in certain weather conditions and might give a pilot a certain clearance, but the pilot might not feel up to completing the landing and might then refuse to do so. The controller will have to understand the pilot's intentions as best as possible, and deal with the consequences of those intentions (e.g., once again, keeping other planes out of the way, or trying to find a new routing that the pilot will be willing to accept).
ATC is also responsible for passing some kinds of information to and from other parties, like in case of an emergency landing communicating with emergency responders so that they understand the nature of the emergency and whatever facts will help them respond more effectively. And they have to tell other ATC facilities about problems and situations that will affect them, like in-flight emergencies, closed airspace, closed runways, closed airport, etc.
Many of these things can and should be more automated than they are, but humans in these jobs are doing enormous amounts of reasoning, improvisation, and even social negotiation.
(I'm not a pilot or air traffic controller, just a former frequent flyer who liked listening to ATC communications and sometimes listens to liveatc.net when friends' flights are arriving or departing, or watches video recaps of various aviation incidents.)
Edit: Another case that I thought of: during an emergency landing, a pilot might be given either a shorter (more direct) or longer (more indirect) route than usual, in response to the pilot's assessment of which would be safer. The pilot could also be given a longer route than usual in order to have time to "work checklists" in preparation for the landing, or in order to burn off fuel so that the plane will weigh less (and be less likely to cause a huge fire) upon landing.
If some navigation equipment is broken, the ATC facility could help with navigation or with diagnosing the problem (by describing visual landmarks, or by estimating the plane's current speed and heading based on ATC radar).
Because it pays half of Hacker News's salaries.
Replaced, no. ATC, at least while we still have human pilots, is a system for instructing, organizing, and responding to humans, with all their flexibility and foible.
Now a copilot e.g. ATC audio parsed by an LLM into intended tracks, requests from traffic, integrated into the scope with projections for future separation etc…
What kind of ai are you talking about? The non deterministic black box LLMs we have now?
> ATC please advise, I'm about crash
> Thanks for reaching out! As you probably know, crashing an aeroplane is not generally recommended. There are many factors that may contribute to a crash, such as weather, technical malfunction or human error. Appropriate training, regular maintenance and flight planning are some of the best practices which help minimise the likelihood of a crash. I recommend revisiting these factors. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Of course not LLMs, but approaches using mixed integer programming, genetic algorithms, and/or simulated annealing.
Oh, algorithms, they should have thought of those.
Are these new products from Rockwell automation?
The kind that could land an atomic-powered vehicle on Mars, eight light-minutes from human contact? In 2012?
It's utterly ridiculous to expect humans to do this job for much longer. It's what computers are for.
Oh you mean the kind that has no conflicting traffic in 0.5 to 2.5 AU?
Gosh, you'd think someone would've thought of this already.
There's no good excuse, other than cost and training and equipment integration (which are massive costs, i know) for not having some kind of learning or at a minimum high levels of automation in 2025.
In fairness to the current administration, while the hiring freeze may have impacted ATC hiring, that is not causal here. No one hired last week would have been running things today (if they were hit with the freeze).
> not causal here
but it does illustrate the type of future incident that it _could_ be causal of
But we don’t know what the future of the policy is either.
Sure, I didn't say otherwise.
Someone that was hired weeks or months ago, but scheduled to start last week, could* have been included in the hiring freeze. There's examples here of rescinded offers after doing irs on-boarding: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2025/jan/executive... (Not that there's information that suggests this caused the incident)
That's not what the hiring freeze EO would have done:
https://www.opm.gov/media/zkebfxow/omb-opm-federal-civilian-...
If someone in your scenario had accepted the offer and was going to start last week, they would not have been included in the hiring freeze and would have been able to start.
> Job offers made prior to noon on January 20, 2025, for which the individual has accepted the position and has a designated start date on or before February 8, 2025. Those individuals should report to work according to their respective designated start date.
They were replying to a comment that said "We're going to need to hire more controllers."
So I took their comment to be forward-looking.
It's worth adding that Elon Musk's email that had the supposed "buyout" went to ATC folks -- however management was telling them they'd need to work through their resignation date, regardless, removing the point of it. Then again, Musk denied the buyout will work this way, that agencies can just do whatever they want on this and OPM seems to agree, so who knows.
Is there an actual reason why the control tower work can't be fully automated? For train control lights we almost don't rely on human operators anywhere.
> For train control lights we almost don't rely on human operators anywhere.
Trains are on tracks. They basically move in one dimension. And the tracks can have (near) contact-based sensors along the way where the exact distance is known. (And in the US, there still is human conducting in a lot of the US)
That’s a very different problem space than the three dimension, unattached, space that air traffic moves in.
