Tom_Waarne
Uh huh, and the blackhawk hadn’t been squawking for what, two years before that and this was a “training flight”?
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Uh huh, and the blackhawk hadn’t been squawking for what, two years before that and this was a “training flight”?
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That’s exactly what I was going to ask.
Their Mode S transponder was on, just not ADS-B. ATC could see them just fine, so could the TCAS on the CRJ. Sure, ADS-B would have provided better information to the CRJ, but the helo was still visible to them.
A wilder fact than their ADS-B Out being off is that military helicopters generally do not show ADS-B In traffic on their displays. They’ll usually have TCAS, but ADS-B In is far better for picking out which jet is which and which way they’re headed. All TCAS gives you is a dot.
Yes, I think the ADS-B angle is another red herring. Interesting tidbit, but the helo transponder was fully visible to both ATC and the jet.
You’ve also got to make sure you’re wearing NVGs over the brightly lit city at night.
I’m a controller who works at an airport with a STARS display. Ads-B mean nothing to me or changes what I see on the scope. There’s a button I can press to display it which I use to help identify 1200s, but that’s pretty much it. My understanding is that aircraft equipped with TIS will still see see other aircraft if their transponder is on with Mode C/S. Is this correct?
Rick seems like you already answered my question, thanks!
The problem was that they were looking at the wrong airplane. The altitude issues are misdirection. Given that the jet was on a visual, they could have just as easily been at 200 feet and collided there. Feel better?
The solution here wasn’t vertical separation: no sane controller would allow these two to be in the same place at the same time and count on 15 feet or 100 feet altitude difference to keep them from colliding. They needed to be in laterally different places, which was the intent and expectation of both the original and second “maintain visual separation” and “pass behind” instructions.
For some reason Washington DC does not seem like a training area; it seems more like a “you better have your shyte together” area.
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Does the military not teach/order instructor/check pilots to take over the controls when the student//trainee has failed to follow proper procedures or instructions which put the aircraft into a dangerous position? Sure, this would have resulted in a failed check ride. So what. Lives may not have been lost. As far as ADS-B, even without it, the controller had all the information necessary to properly manage the situation.
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I’m a retired Naval Aviator with an ATP and over 10,000 flt hrs. I instructed at all three levels in the Navy - training command, squadron and Fleet Replacement Squadron. And, I’ve flown a number of light civil acft., including my own PA-128.
As an instructor and Acft. Cmdr. in the P3-C, I had to “take an acft” on a rare occassion. Yes, the Navy teaches this and very well.
Although there are a number of factors being assesed in the DC mishap, the one that’s so fundamental and appears to be missing is - " see and avoid." No what the circustances, when flying in VMC conditions, see and avoid is paramount.
If the helo instructor saw the CRJ and told the pilot at the controls to avoid, then it’s absolutely perplexing as to why the instructor didn’t “take the acft.” I’m at a loss here.
I recall several times when I had to take an acft for one reason or another. In one situation, I was junior to the person flying.
Finally, I believe the primary casual factors were spatial disorientation and situational awaerness. I believe the pilots didn’t see the CRJ and flew into it unwittingly.
I offer this as a Navy mishap investigator who was invoved in investigating several tragic P3 mishaps.
CAPT USN (ret)
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The New York Times just repackaged facts that were already known. They didn’t break any new ground, the NTSB, AVweb, and others had already covered the real issues. They’re writing for the general public, not pilots or controllers. The route design should have been recognized as a primary cause too, because it forced a bad setup that was bound to fail, even though pilot, controller, and equipment failures still played a role.
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What a crock of baloney. It took the Army lawyers 3 months to think of that excuse (for not having ADSB-out turned on)? A mea culpa would go a long way here.
Rick do you have a published media reference that the helicopter Mode-S was turned ON, I had not heard that.
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Say, Captain … what the heck is a PA-128 ???
I’m reading that internal discussions between the Capt. pilot and the CWO2 were “revealed.” Does that mean the helicopter had a cockpit voice recorder? The NYT article said that Capt Lobach “repeatedly ignored warnings from the right (?) seater about altitude.” “She did not turn left (toward the river bank” when directed.
Elsewhere, I read where there was no ADS-B ‘in’ in the helicopter. So there’s a single point failure mode. They had an assigned path and altitude and didn’t follow it. They couldn’t ‘see’ the CRJ because (I believe) they were fixated on the other departing traffic at DCA AND NVG’s hindered their scan. And insufficient local controller staffing in the tower added to the problem. Once the helicopter reported “in sight,” however, the ‘onus’ was off the tower. Still, another controller might have discerned the problem?
In the end – no matter how you cut it – this was a comedy of errors that came together to form a perfect storm. Flying a simulated “classified” mission which really wasn’t in such busy airspace with NVG’s was the main culprit here.
An ADS-B ‘in’ device … even a civil Garmin GPS or an iPad w/ an ‘in’ box feeding it, would have allowed the crew chief to ride herd on the situation. I read where there were insufficient iPads available to the Army people.
