74 points | by js214 hours ago
Hire more controllers? Sure, maybe, but I can't help but think this was very avoidable using technology and training.
> Traffic just south of the Woodrow Bridge, a CRJ, it's 1,200 feet setting up for Runway 33.
Subsequent communications in the following minute from both parties were not specific.
That practice is plainly asking for an accident to happen.
The ATC for the Reagan crash did not indicate a relative or absolute position, only referencing “the CRJ”, which might be hard to identify in the dark, and the helicopter pilot may have assumed he “had visual”, but was looking at a different aircraft.
> Traffic just south of the Woodrow Bridge, a CRJ, it's 1,200 feet setting up for Runway 33.
What happened with this accident is a wake call but nothing will change -- the current administration is interested in destroying institutions, not building them up.
One would hope, but it's a tricky thing to do and it's so much easier to do media performances for your constituents.
TFA mentioned that they tried modernizing way back and it was a failure. To make it succeed would require both adequate funding and good governance -- both currently in short supply.
Ironically, DOGE would be perfect for this role if it did what it says on the tin (the GE part of the name). My spidey sense on that it that it's really about doing a Jack Welch number on disliked organizations. But hey, Welch made GE into the powerhouse it is today so there's hope! /s
If have a feeling it’s what musk will try to do.
Personally I'm in favor of the "Swiss cheese" model of accidents, in which a lot of errors might routinely happen, but they're blocked from leading to an accident by other measures. When however the holes in the cheese line up... boom. There's evidence that there was a culture of accepting near-misses along this route, there's evidence that the training flight ignored best practices, there was a single ATC person managing rotary and fixed wing in that airspace, it was night time, the jet was making an approach to the shorter runway, etc etc.
On any given night one or two of these factors might have lined up, but not all of that. That night however they all lined up, and people died. This notion of failure in depth is the driving force between the total nature of an NTSB investigation, they don't want to find the LAST failure, they want to find ALL of the failures.
Only one on duty? How about 100 agents continually monitoring
It really doesn't.
Is it going to have the critical thinking skills to understand the situation and make the right decision or is it going to just hallucinate some impossible answer and get people killed?
I’m not saying human controllers don’t make mistakes but this should be one of the last areas to fully automate.
< Let it direct airplanes
- there was a similar incident just the day before where a helicopter's path came close to a similar plane. It was high enough, so the plane received the TCAS (traffic alert/collision avoidance) 'resolution advisory' warning and made the proper actions.
- warnings from TCAS are inhibited under 1000ft because they would be full of false/nuisance warnings that close to the ground and potentially suggest unsafe evasive maneuvers.
- the helicopter was following a designated route along the river as the general guide
- the helicopter went a bit higher than the designated ceiling (and that probably happens pretty often).
- the incoming airplane was following the 'glideslope' of the 'instrument landing system'
- the helicopter crew may have been wearing night vision goggles. such goggles can affect ability to see periphery. Also, nighttime lights of a city can appear bright and distracting.
- the helicopter crew of 3 may have been less than other similar flights
- airplane was initially looking to land on the longer runway #1 but was asked by the ATC to use #33 instead (their smaller plane could use it fine). They take awhile considering it and then accept it. They had to slightly change the angle of their approach. This may have been a choice to simplify the workload for the ATC controller.
- There was one controller handling both the plane and helicopter traffic and one left earlier
- the plane and atc use VHF to communicate while the military helicopter uses UHF, thus, the plane had no awareness of any communications with the helicopter
- the ATC mentions the presence of the plane to the helicopter. the helicopter says they see them and request "visual separation" which is basically 'we can see them, so we can move around them accordingly'
So, it's possible the helicopter was looking at a different plane/set of lights when they mentioned that they had them in sight. Another plane had just taken off from runway 1. It's also possible that they saw the CRJ plane and just misjudged its location (maybe due to the turn they were making for the alignment to land?).
As for systems issues, it seems there's no way for ATC to know just which plane a helicopter (or other plane) is referring to when they 'confirm' seeing it.
It's interesting to note that some airlines actually forbid "visual separation" at nighttime due to the safety concerns (misidentifications, conflicting city lights, human perception). (eg, KLM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rdapQfJDAM)) US ATC might prefer visual separation which means that planes can be closer together in lining up to land whereas an instrument approach means a bigger gap. (More planes landing means more money for airports?)