Because things can go from routine to multiple simultaneous life-threatening failures very quickly. Something like one flight declaring a mayday while another one just lost communication, all while the radar just started glitching in a weird way. Human intuition and common sense can sort it out. Deterministic algorithms would not.
Trains run on fixed tracks with fixed intersections, and one track might see a handful of them per day.
Planes around airports come in from all directions in three dimensions, and there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour.
These are vastly different scales of problem domain.
> one track might see a handful of them per day.
In the middle of nowhere. A metro track can have a train every 60s.
But it's still entirely fixed, with easy to deploy sensors on both the tracks and trains.
Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.
I should have said “arrivals and departures”. KATL has 2,100–2,700 arrivals and departures per day. Even if we assume those are equally spaced throughout the day (they aren’t) we’re over 100/hour.
But sure. It’s a mild exaggeration. It still doesn’t change the core point.
3D isn’t just “magically hard” for computers, but the process for routing traffic is wildly complex and a bunch of planes arriving and leaving at semi-random times, directions, and with different requirements and capabilities is where the problem starts not finishes.
The happy path is relatively easy. The exceptions are innumerable.
I think the 3D part is fine, it's more "all of physics" coming into play with a plane. Like bird strikes, engine failures, trying to decide how to handle that. What is the loss function the AI is supposed to apply if an emergency landing is needed?
And then if you have people flying the planes, you have to deal with people mostly _but not always_ doing the right thing. So now you build out a plan and have to deal with consequences of that.
So at the end of the day you're still looking at funneling humans into a thing. At worst you could consider ATC as "customer support", there to press buttons on machines to actually handle a bunch of logistics because the pilots need to figure things out.
On top of all of this, airports are trying to get through a lot of flights quickly. So people can make snap judgements about whether planes can or cannot advance, what they should do, etc. No matter how well your plan is, the instant a pilot mishears something it's over.
If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. But in the meantime there's somebody not following the plan often enough.
This does lead to an interesting question for me, though: what is the biggest "human movement" system that is actually entirely hands-off logistics? I would imagine that postal service companies are doing a lot but every major person moving operation seems pretty hands-on from the outside.
> If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs.
There's currently a human in the loop at almost all times but a great many planes are already self-flying. Autopilots are a thing, and have been for decades. Modern airliners routinely land themselves, and Garmin have developed an emergency landing system for general aviation aircraft which can handle everything including selecting an airport and communicating with ATC in the case of the pilot being incapacitated.
In many ways a self-piloting plane is an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars. Every plane has (or will have in the near future) a beacon on it transmitting it's location to every other plane around it to allow collision avoidance, and the procedure for getting from one major airport to another is pretty much prescribed in the form of standard departures, arrivals, and airways. The big difference of course is that if a car on the road breaks down and the AI can't handle it then the car can just stop, and baring someone not noticing and plowing into the back of them everyone will be fine, while if that happens in a plane it's a matter of time until the thing falls out of the sky killing everyone on board.
It's not just a 3D problem. It's all of the management in the air and on the ground. Could a computer eventually do it autonomously? I would think eventually, but the problem is handling exceptions. The Navy has been experimenting for years with a digital replacement of their Ouija board analog flight deck management tool for carriers [1]. And even then, people are still making most of the decisions.
And ATL is a crazy busy airport (there's an old doc on Netflix I think which is interesting). To confirm your question, ATL can run 5 runways nearly continuously[2]. It would be interesting to know what they peak at during a busy Monday morning, but my guess is they are more constrained by gate space at this point.
[1] https://newatlas.com/us-navy-ouija-board/50087/ [2] https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-econom...
The happy path is easy, as you imagine. It’s all the other imaginable and unimaginable paths, each unhappy in their own way…
Oh and thousands of lives hang in the literal balance
> Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.
Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe it is a more modern phenomena, enabled by a steady diet of 30 second videos.
Either way, I'm quite disturbed, regularly, recently, by the # of people who breezily stumble through quarter-baked thoughts while speaking dismissively, as if they've covered the surface of a complex universe that has been worked on very many smart people for decades, and now we can get to the real singular problem that'd fix everything, the one thing they've identified.
I don't even know where to begin trying to interlocute when the starting premise is "3D is hard for modern computers."
So I speak straightforwardly, in a way that I wish wouldn't be seen as rude, but it is.
So it goes.
You're right about the arrivals, but you missed the forest for the trees in the comment you're replying to.
We’ve built good enough systems that lots of people have never had engage with the complexity of reality?
You're reading into it too much. It wasn't dismissive.
And the framing of "3d" is a reasonable followup to the train comparison.
Well, if it wasn't, it certainly is now! ;)
?? I have no idea what this means.
Are you implying your reply would make the previous post become dismissive?
