Photo: AFP
A US Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines plane in the skies over Washington D.C. as the plane was approaching a runway at Reagan National Airport Wednesday night. As daylight broke over D.C. on Thursday, the grim work in the Potomac River gradually shifted from search and rescue to search and recovery, as it appears that none of the 64 people on the plane or the three Army personnel on the helicopter survived. The most obvious question that investigators are asking is how the crash occurred. John Nance is an ABC World News aviation expert and retired airline pilot; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to recommend not jumping to conclusions, based on what little information we have now.
“Basically, what we’ve got here is a mistake,” Nance told host Larry Mendte. “Obviously, the pilots of the helicopter, which was a military UH-60 Black Hawk, would have had no reason to, nor would they have, flown into the flight path, or around the flight path, of the commuter jet, so there was a mistake made. Now, figuring out which mistake it was and how many different contributing elements is one of the important parts. The NTSB is already on the scene and organizing everything they can, pulling in all the data, but that’s really the one central question.”
A pilot on the helicopter is heard saying “I see it” before the collision. Nance offered his theory on what the pilot may have been referring to. “When you look at the potential mistakes, one of the easiest ones to make is when you have traffic pointed out to you by the air traffic controller, and you’re in the ‘see and avoid’ phase, and that is something I have always railed against because we utilize it too much; ‘see and avoid’ in modern cockpits is sometimes impossible. But you’re in that mode, ‘see and avoid,’ and you pick out a target that you think they’re talking about, hoping that it’s right, and you make sure you don’t hit that target, but now you fly in the face of the one that the air traffic controller was talking about to begin with. That is a quick and dirty analysis of what could have happened, but by no means do we have this solved.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images