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The radar replay has been out for a long time. The “they were at 300 feet!” stuff comes from their mode C info - if the transponder had been off there wouldn’t have been any altitude reporting.
Flight radar from air traffic control show the crash between a passenger plane and military helicopt
The ADS-B data wouldn’t have added much. It has 25 foot resolution rather than 100 foot resolution, but the ATC radar displays only show 100 foot increments anyway.
Thank you for your service, Captain Denari. Similar experience here, in the civilian sector though. 32+ year ATC (retired) and current ATC instructor at one of the world’s busiest towers. Great explanation and excellent narrative. I agree 100% with your assessment.
At the risk of being pedantic, if either pilot had seen the aircraft they hit, they wouldn’t have hit it. Unfortunately, there was a readily available wrong aircraft to see on the runway 1 final, and that’s the most likely explanation. There is always a risk of that with visual separation - this isn’t the first time such confusion has occurred. It usually works out better, though.
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Scott, I concur with your assessment. The mishap investigation will highlight two (2) primary causal factors in this tragic, pilot error mishap – one (1), acute spatial disorientation (seeing the wrong acft. and not seeing the one they impacted), and two (2), poor situational awareness.
Given what happened, I can only speculate that the IP didn’t see the CRJ and felt they had adequate “visual separation” from the acft. or object he did see.
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I would bet dollars to donuts on this. Especially since it seems that the information about the aircraft circling was stepped on. When the controller asked if the helicopter had the original sight when the conflict alert went off, the helicopter reported it did. They saw an aircraft where they thought they’d see one.
I have 15 years of experience at a tower and I have probably have had over a couple dozen times where I noticed the pilot might have the wrong aircraft in sight (getting too close, cutting off the guy they are supposed to follow, etc). When I see this occur I restate where the aircraft is and ask if they have that one in sight.
For this situation the controller asked if the helicopter had the CRJ in sight. The pilot saw aircraft #2 on a straight in and assumed it was the CRJ. The whole situation could have been avoided had the controller simply said “off your left” when he asked. He did nothing wrong by not saying such and all indications from the helo told him the situation was managed. Tragic comedy of errors.
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I was a center controller, never tower, but when I saw that radar replay with the CA going off I would have directed a left turn even if they said it was in sight - that wasn’t looking good at all Having said that (and it was just my personal reaction) the tower controller heard the magic words twice and would have expected that the conflict was resolved - twice. Hard to fault him, really - he identified the potential issue when they were miles apart, took action, and thought it was fixed. Why wouldn’t he?
And despite all the “accident waiting to happen” hyperventilating, they’ve been running those routes for 25 years. The fact that ATC needs to identify and resolve conflicts is why we have ATC in the first place. Wait until they find out that en route aircraft sometimes converge at crossing points and need to turn or change altitude…
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Agreed but pass behind can’t be accomplished without turning left so I would think it would be assumed in the instruction.
All he needed was visual separation to even saying pass behind was extra.
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Understood, but “turn 30 degrees left” fixes the conflict whether they see the right aircraft or not.
One of my OJT “rules to control by” was “You’re not done when you tell a pilot what to do - you’re done when they do it.” The whole idea of control instructions is to produce an observable change in aircraft behavior - in this case, the controller expected the initial “maintain visual” instruction to result in a ground track that separated the two aircraft. That didn’t happen, so he tried again - still hoping for a change in ground track, no? But by leaving the separation entirely to the pilot, you don’t know exactly what they’re going to do, even if you know exactly what they need to do. By the time the CA is going off, what I’d want to ensure is a very specific and observable left turn. Might as well make that the instruction instead of pure visual or “pass behind.” But that’s radar thinking…
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Maybe this is the difference between center environment and tower then because helicopters having visuals and passing 1/8th of a mile or less behind is super common and the targets still merge on the scope. Either we appreciate the convo 
If you’re practicing hauling VIPs out of DC to secure undisclosed locations, trying to do it in North Dakota doesn’t work real well.
Yup. At its basic cause, it’s pretty straightforward. What we want to do about the operational context is where the discussions will occur.
There were MLAT tracks for the helicopter, which is where the flight path information everyone has been using came from. Also is responsible for the odd discontinuities in the flight path data. MLAT triangulates Mode S, ergo Mode S was on. Here’s corroboration from a USA Today article, though:
“However, the helicopter was not broadcasting ADS-B and was broadcasting only Mode S, a secondary surveillance and communication system.
ADSBexchange was able to triangulate the flight path of the helicopter using multilateration (MLAT). was able to triangulate the flight path of the helicopter using multilateration (MLAT).”
Ummm….that may be how ADS-B Exchange was tracking it, but FAA was using transponder data from the DCA and ADW ASRs. FAA does use multilateration in very limited scenarios, but not this one.
It’s also somewhat common to get “bad hits” in areas near airports. Radar interrogations and replies can bounce off large metal expanses like hangars and produce false targets. That may have happened here.