Four Dimensional Navigation, actually! X, Y, Z, plus Time. By incorporating strict time constraints, air traffic controllers can schedule and merge arriving aircraft more precisely, reducing holding patterns and optimizing fuel usage.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19750022064/downloads/19...
>4D AREA NAVIGATION SYSTEM DESCRIPTION AND FLIGHT TEST RESULTS
>A 4D area navigation system was designed to guide aircraft along a prespecified flight path (reference path) such that the aircraft would arrive at the approach gate at a time specified by the ATC controller. Key components to achieve this requirement were:
>(1) stored reference trajectories;
>(2) a continuously recomputed capture trajectory to a selected waypoint on the reference trajectory so as to achieve the desired time of arrival;
>(3) electronic situation displays; and (4) a control system to follow the overall trajectory in space and time.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19750015477
>Four-dimensional guidance algorithms for aircraft in an air traffic control environment
>Theoretical development and computer implementation of three guidance algorithms are presented. From a small set of input parameters the algorithms generate the ground track, altitude profile, and speed profile required to implement an experimental 4-D guidance system. Given a sequence of waypoints that define a nominal flight path, the first algorithm generates a realistic, flyable ground track consisting of a sequence of straight line segments and circular arcs. Each circular turn is constrained by the minimum turning radius of the aircraft. The ground track and the specified waypoint altitudes are used as inputs to the second algorithm which generates the altitude profile. The altitude profile consists of piecewise constant flight path angle segments, each segment lying within specified upper and lower bounds. The third algorithm generates a feasible speed profile subject to constraints on the rate of change in speed, permissible speed ranges, and effects of wind. Flight path parameters are then combined into a chronological sequence to form the 4-D guidance vectors. These vectors can be used to drive the autopilot/autothrottle of the aircraft so that a 4-D flight path could be tracked completely automatically; or these vectors may be used to drive the flight director and other cockpit displays, thereby enabling the pilot to track a 4-D flight path manually.
https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2020-12-4d-tbo-a-...
>4D-TBO: a new approach to aircraft trajectory prediction
>How four-dimensional trajectory data could contribute to aviation decarbonisation targets
>The real-time transmission of four-dimensional trajectory data has the incredible potential to greatly improve an aircraft’s trajectory prediction. By reducing the inaccuracy of current air traffic management (ATM) prediction models by approximately 30-40%, the Trajectory Based Operations in 4 Dimensions (4D-TBO) project is helping to pave the way to a more sustainable management of tomorrow’s air traffic.
https://skybrary.aero/articles/4d-trajectory-concept
>The 4D trajectory of an aircraft consists of the three spatial dimensions plus time as a fourth dimension. This means that any delay is in fact a distortion of the trajectory as much as a level change or a change of the horizontal position. Tactical interventions by air traffic controllers rarely take into account the effect on the trajectory as a whole due to the relatively short look-ahead time (in the order of 20 minutes or so).
>The implementation of 4D trajectory management is being researched by SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) in the EU and NextGen in the US.
>The 4D trajectory concept is based on the integration of time into the 3D aircraft trajectory. It aims to ensure flight on a practically unrestricted, optimum trajectory for as long as possible in exchange for the aircraft being obliged to meet very accurately an arrival time over a designated point.
Yes, this multiplies the complexity. When you talk to ATC you always need your tail number and airplane model. Why? Because a landing Cessna 150 is moving at 70mph. An incoming jet is moving at 130mph. And the jet can’t just slow down to 70 or it will fall out of the sky. They need to consider aircraft performance in all aspects of planning.
The problem space is too broad.
E.g. On 9/11 ATC had to land almost 3000 planes in 1 hour. I'm not sure if that sort of national coordinated grounding is part of ATC training, but it's certainly not something I'd want to leave to some code that has never needed to run in production before.
It just seems like software could pretty easily compute non-intersecting flight paths for all planes and assign them accordingly. As well it could real time monitor all trajectories and continue to give out the updated flight paths. I don't see why you also couldn't run a trillion tests using real and simulated flight data to make sure it works well.
Air traffic control has a lot more things to deal with. There are scenarios like runway closed and all traffic has to be diverted. Loss of communication. Various emergencies. Weather changes. It's not just a question of 3D motion planning. Controllers in the tower also use their eyes.
In your imaginary system how is the software "tower" communicating with airplanes, using voice? I don't think we even have software that can reliably decode the variety of human voices over radio that a controller can respond to.
One can imagine a digital protocol to all airplanes but technology works its way really slowly into aviation.
Yes, it would require a piece of hardware, but that seems easy to regulate and wouldn't need to be very expensive certainly not in relation to the costs of owning and operating an airplane.
