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…
Alex Berenson had a great piece on this as he sifted through the BS of the TIMES Article. Bottom line you don’t take the controls over from a DEI superstar.
She was told multiple times to correct altitude and turn away but never responded. With the new Admin we might get the truth in a year with the final NTSB report. But then again truth is what is said. Warren commission and 9/11 report. The USS Liberty investigation report. You get the picture.
But, but, Ukraine needs more money.
Ok, time-out, here. Here is the quote from the New York Times: ADS-B Out was turned off because of “the confidentiality of the mission for which the crew was practicing”.
Calling it “classified” brings in a lot of questions and problems with information quality that are apparently not in play, here. So let’s set that aside.
To quote Reacher, in an investigation, details matter. 
We should also have a lot more discussion about Crew Resource Management. (cockpit comms). All this talk about tech is overlooking the elephant in the room as far as “lessons learned” are concerned.
The Times report does not say it was classified. This story should be corrected.
The ADS-B data itself isn’t classified, it was selected off because it is unclassified altogether and extremely open source. Running ADS-B off and Mode S on is very common with military and law enforcement aircraft so some nerd on ADS-B Stack Exchange can’t piece together their patrol areas or other “patterns of life” for free. They already do that with Taylor Swift, don’t need to add the US military to their list that easy.
That’s why they’d have it off while training for a classified mission. If you’re training to evacuate VIPs during WW3, no reason to let the adversary know your typical routes, times enroute, and particularly destinations for free.
True, MLAT exists, but it takes a little more than a Raspberry Pi and an internet connection to pull that down.
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