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This is a great discussion. As a Canadian private pilot only i am not very famiar with all the technical acronyms and abbreviations. However, i think the route cause and key to frequent repetition of this collision is much simpler and can be summed up as “you can’t go that way”. There is plenty of other geography and safer approaches to the base. Its crazy to rely on routes and procedures that have no margin of error. As for it being classified, when a helicopter passes 2-300 hundred feet overhead it’s not a secret to anyone ! Don’t rely on the infallability people or systems. Take another route.
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Thanks, Raf.
I think all are overlooking the “WHY?” behind this disaster.
Fears of Cold War nuclear attack on Washington, D.C., led to the creation of “escape plans” for government officials, including Congress, to relocate to secure facilities like Mount Weather. This was part of the U.S. government’s “Continuity of Government” (COG) program, which aimed to ensure the survival and functionality of the government in the event of a catastrophic attack.
Those plans are just fine, but the necessary practice of flying helicopters near DCA should have included suspending simultaneous commercial traffic to avoid this accident waiting to happen. Because that would inconvenience congress and others who demand more flights into DCA. (That the same congress who (under)fund the FAA)
Tom: that achilles heel (Congress) has been there f-o-r-E-V-E-R. I’ve watched for it, holding my breath… but turned blue. To date, you’re the first to lay the corpses at the correct door. 
Classified? A training flight? Talk about taking liberties with the rules.
HR 1898: A Start, But Still Missing the Point
After the midair, Congress moved with H.R.1898 – the Military Helicopter Training Safety Act of 2025.
The bill calls for studying whether collision avoidance systems and ADS-B IN should be installed across military helicopters.
It’s a start — but not nearly enough.
The collision wasn’t just about a Black Hawk with ADS-B OUT turned off.
It was the result of a system that had been broken for years.
Route 4 at DCA forced helicopters under Runway 33’s final without proper vertical or lateral separation — and with no real wake turbulence protection.
Controllers and pilots kept it working, but they were holding together a flawed setup, made worse by military and civilian traffic split across separate frequencies, with situational awareness hanging by a thread.
Situational awareness isn’t a buzzword — it’s the 3D mental picture every pilot and controller relies on: who’s out there, where they are, and what’s moving where.
The night of the crash, that picture collapsed — and when it did, there was no backup.
ADS-B matters, but it’s only one piece.
The real fixes have to go deeper:
H.R.1898 touches the technology, but not the structure.
Until the airspace and the way we manage it are rebuilt, we’re still flying on borrowed time.
It wasn’t just one helicopter that went unseen that night.
It was a system that had been deficient for years — and unless the deeper problems get fixed, it’s only a matter of time before it happens again.
I’m well aware ATC doesn’t use MLAT, I was replying to the previous post requesting a source stating the 60’s Mode S was on, which it had to be if MLAT was possible. And most of the visuals in the news reports and YouTube videos used the MLAT data because that’s what was openly available at the time.
The helicopter routes around Washington are largely based on following rivers and freeways for both ease of navigation and noise abatement. They’re also used by police and medevac helicopters among others to reach local hospitals. “Make them go somewhere else” may be the final outcome of this, but I don’t think the current setup was insane: we have ATC because sometimes aircraft conflict with each other. If you want a system with no potential conflicts, that’s a very unlikely place to get to. Having said that, there are certainly situations that can be unnecessarily dangerous and need to be changed to something else, or procedures altered to make safe resolution more certain. We may decide this is one of those - but that’s essentially a value judgment, not some obvious no-brainer outcome. This controller was not overloaded, he correctly identified the potential issue, and believed it had been resolved. He had no way of knowing that the pilots saw the wrong aircraft. That’s a problem with visual separation that can occur anywhere, not just DCA -but if we eliminate visual separation to prevent it, that’s a mammoth change in the way the system works that will have significant operational impact. So should we do it, or accept the risk of errors? These things are all tradeoffs. Some are worth it, some aren’t. The DCA operation may end up on the “not worth it” side.
Thanks Rick. What you are saying makes sense. Mode-S is an older transponder system compared to ADSB-out I believe. And maybe the 60 pilots cant turn it off easily. So according to the Army response, why is the helicopter’s ADSB position data classified, but the Mode-S not? I think what the Army really said was that the training mission was classified. Although they recently told reporters what the mission was, So was it really classified?
The whole situation was based on an insane procedure if expecting it to provide always separation. When separation is based on whether the copter will fly on one side or the other of a river bank and have additionally 200 feet or so vertically below the other traffic and at night, that will eventually fail to provide. And the jets on circling approaches, no glide slope, who’s to say that they, absence knowledge of and visual with the copter traffic, not be dragging it in some below papis or vasis. Just can’t be expected to work except by luck. If you ain’t got “green between”, counting on that skinny altitude is crazy. And good luck to the copter that it doesn’t roll inverted as it passes close behind and one/two hundred feet under the jet. It worked, and credit to those who made it work…until it didn’t work. I’m sure luck and the big sky theory prevailed many times until…