Seems like you’ve stumbled onto a very obvious solution that would be easy to implement and that no one else has ever managed to see, but which would totally revolutionize the airline industry. Time to start a business!
Because right now airplanes are flown by humans. A large part of atcs jobs is dealing with humans. Not every pilot will be able to fly the optimum flight path.
How would you deal with all sorts of emergencies involving human pilots? For unmanned aircraft(aka drones) it’s a lot easier to implement unmanned traffic management (UTM).
Direct them to land in the best location and make sure all other aircraft are on non-intersecting flight paths. What exactly is ATC doing that software isn't able to?
How many options are there for handling emergencies with aircraft now? You pretty much just have either land ASAP or circle to burn fuel and then land.
Obviously you’re not a pilot. It might be helpful for you to listen to a few ATC transcripts of emergency situations.
"You pretty much just..."
Ah, there it is. "How hard could coordinating takeoff and landing for thousands of flights be? You just..."
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Weather. How often do weather events change the entire traffic flow into a train station?
I’ve heard ATC swap landing and takeoff directions in the space of 10 minutes because of weather
Not an expert but I can't imagine that would go very well. Trains have a single axis of movement that sometimes cross or combines with others. Aircraft have three axes of movement all under human control.
Positive Train Control has been a big fight too.
I mean this sincerely. What is more likely: that we've spent several decades ignoring very real automation solutions to this problem, or that it's a really, really hard problem that could get people killed?
not a bad question honestly.. I'd want some highly skilled humans there monitoring things but, yes. The air traffic control system of the US is absolutely incredibly amazing, but their entire mission, technology and equipment used to accomplish that mission, etc need to be reviewed, maybe rebuilt to be even safer.
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/01/broad-exemptions-t...
> President Trump signed an executive order instituting the freeze on Monday shortly after his inauguration, but allowed for exceptions for positions related to immigration enforcement, national security or public safety.
Important to read the details! There will be lots of misinformation as people invoke the minority of critical jobs as cover to defend the less critical ones.
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To quote the order itself:
> This order does not apply to military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.
ATC surely falls under public safety. Additionally, the ATC issues stretch well back into the Biden term, and you can find plenty of articles discussing the controversy elsewhere.
I get a strong sense that they don't actually know what they cut as they stopped paying to guard ISIL prisoners. I could very easily see ATC getting hit by accident. Generally this administration neither thinks nor plans before acting
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily...
That article is propaganda from the same people who brought you the Iraq War. That’s exactly the sort of funding spigot we should be stopping so we can figure out what the hell is going on. Why the hell are we paying for prison guards in Syria? At one point CIA backed militias in Syria were fighting DOD backed militias: https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-...
Everyone obviously wants to use critical services as a shield to avoid scrutiny on them. But by all indications the administration was ready to go on day 1, and insofar as stuff is being cut or halted a decision was made to allow that to happen.
So the LA Times is not part of the propaganda that brought us the Iraq War? And the US must, must at all cost, stop paying for prison guards to figure it out?
There's no other way to just ... figure it out? You know, by studying the situation?
I’m begging you to read Manufacturing Consent.
And when has “studying the situation” ever worked to make the government stop wasting money destroying the Middle East? Obama promised to change this stuff, and he couldn’t do it, because he innately trusted the same people who made the mistakes to “study” how to fix them.
I don't know what was going on with Syria, sounds real bad, but your claim about the administration having clear plans they're executing from day 1 is clearly false. This is sourced reporting, not analysis:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/omb-whi...
The Atlantic is a propaganda machine. You can't counter that accusation with yet another example.
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Spare me the sanctimoniousness. We've become numb to political Weekly World News-style journalism disguised as serious reporting.
No offense to the Weekly World News intended.
Wow, a controller can be hired and on the job in less than a week?
Sure can if they make the right offer to the people that were working there just before they quit due to being lowballed!
And we also did make it basically impossible for ATC workers to strike, so its not like the ATC workers could have said "fix this shit so people don't die or we will strike" because they can't really and anyone who says it anyways alone is going to be given the boot and blacklisted from the job. Not to mention the amount of training and effort needed to become one in the first place with basically zero job security or recourse if you make the wrong person angry.
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If you listen to the ATC recording, around 15:50, they instruct the helicopter to watch for traffic, specifically this flight, and clears them for virtual separation.
It's the helo's fault. They likely misjudged the plane due to assuming it was a large jet but it was a regional jet, so it was way closer than they thought it was.
It's a tragedy, but I don't see how it would be ATC's fault. But that's just my 2 cents.
> They likely misjudged the plane due to assuming it was a large jet but it was a regional jet
Maybe this is possible, but it seems implausible given that ATC explicitly refers to the jet as a "CRJ".
