I heard on NPR this morning that the ATC said “do you see the plane” without specifying which plane. There was another larger plane taking off at the same time. So could be partly ATC’s fault.
That being said nothing like this happens without multiple failures by multiple people.
Yeah I feel like it’s not really fair on the victims or the victims families to blame any one person at all. It’s a tragedy for sure but it’s not like anybody fucked up on purpose. It doesn’t really help to lay blame on an individual, just figure out where the mistakes happened and amend the procedures so it hopefully doesn’t happen again.
The audio is out there, being pretty familiar with air accidents and radio call outs:
ATC wasn’t clear, they just said “go behind that plane”, yet if you listen to literally any of the other ATC callouts in the surrounding 10m they’re all proper with heading and altitude like “AAL111 go to 3000’ and hold heading 270”, yet with the helo he just says “go behind them”
The helicopter doesn’t change heading at all and just basically plows into the passenger jet (from what I can see on the ATC map anyway), so I think either they misjudged their speed vs the jet they hit or mistook it for another jet
Either way: ATC should have been more clear, heli pilot should have asked for clarification before proceeding without any change or even slowed when the uncertain command came through
Given the relative speeds, I think it’s more likely the plane plowed into the helicopter than the other way around. The minimum speed of the jet (a CRJ 700) is about 145 knots indicated air speed, the max is about 470 knots. The Black Hawk has a minimum speed of zero, and a maximum of about 180 knots. The two might have been moving at a similar speed, but if one was moving faster and crashed into the slower-moving aircraft, it was almost certainly the jet that crashed into the helicopter.
I heard on NPR this morning that the ATC said “do you see the plane” without specifying which plane. There was another larger plane taking off at the same time. So could be partly ATC’s fault.
That being said nothing like this happens without multiple failures by multiple people.
Yeah I feel like it’s not really fair on the victims or the victims families to blame any one person at all. It’s a tragedy for sure but it’s not like anybody fucked up on purpose. It doesn’t really help to lay blame on an individual, just figure out where the mistakes happened and amend the procedures so it hopefully doesn’t happen again.
The audio is out there, being pretty familiar with air accidents and radio call outs:
ATC wasn’t clear, they just said “go behind that plane”, yet if you listen to literally any of the other ATC callouts in the surrounding 10m they’re all proper with heading and altitude like “AAL111 go to 3000’ and hold heading 270”, yet with the helo he just says “go behind them”
The helicopter doesn’t change heading at all and just basically plows into the passenger jet (from what I can see on the ATC map anyway), so I think either they misjudged their speed vs the jet they hit or mistook it for another jet
Either way: ATC should have been more clear, heli pilot should have asked for clarification before proceeding without any change or even slowed when the uncertain command came through
Given the relative speeds, I think it’s more likely the plane plowed into the helicopter than the other way around. The minimum speed of the jet (a CRJ 700) is about 145 knots indicated air speed, the max is about 470 knots. The Black Hawk has a minimum speed of zero, and a maximum of about 180 knots. The two might have been moving at a similar speed, but if one was moving faster and crashed into the slower-moving aircraft, it was almost certainly the jet that crashed into the helicopter.
Black Box Down is a good podcast to hear a bunch of incidents similar with communication being a huge issue in most of them
Do they have an episode on Flight 800? I’d be really interested to hear that.