As The Investigation Starts, Should Flight Patterns At Reagan Be Changed?

Photo: AFP

The NTSB is now looking for clues into why Wednesday night’s collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines jet occurred just outside of Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, killing all 67 people on the two aircraft. The black boxes have been recovered from the plane wreckage, and new cell phone video of the collision seems to indicate that nobody on either aircraft knew what was coming. It may be a while, however, before enough evidence is recovered from the murky water of the Potomac River to provide investigators with a definitive cause. ABC World News aviation expert John Nance appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to reiterate what he said only 24 hours earlier- it’s still too early to know for certain what happened.

As Nance told host Larry Mendte: “We’re uncovering a number of things, including go-arounds, a number of them that have happened as a result of pilots seeing a helicopter traversing left to right, right under them. It’s time to take a look at the policies that led to the creation of these corridors for low-flying helicopters who should be at or below 200 feet, at least that’s the way it looks right now. We’ve got two issues with respect to those corridors; first of all, are they placed correctly, and second, should they be there at all.”

Still, Nance says the cues we have so far would point logically toward human error. “I think that is one of the operative points here in the investigation. Certainly, these pilots of the Black Hawk would not have purposefully aimed at an inbound jet liner. So, when they said they had the traffic, they’re either lying or they’ve got the wrong one. Now, I would not expect these guys to lie… so you’re left with the reality that they probably saw something other than the inbound jet liner and were fixated on that and thought they were passing behind it when they actually intersected the flight path of the jet.”

Photo Credit: Getty Images


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