It could be that the right call was for ATC to deny the request for visual separation and for them to do the deconflicting themselves. Not saying that's the case, I don't know, but that's one way it could be (partially) ATC's fault.
That's the best theory I've seen so far, but it's still really really bad.
Do you have a link to the recording?
It's linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874330 the liveatc link
It's way to early to say but one of the threads seemed to indicate the helicopter pilot was told about the airplane and instructed to maintain visual separation. I used to be a military air traffic controller and that was fairly common practice but I wasn't aware this is something that happens in civil aviation where usually the margins should be much higher.
Crazy and sad. I guess we'll learn more over the next few days. Going into the water is maybe better than crashing on land. Hopefully some people make it.
EDIT: Found this: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...
It's very common for civilian ATC to instruct pilots to maintain visual separation, especially when they're both in the approach pattern. For airliners, TCAS gives an extra level of safety to guard against pilot errors. But I think many military aircraft lack TCAS.
> When visual approaches are allowed, controllers can tell pilots to maintain visual separation from other aircraft, so they don’t have to leave as much of a buffer as with an instrument landing (where it’s entirely on the controllers to provide proper spacing).
From an incident at SFO where a Luftansa plane was not allowed to perform a landing using visual separation at night, and therefore was delayed interminably:
https://onemileatatime.com/news/lufthansa-a350-oakland-diver...
And the collision was lower than TCAS would be active, no?
TCAS is always active if your transponder mode dial is in such a position, so it always calls out other aircraft that are nearby and could pose a threat of mid-air collision. However, resolution advisories are inhibited near the ground. The last thing you want to be telling a pilot to do is to increase their descent when they're only a thousand feet above terrain -- this would at the very least trigger a more serious GPWS callout, the response to which is drilled into pilots during training -- pull up, directly into the path of the thing TCAS would want you to avoid. If the other aircraft also has TCAS equipped and enabled, and their RAs aren't inhibited, they will still get a climb instruction (both crews usually get opposite instructions in order to maximise the vertical separation).
Correct. At that altitude TCAS RAs were almost certainly inhibited. They might have gotten a TA.
On the tapes, the military helicopter was warned about the airliner. They replied that they had the traffic in sight and requested to maintain visual separation.
It is so incredibly tiring that you dweebs try to blame every single bad outcome in the world on cough minorities cough "DEI", with zero evidence.
In fact, literally when you posted this comment there were already ATC recordings floating around of the controller telling the helicopter pilot to maintain separation from the exact airliner they crashed into.
Take a look in the mirror.
At least DEI can't be blamed for much longer.
I sometimes wonder about the value of these news stories on forums and social media.
It's all pretty much wild speculation with several potential causes already mentioned on this forum.
News important yes, every rando with a few shreds of factoids speculating, not so much.
Here we get air traffic controller recordings, and people who are ammeter pilots. It is more informed speculation than my "normal" friends or co-workers.
Anything about civilian air safety is like catnip for nerds. It is the ultimate armchair nerd sport -- speculating about reasons for a civilian air crash. I guess this discussion will be more than 1,000 comments before its heat-death.
I’ve been saying something similar to friends recently. We have access to a bit Too much news for our own good.
In this case there is no or negative value. Wait for the facts, avoid the noise and wild speculation.
But my dopamine…
Yes, tons of speculation, and very little clear basic facts.
When I clicked, I expected to find the comments interesting (since I worked in a small corner of flight safety), but, skimming through, I kept feeling aversion to threads.
Most modern news organizations aren't much better.
I come to hn for the speculations.
Don't you know? If a person can program in Rust and Kotlin, that makes him an expert in every other field, too.
I've seen at least one "why don't you just <misunderstanding of how aviation works>" upthread already. Can't believe this flavor of tech hubris is running the country now. No wonder the goddamn planes are falling out of the sky...
Let's go back to AI non-stop 24/7, hallucinations are saner.
Oh man. I’m in Wichita and am getting a bunch of texts.
Texted my friends that fly that route regularly and most have texted back.
It can all be gone in an instant, tell those you love what they mean to you.
edit: everyone is accounted for
> everyone is accounted for
Happy to hear that.
Damn. We’ve avoided a US airliner having a fatal crash since 2009.
It's a crazy accomplishment really, unimaginable how safe US commercial airplanes have been in the last two decades
So sad that streak finally ended
As someone working in aviation safety, this is heartbreaking and awful to watch. The efforts of CAST and ASIAS in reducing aviation safety accidents have been very successful, but of course we still have so much to do.
There have been incidents that were just saved by luck (eg losing door in flight). And Too many near misses.
Better a near miss than a catastrophic incident.
And in such an avoidable way, too.
There was a fatality on a Southwest flight in 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380
> fatal crash
But yes, you're right to point that out.
