April 4
Section 352 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) allows the military to turn off ADS-B for certain reasons but it’s still unclear how often the military uses its authority to turn off ADS-B or how those decisions are coordinated in busy airspace like DCA. If ATC didn’t know the Black Hawk was coming, that’s a serious gap.
National security matters, but so does public safety. Maybe the rule doesn’t need to be scrapped, but it’s probably time for Congress to take a closer look at how these exemptions are managed, especially where military and civilian traffic overlap.
1 reply
April 4
▶ Raf
Raf, I fly the DC airspace out of KVKX which is inside the FRZ. A lot of times I can traffic calls from ATC for military traffic inside the FRZ and SFRA that I can see on ADS-B. Lately that has changed a bit and more of those ircraft are showing up. But yeah, baring an actually national security mission, they all should be running ADS-B live.
1 reply
April 4
▶ KeivnR
“But yeah, baring an actually national security mission, they all should be running ADS-B live.” I agree. The other point would be for all to be on the same freq.
1 reply
April 4
▶ Raf
As I said in a previous blog, I once flew a RAF Bulldog over the top of MCO using its UHF radio. I was amazed at how quiet the frequency was despite seeing lots of traffic flying in and out.
The DCA airliner didn’t have UHF so all they knew was that the tower was talking to a helicopter and they may not have even known the Army crew stated they ‘had’ the traffic (which they obviously didn’t). So between ADS-B ‘out’ being turned off on the helicopter and not having any ability to see ‘in’ traffic, the whole situation hinged on the helicopter seeing and avoiding the airliner and that failed. Even if the active ‘out’ function was off, the passive ‘in’ function could have alerted them to the position of the airliner. If ever there was a Keystone Kops aviation episode comedy of errors, this one – sadly – was it.
1 reply
April 9
▶ Larry_S
I think we can all agree that every army training flight should have ADS-B activated.