It seems like the 'glidescope' area when landing should be treated like a 3d extension of the runway -- keep planes and craft out of it during a plane's landing. Anything crossing into it should be treated like a "runway incursion" (which is also clearly a problem that the US needs to fix...In someways, this crash might be seen as an extension of that issue?)
There needs to be a way to verify just which planes a craft is "confirming visual' of - especially at night.
>>>Facing pressure to diversify an overwhelmingly white workforce, the FAA began using a biographical test as a first screen of candidates. Minority candidates were fed “buzz words” to bump their resumes up to top priority. Apparently saying your worst subject in school was science served as a golden ticket. Correct answers to the take-home biographical questionnaire were given in their entirety. These questionnaires were later banned. This was dumb, but it’s not the problem.<<<
Ok, besides the fact that this, along with the evidence that the magic keywords were given in secret to special groups, is blatantly illegal, after they banned it, what did the criteria become? What is the criteria today?
Did they switch to a primarily merit/skills based assessment of candidates? Did they lower standards and if so, by how much? Have they tracked their assessment performance against real-world performance across the ATC pool?
Just getting into training doesn't mean you get to be a controller, you get tested a lot and hard with very representative work (a close relative failed this actually), and only get to be an ATC if you pass well enough.
I think maybe you misread the article, because it explicitly says "Note that leaving behind qualified applicants from Collegiate Training isn’t why we don’t have more controllers"
Have they lowered the standards to get through ATC school? What is the truth?
Just asking so I have ammunition against right-wing arguments.
> The list is on the last page of this document: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Vi9dDtZvbwHDafrygRG... It looks like it's a page that was photocopied from a book about how to write a resume. It's a list of dozens of incredibly generic verbs like "manage", "analyze", "administer", "make", "improve", "design", etc. pretty much any resume will have at least some of these verbs.
So it's not a secret code, but rather "tailor your CV for the job, ok?"
What else did they think was a good idea?
RONALD REAGAN AIRPORT has a disaster because of decades-long crisis of too few air-traffic controllers available?
Reagan fired thousands upon thousands of ATC because they dared to ask for proper wages.
That seems like an odd place to put his name.
(oh and this had nothing to do with DEI, just like all attacks on DEI are ridiculous and just people being trolls for entertainment)
There's probably also something there about the fact that the plane was a Canadian one (Bombardier) whose name means "the guy releasing the bombs in a bomber". And also, the Bombardier company was started by a guy just trying to get people around (mass transit) in the winter time (via the first good snowmobiles B7, B12 - powered by american-made engines from Ford/Chrysler). And the helicopter was from a US company started by a Russian immigrant (Sikorsky) who immigrated to the US to escape the Russian Revolution after making bombers (that hold bombardiers) in WW1. And the helicopter crashed into a river, Potomac, named after the Algonquian word for a native american city and was itself named after a native american war chief (Black Hawk) that fought alongside the Canadians/British in the war of 1812 (where the white house and capitol were set on fire) to "push away white settlers". The helicopter left a fort (Fort Belvoir) named after a former slave plantation. The airfield it departed was named after a WW2 aviation engineer (Davison) and where Army One, the helicopter that carried Eisenhower, used to be based. In addition to the Black Hawks, the airfield is also home to 4 cessnas used in civilian air patrol - made in Wichita.
After the workers disobeyed a Federal judge's orders to return to work, they were fired.
EDIT: It's so funny that if you make any comment that doesn't tow the left wing narrative here on HN you're down voted. I'm not right or left, but find it kinda sad.
Because the remainder and future employment prospects for ATC simply looked at how they were treated and how they had absolutely no options and decided to NOPE NOPE out of that profession.
And so here we are:
naming airports after people whose actions eventually led to the specific reasons for the disaster
> An FAA employee and then-president of the NBCFAE's Washington Suburban chapter, provided NBCFAE members with "buzz words" in January 2014 that would automatically push their resumes to the tops of HR files.
It's true that this person said that in the email, but if you actually look at the list of buzzwords, it's clear that this person was bullshitting and inflating his own importance (or maybe just fundamentally misunderstanding something). The list is on the last page of this document: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Vi9dDtZvbwHDafrygRG... It looks like it's a page that was photocopied from a book about how to write a resume. It's a list of dozens of incredibly generic verbs like "manage", "analyze", "administer", "make", "improve", "design", etc. pretty much any resume will have at least some of these verbs. There's just no way you could build a system that would use these verbs to secretly screen in resumes of people who are in the know because everyone uses these verbs. A far more plausible explanation is that this guy was trying to make himself sound more powerful than eh really was.