I posted my comment and thought, okay, now for a nerdfight about what 'crash' means. And here we are.
This might have been a better approach: It wasn't a crash, but there was a fatality on a Southwest flight in 2018.
You are the one instigating the nerdfight
Although Air Canada Flight 759 was far too close for comfort and should be classified as a failure of the system, even if it did not result in an accident.
Not a US airliner, but in the US: Asiana Airlines Flight 214
This will be the worst disaster since Colgan in 2009 which is the crash that upped the hours requirement for ATP pilots from 250 to 1500 even though both pilots had over 1500 hours. I think this is going to be a very big deal and very quickly become a political football. Regardless, this is absolutely awful and extremely unfortunate.
This is an often repeated misconception. ATP always needed 1500 hours. What wasn’t required is for both pilots to have an ATP, just the captain - the flight officer only needed a commercial certificate. Airlines would hire with lower hours and train on the job.
While both pilots in the crash did have over 1500 hours, the flight officer did not in fact hold an ATP. The rule also changed some of the ATP training requirements, and there were other regulation changes on duty cycles, etc.
It’s very possible we’ve had a run of good luck since 2009. It’s also possible some of the rule changes helped. I wouldn’t dismiss that possibility too quickly.
https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/notice/n_8900.225....
Early indications are that the airliner and ATC were operating as planned, and the immediate cause of the crash was the military helicopter.
Radar replay: https://x.com/avgeekjake/status/1884823071611363833
UHF feed with comms from the military helicopter: https://archives.broadcastify.com/44114/20250129/20250129200...
- 5:41 - AA5342 is given instructions for circling to 33
- 6:45 - PAT-25 reports Memorial
- 7:06 - Tower gives PAT-25 traffic advisory, PAT-25 reports traffic in sight and requests visual separation
- 8:08 - Tower asks PAT-25 if they have the CRJ in sight. PAT-25 again reports traffic in sight and again requests visual separation
- 8:23 - Crash occurs
aaand.. it's gone.
archive of the radar replay: https://dpaste.com/3DUG9YWFB
sha3-256: 539b49e57443109cb0aea06209ce142d44a5ccbee16e42e0c71026742fc56703
No, the Twitter/X post is gone but the archives.broadcastify.com link is still good.
more: https://dpaste.com/HDBW79JMX
(no height data, so I ignore the overlay comments on the first video)
sha3-256's 7c608babe5552ac436499978b1a458b3a74ddc7e1d7e5011c6573b724729149e 24a3e23aa97f348ebd8740af83b3b50ae7dd5cd5147e88636b564e93d99d9775
blancolirio: Potomac Mid Air Collision DCA 1/29/25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouDAnO8eMf8
Could be a relevant DEFCON talk: https://youtu.be/KYuBf2HpXJg?si=srOl5T6CY6Lg8HZQ
Sounds like maybe the ADSB was on in this case though.
A CRJ700 crashing into a Black Hawk sounds bad. :/
FR24 shows helicopters from various agencies doing many laps around the site, presumably looking for survivors.
https://i.imgur.com/SykzxUA.png
On the ATC radio archive you can hear the tower asking aircraft if they have lights, can the circle over the east side of the field to help locate survivors
It’s probably really early to ask, but in case anyone here is knowledgeable and has any idea: why didn’t TCAS help avoid the accident? Isn’t it designed for such situations where 2 aircrafts collide? Do military crafts not have it or something?
It’s likely both the helicopter and the jet received a TCAS warning. In dense airspaces, those alerts tend to trigger frequently, so there’s a strong chance they may have dismissed it. The CRJ crew might have been aware of the Blackhawk’s presence, but if the other crew had visual contact with the approaching traffic (the CRJ), they might not have felt the need to take further action.
TCAS RAs are inhibited at low altitude.
as others have said, likely too low. tcas is pretty awesome (and yes, most military flights will use it), but it is (deliberately) muted/degraded at low altitudes (i think around 1500feet).
Too low, most likely.
Are pilots landing at DCA conditioned to ignore TCAS warnings on approach? Would there have been one?
TCAS has a minimum altitude of 700ft AFAIK
It's 900ft AGL and below while descending
(CRJ pilot here)
Maybe not related at all, but I can't help but wonder if this is affected by the funding turmoil. Would a less distracted ATC controller prevent this?
Anecdotally, the amount of helicopter & air traffic going on around DC has been absurd this month.
My house in DC has calmed down some but we had a bunch of low flying fighters jets & helicopters for a bit. It's been wild having the house shaken at noon or 1:00 from pairs of fighter jets!
I've had an in-week around Tysons this week, and it's been wild seeing pair after pair after pair of helicopter flying east towards the city this week. I'm normally up there once or twice a week and usually there's nothing like this.
