Quotes
They had to circle back around because there was a helicopter in the flight path,
passenger Richard Hart told the newspaper of his experience on the flight We are looking at altitude... someone was at the wrong altitude. The investigation will help us understand that – was the Black Hawk too high? Was it on course? Right now we don’t quite know,
The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit,
What I've heard from the audio is that they called out to [air traffic control]. The helicopter said that he had the aircraft in sight,
The position configuration was not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,
Do you have the CRJ in sight?"
the controller asked, and the helicopter pilot confirmed Having flown at night, having tried to look and see traffic, I think most people would say, ‘Oh, how hard is it to miss an airliner,’ right? You should be able to see that. But it's a lot more difficult than people would expect,
The military tend to have a bit of a law-unto-themselves approach,
There’s so many places they could have been doing training. Why did they have to do it at the end of the runways of DCA?”
Johnson continued, referring to the airport code of Reagan National airport There was communication between the air traffic control tower and the helicopter pilot about whether they can see the CRJ [the American Eagle Bombardier jet] – did the controller give too much authority to the helicopter crew, or did the helicopter crew mistake what they saw?”
Given that these are everyday training flights over known congested areas,
he said, referring to a nearby antenna On 3/29/2024 at 1503 hours I observed two US army UH-60s nearly collide over 1-495 near Annandale,
he wrote in one complaint to the FAA from last March, noting they passed each other above the highway only “about 50-100 meters apart”. As we have said countless times before, DCA’s runway is already the busiest in the country,
Virginia US senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Maryland’s senator Chris Van Hollen and then senator Ben Cardin, all Democrats, said in a joint statement months before the law was passed We lost more than 60 people, and two aircraft, and we shut down a major airport, and it was completely avoidable,
And suddenly, this is where the flight ended.”
He ended the segment by saying This is a bit sick…” ... Ghoul!”
Fuming social media users took to X – formerly Twitter – to complain about the segment, with one writing So we are in a helicopter simulator… where are we?”
Utterly shameful and sick. @Ofcom will be getting many complaints over this. Think of the families and victims. Disgusted.”
Upon review of the approach path and other information, we estimate we came within 300 ft. or less of what turned out to be a helicopter lifting off of the hospital,
That was as routine a (commercial) flight as it gets,
said Richard Aboulafia, managing director of AeroDynamic