The email this person sent is awful, but it seems to be one person's very misguided attempt to push an agenda, not some sort of secret plot by FAA.
Later and probably most egregiously, there was a completely nonsensical and arbitrary biographical questionnaire which was scored like:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.182...
15. The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
A. SCIENCE (+15)
B. MATH (0)
C. ENGLISH (0)
D. HISTORY/SOCIAL SCIENCES (0)
E. PHYSICAL EDUCATION (0)
16. Of the following, the college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
A. SCIENCE (0)
B. MATH (0)
C. ENGLISH (0)
D. HISTORY/POLITICAL SCIENCE (+15)
E. DID NOT ATTEND COLLEGE (0)
29. My peers would probably say that having someone criticize my performance (i.e. point out a mistake) bothers me:
A. MUCH LESS THAN MOST (+8)
B. SOMEWHAT LESS THAN MOST (+4)
C. ABOUT THE SAME AS MOST (+8)
D. SOMEWHAT MORE THAN MOST (0)
E. MUCH MORE THAN MOST (+10)
Look at questions 29 and 33. The first (about whether negative feedback bothers you) is a plausible question but the grading is completely nonsensical. The second question, about art/dance classes you took in college, is nonsensical both as to the question and the answers. These seem obviously designed to be gamed with secret information.
This was used as a mandatory screen for several years. The FAA didn’t fix it, Congress found out and banned it. How many people at the FAA saw this and green lighted it?
My interpretation is that this was not "obviously designed to be gamed with secret information", it was just bad methodology. They had a goal of screening out 70% of applicants, but the remaining 30% of applicants needed to have a demographic balance that would not constitute a disparate impact, and they had to do this in a legally defensible way. Working backwards from that goal, they took biographical data that they had collected in the 80s and 90s and constructed a test program that, they believed, would give them the result they wanted. So if the answer weights are logically nonsensical, it's not because they were building in a secret password, it's because that's what happens when you build a model that's overfit on a small number of datapoints.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.182...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/139/24/brigida-...
1) was designed to statistically select for members of favored identity groups and against members of disfavored identity groups, and not in any way to measure ATC job aptitude, resulting in highly-scored questions like "The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was" where the only correct answer was "Science", and failing the test disqualified you permanently
and
2) current FAA employees distributed the exact answer key to outside racial identity organizations to give to their members
If you have another source for how the assessment was actually graded, I'd love to see it, but as far as I can tell, these claims are coming from a guy who seemed to just be making stuff up.
Two things can be true at once:
A) Diversity hiring is unrelated to the crash
B) There is a real scandal with hiring and the FAA
What I have read so far about this situation is outrageous. My understanding is that in 2014, Obama appointed a head of the FAA who wanted to diversify the workforce.
They introduced a biographical questionnaire which had rather arbitrary criteria for passing. It appears to have been explicitly designed to fail people that do not know the magical answers. The failure rate was 90%.
This is not the only example, but perhaps the most egregious questions: you are asked what your best subject was in highschool. If you answered science, you get 15 points (a substantial amount). No points for any other subject. Next, you're asked your best subject in college. If you answer history, you get 15 points. No points for any other subject.
Here is an alleged recreation of the test: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
There are supposedly voicemails in which they helped select candidates pass this biographical questionnaire by providing their preferred race/gendered candidates with the answers. I haven't been able to find a voice mail online, but Fox Business reported that these voicemails exist.
Per a 2016 Yahoo Finance article, an internal FAA report falsely cleared the employee of wrongdoing.
It's my understanding that there is currently a lawsuit making its way through the courts regarding this. It's also my understanding that some allege that the problems are not all resolved yet with hiring, despite the questionnaire being withdrawn in 2018. I'm not sure of the specifics of how there may still be problems with hiring and the FAA.
That was 7 years ago.
Anybody who was involved in this obviously has severely compromised judgment. Who can trust anything else they did?
They wanted to create a process that would not lead to disparate impacts, but would also give them competent controllers. So they took the biographical data that they had collected in the 80s and 90s and constructed a test such that the output of the test would give them the result that they wanted. This is clearly dumb, and they ended up with a model that was overfit to the old data and didn't generalize (or even make much logical sense). Likely there were a tiny number of black controllers when they gathered the biographical data, so those few data points, and their idiosyncrasies, had a large impact on the answer weights that they generated, making the model weird and pretty nonsensical.