Agreed. Why so many heli's to McClean? Are they just too stingy to pay the I66 toll in the afternoon?
Does anyone have the flight path for the helicopter? (Tail number PAT25). FlightAware doesn't show it but it might have been tracked by open source ADS-B receivers.
This helicopter was often utilized for VIP transport.
PAT25 would be a temporary military flight call sign, not a tail number. US military aircraft don't have FAA "N" registration numbers like civilian aircraft do. Military aircraft do have official numbers but those aren't used for ATC or radio communications.
In this particular case it appears that the "PAT" part is an acronym for Priority Air Travel. In other words, it was a VIP transport flight (there may not have been any VIPs actually on board at the time).
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae313d
Note: This is MLAT, not ADSB-Out data.
https://skybrary.aero/articles/multilateration
The video makes it look like the helicopter crashed into the airplane, not the other way around.
How do you figure? The videos of the crash that I can find on X just show a small airline light suddenly turning into a low-res explosion. (Edit: ah. yes.)
https://x.com/aletweetsnews/status/1884789306645983319
You see the helo coming from the left on the screen while the airliner appears to be descending. The helo must have gotten in the way (as opposed to catching up from behind). The airliner's lights are unmistakable, so how did the helo pilot not notice them? The airliner's pilots might not have had a chance to notice the helo. Since the helo was crossing an active runway approach the fault has to be with them.
Landing lights are very focused. They're only noticeable if they're pointed towards you (but then they're very bright). They were visible to the camera but perhaps not to the heli.
Of course the plane would have anti-collision lights as well though, those are omnidirectional.
My only thought is that it's a regional jet, so it's smaller than a "normal" commercial flight. At night, if you expect it to be a big jet and it looks small, you presume it's just further away. I think they saw it, saw it small and presumed they had enough time to make it in front of it.
Not many big jets at DCA. Max is typically a 757.
Maybe, but those smaller aircraft handle tons of flights in and out of DCA. Lots of commuter flights to NYC, Boston, etc.
Anyone that can explain what the people on X mean when they comment that it was "intentional"? I'm probably out of the loop but this feels super out of place to me.
These are only a small amount directly from the replies to the tweet you shared, you can find many more if you keep scrolling.
https://x.com/27steph77/status/1884799302947500062 https://x.com/Aangtweets/status/1884793609326666014 https://x.com/Ray4444444444/status/1884824192308134234 https://x.com/OmarGoshTV/status/1884807622588522981 https://x.com/Sgt_Mac87/status/1884795428559814968 https://x.com/dudeodnv/status/1884796307665203456 https://x.com/USBornNRaised/status/1884793041610842420 https://x.com/thatcrazytoast1/status/1884797991678034183
Because too Allah-damned-many people are worm-brained conspiracy theorists nowadays: https://archive.is/sS3W1
there's a dot moving from the left to right that intercepts the airline lights and explodes. I would presume that's the helicopter.
Its on final landing. The small light (helicopter) from the left intersects it.
I believe the Marine aviation unit supporting the WH operates from the navy base east across from DCA. You can watch them training from the terminal.
Not sure how they or the Army transition the approach ends to the runways, but it’s really close.
A passenger jet originating from Kansas collided with a Blackhawk helicopter midair near Reagan National Airport on Wednesday night.
Flights at the airport have been halted.
We really can't have this type of accident, a midair collision happen anywhere in the United States, much less the nation's capital, especially considering the Washington area is some of the highest controlled airspace in the country. DCA has been a high-risk airport really since the jet-age, and I have a feeling this might be the end of it as a major passenger airport (at least for Part 121 operations). DOT/FAA are really going to need to step up after this and figure it out, for good. I hope there are survivors but it is really cold in that water right now, look up Air Florida flight 90 for a completely different accident, but in a similar time of the year.
Unfortunately it's not gonna happen. The traffic at DCA only keeps going up, and I've heard chatter that it's because a lot of congressman and senators prefer taking flights from DCA instead of driving to Dulles or BWI.
Cities should have convenient airports
Maybe the evtol technology will alleviate this dilemma
> DOT/FAA are really going to need to step up after this and figure it out, for good.
Yeah. First, we should fill the currently vacant US Secretary of Transportation role. Then we should fill the currently vacant FAA Administrator role. Then we should fill the FAA Deputy Administrator role [0]. Then we should fill the currently vacant DoT Inspector General role that Trump just opened up by illegally firing this watchdog without the required 30 days notice to Congress [1]. Then we can start investigating.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250129122818/https://www.faa.g...
[1] https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2025/01/trump-fires-multip...
I know that everyone crosses all altitudes during landing. But why don't ATC / FAA stratify aircraft type and use by altitude. Like all commercial traffic is put in even thousands altitudes. And the Military / EMS gets the odd thousands.
Its crazy to have things colliding like this.
Route 4 (the helicopter route along the river) has a maximum altitude of 200 feet for helicopter. From the crash it seemed like the helicopter pilot wasn't strictly following the ceiling.
Everything eventually needs to land, so when you’re talking about an area around an airport, at low altitudes, that’s going to be a difficult thing to do. If you mix in helicopter traffic that needs to run at lower altitudes anyway, that is also near an airport, it becomes a much more difficult scenario to control.
You'd think they would've figured this out by now. Hacker News to the rescue!
Helicopter flies at 200ft. Planes landing have to traverse through 200ft. Therefore vertical separation impossible.
This heli route is just crazy.
Gruesome, in a crash like this, if there were any survivors from the impact, the water would likely have finished them off.
If they can get out, they have a chance. There was a crash on the Potomac in January 1982 and there were several survivors. The video of the rescue is pretty crazy.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/from-the-archives-h...
There was a truck that crashed on bridge right next to lincoln memorial and then veered off roadway into bridge, and both were deceased. Its very cold in DC right now and an airplane crashing is much more catastrophic.
It was very cold in DC until recently but it's 45°F right now at 11:21. I was walking & biking around in a sports jacket today with a winter coat strapped onto the outside of my bag.
Best wishes to the victims.
Potomac is half frozen still.
appears to have collided with a helicopter
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Went on Reddit and them came here
always was
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Trump is fully responsible for plane crashes /s
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I'm going to head this off right now: This was between the pilots of the American Airlines flight and the Blackhawk, and the ATC at Reagan. Short of the controllers being literally understaffed, which I assume is not the case, the focus of this investigation should be what the sincere hell happened in the air there.
This was a wholly preventable incident, hell this should have not happened period. Something likely very basic and fundamental failed catastrophically, and we need to figure out what and why. Bringing politics into this at this stage is unnecessary and deleterious noise unless findings implicating politics come to light.
Yeah, it's just a mountain of coherent circumstantial evidence at this point. We can infer that liquidation of leadership and oversight in the agencies responsible for the safety of air travel might distract and strain remaining operational staff, but we don't know for a fact yet that that's the case. Maybe we'll find that all relevant pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance people, etc were all completely insulated from and oblivious to the active public campaign to eliminate their roles including the emails they would have received on Tuesday from the US Govt Office of Personnel Management [0].
I really don't see a way to eliminate Trump's chaos as at least a partial cause, and it could only be ruled out if the investigators are cognizant of political context.
[0] https://www.opm.gov/fork
Another horrible cost of militarism.
Maybe the military shouldn’t fly training flights there. Just an idea.
I was startled to learn that just a few months ago Lockheed Martin was demonstrating remote control flight of a similar military helicopter: https://theaviationist.com/2024/10/22/uh-60-black-hawk-matri...
Given the strange way the helicopter appeared to fly right into the jet there will be no end to the speculation. Already people on social media are claiming that the helicopter originated near the CIA or that there was someone important flying on the plane.
As fullshark commented above, there is no value to wild speculation. Wait for the facts, avoid the noise and wild speculation. We do not have many facts as of 1/29 overnight.
(Next thing is how would we ever falsify a wild theory like that to the satisfaction of all speculators, given we only have the ATC recording, not the audio from the helicopter (assuming the Black Hawk didn't have a black box, as seems to be the case from what I've read so far)).
> Given the strange way the helicopter appeared to fly right into the jet there will be no end to the speculation.
There's an ATC recording. No speculation necessary. The Army helicopter pilot is likely at fault.
People who take UAP seriously still will speculate, especially since drones can relay audio from controllers to talk to ATC as if they were onboard. People on the internet speculate about things that are a lot more clear than this case.
If you think a recording of ATC saying 'keep an eye out for that plane coming in to land' is going to end speculation then you have no understanding of how people behave on social media. For some reason people are upset about me pointing out the reality that this will generate lots of conspiracy theories. I invite you to consider this example of a prominent public figure engaging in exactly the sort of speculation I described.
https://bsky.app/profile/yasharali.bsky.social/post/3lgwrcvz...
Are you speaking from experience?
Yes, I research and write on extremists and have become depressingly familiar with conspiratorial narrative formation in real time, as well having read a huge number of research papers into social media dynamics. I used to spend a lot of time and effort debunking CTs but frankly it seems increasingly pointless to do so nowadays.
Your first sentence, being startled to learn about remote-controlled flying, gives the impression that you're one of those conspiracy theory hobbyists (a term I'm conjuring for idjits who speculate conspiracies when anything happens)...