It's not a conspiracy, it's just bad methodology in service of a dubious goal.
"OIG reviewed official government emails for the period January 2013 to July 2015 and did not identify any additional matters or information of specific interest to this investigation.
AEO-500’s ROI Case Number AHQ20150170 did not develop information that demonstrated HR employees gave improper advantages in processing the applications of ATCS candidates affiliated with the NBCFAE. A review of the ROI did not identify any issues that warranted additional review in this investigation.
The findings in this investigation did not warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor."
What exactly makes 'diverse' candidates more likely to answer 'science' and then 'history' on those questions? Are you saying there was a conspiracy to create hard to answer questions on the test and then give out the answers to diversity candidates?
Occam's razor says this was a bullshit 'behavioral' test that meant nothing but disqualified a lot of candidates, and someone who knew that gave others a way to bypass it to get their foot in the door in one instance.
A corollary to this: people who don't have expertise in any field might never realize this, and will believe whatever Reddit (or HN, Twitter, etc) tells them that matches their previous-held beliefs.
I recommend people become technically proficient at at least one thing in their lives. It gives you an anchor to reality (you can easily recognize bullshit), and it will cure you of the illusion that most people know what they're talking about.
Then the rest go around repeating it ad nauseam.
The reality is that most of this either had no effect or not enough time to have an effect, but whether it has bite politically remains to be seen. My view on it is that it's an explicit attempt to use Trump's own tactics against him.
From what information is currently available, the actual investigation will likely blame pilot error on the part of the helicopter pilot, but also decades-old systemic problems with ATC understaffing, crowded and awkward airspace at DCA squeezed too much by increased traffic and no-fly zones, and years of "accepted practice" that normalized an unnecessarily dangerous situation, all of which are solidly bipartisan problems. (The Philadelphia crash I haven't read much about; I would guess it probably won't have as much in the way of broadly applicable takeaways for the aviation system, but it coming in such quick succession certainly helps build narratives.)
Still I'd have to say the narrative I outlined above is more of an attempt to hang the crash around his neck than something that reflects the truth particularly well. Of course Trump for his part as always immediately tried to hang it around Biden's and Obama's necks (neatly skipping over his own prior administration) with no evidence, so turnabout is fair play. Now, whether the Muskification of the whole government will be the cause of problems going forward, that's another story.
I was writing something here about having great confidence in the NTSB to perform a thorough investigation and account for various factors if they're allowed to remain independent and operate without interference... and then I saw a post from the NTSB today that they'll no longer be sending out email to media and instead only posting updates to their Twitter account... so put a lot of emphasis on that "if."
If you don't think that could have had an impact on morale, and therefore attentiveness, I can only wonder if you've never witnessed large-scale layoffs first-hand. They're pretty common in tech. From what I've seen in our industry, first and second hand, almost nobody gets any real work done for several days after getting such an email. The ATCs don't have such luxury, but instead, they continue their life-and-death job with an elevated level of stress.
And we know that one of the ATCs was dismissed early that day. Was it because undue stress, caused by that email, was impacting their performance? If so, will their supervisor be brave enough to say so in public? We don't know. But this is a substantial reason to suspect that the administration's actions could have had a direct impact on the people in that control tower.
[1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2025/01/...
You are supposed to be outraged. You are supposed to think that the 'dumb libs' have no legitimate points, that they only believe 'orange man bad' and therefore everything they say can be completely disregarded.
Stop reading, sit back, and figure out what you think without feeling like you have score points over some imaginary opponent.
[1] https://www.natca.org/2015/12/09/natca-discusses-air-traffic...
These non viable careers include pilots, atc, teaching, and a large portion of the skilled trades and more. While a non viable career path will still have some individuals in the field due to sunk cost, passion, or inertia - a shortage is inevitable.
Supply and demand should rationalize this - but if training is long, wage visibility is low, and sunk cost is high, and negotiation power is low - its entirely possible for a employers to collectively push the prevailing wage below the level which makes the job worth it to enough individuals.
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears...
If suddenly I have to worry about my job security and the possibility of losing a bunch of colleagues and becoming overworked there's no way I'd be able to be all there.
That said, conditions in the ATC facility were likely a contributor, and the overall management and control environment of the FAA created those conditions. Frankly, the Elon stuff is insane, and who knows if the people who approve the overtime, etc exist anymore.
Trump deserves blame for the circus and harm created by his administration’s irresponsibility and recklessness. But he didn’t crash a plane.