¶ Blackhawk Helicopter Crash Analysis
Blackhawk crew members don't really have the critical piece of information to understand that oh, there's an airplane that's not just gonna come straight in here and we're gonna go to the left of them and never cross paths Down runway one, down runway one, and then it's gonna take a hard turn to go into runway three, three and cut right in front of them. And they never heard that critical piece of information.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Going Rogue with Laura Logan. So there was a lot of interest in the crash that happened at DCA Airport between a US Army helicopter Black Hawk helicopter and a civilian aircraft from American Airlines. But there are still a lot of questions about what happened and whenever there's something like this goes on, people have a lot to say about it, especially in the age of social media where anyone can say anything they want, anytime they want any time.
But most people don't know anything close to as much as my guest today, who was driven to speak about this because he actually knew the instructor pilot aboard that aircraft extremely well. He was part of that unit, that was his unit. He was based there for many years and he also knew of the crew chief. He knew the crew chief in passing and he also knew the crew chief and the pilot by reputation.
So we wanted to hear what he was upset about, what was frustrating for him about the coverage, and try to understand more about what could have happened there. So I would like to introduce you to Austin Roth. Austin, welcome. Thank you for making the journey out here to our little corner of flyover country in the great state of Texas. Yeah, on the compound. On the compound. Okay, we got honey here. We've got everything in place. We have the dogs behind the chair, okay, so got, we got honey here.
We got, we've got everything in place. We have, we have the dogs behind the chair. Okay, so we're good to go. Um, austin, tell me, just for for people to understand, uh, why anything you have to say about this um is really relevant, they got to first understand who you are and um and so. So I know that you were in the army for 20 years. I know you were a Black Hawk pilot for 20 years. You were stationed at Fort Belvoir, virginia, which is where that team was stationed, right?
So tell me about the unit and tell me about your role.
So yeah, quick background on myself. I spent eight years in the infantry. After that I switched over to becoming a warrant officer pilot, so I put an application in for that, went to flight school, spent the next 12 years as a Blackhawk pilot Shortly after my first duty station, went back to be an instructor, so I was an instructor. After that I became a standardization instructor pilot, which is like an instructor pilot for instructor pilots.
So that's as you're going. You're basically going up and up and up.
You're pretty good pilot yeah well, I don't know about that, I'll leave that for other people to say. But I'm a pretty.
Uh, I've got all the qualifications, uh, so I'm not everybody, I'm well qualified on, but when you were like when you train the trainers no, not. Not everybody becomes a standard instructor right, I mean that's, and there's different, there's different levels of pilots, which is something I didn't really understand. But you're an instrument evaluator, right, which is one kind of instructor, and then also explain the other two levels.
Yeah. So you've got an instructor pilot which would be instructing kind of everybody at the unit for their. You'd be doing everything from evaluations to initial qualifications on new. You know, if you're going to do, for instance, firefighting, the instructor pilots would usually train that. So if you're going to do unit-specific stuff, they would be the trainers for that primarily.
They're also the trainers of the new guys when they get there from flight school, so we call it progression, so they kind of get them spooled up on that individual unit's SOPs and techniques and all of that stuff Standard operating procedures, Standard operating procedures. So instructor pilots are responsible for that Standardization. Instructor pilots are kind of over the instructor pilots but then also operate as an instructor pilot.
Well, and you also flew in Iraq and Afghanistan in combat.
So I was in Iraq as an infantryman but I flew in Afghanistan in combat as a medevac pilot and what was that like? Number one, it was really rewarding, especially as a former infantry guy, having seen it kind of from the other side.
Yeah, being on the ground, being on the ground, yeah, and having needed medevac before, not for myself but for friends, and so then to be on the other side of it as somebody providing that service, providing that assistance to the people on the ground, especially because you have kind of a good understanding of what they need and when they need it and what you're going to do how it's going to affect them potentially.
You know, if I land in this direction, if I land in that direction, if I wait five minutes, would that maybe be better, would it maybe be worse? And with that background you can kind of develop that picture a little bit better, I think, than some pilots. And so I found it really rewarding. And then also I thought I think I was pretty good at it and certainly found it challenging and yeah, that's.
I wonder if we were in Afghanistan at the same time.
We definitely could have been. I was there 12 and 13.
Yeah, I mean I came in and out in that time and I always remember what it was like being in combat. You know when someone is shot or you've been blown up. Waiting for that, there's nothing quite like seeing that medevac bird in the sky.
Yeah, it's definitely like I said, having seen it from the ground before. Oh my, when you need it, you need it.
Yeah.
Five minutes ago or yesterday.
Yeah, I mean, it's literally life and death at the in that moment. So those guys are like gods to you when you're on the ground. I mean they are right.
But then you get in the unit and it's just normal guys, yeah, and it's just, and you're doing it and your friends are doing it, and it just becomes kind of normalized yeah, well, and so for you.
I mean, who were you with when you were?
deployed. I was with the 101st Airborne Division, so I was with the 50th Medical Company, which became Charlie Company 7101. So 7th Battalion, 101st Aviation.
Okay, and then. But then you went to the 12th Aviation Battalion.
Yeah, so I had a couple of different things I did in between. Then I went down as an instructor to Fort Rucker, I did a tour in Egypt and then from Egypt I went to Fort Belvoir. So my first standardization instructor pilot tour was in Egypt and then after that I went to Fort Belvoir in the same kind of capacity.
Okay, so Fort Belvoir, virginia, 12th Aviation Battalion, is where the crew that was aboard the Black Hawk the day of the crash right, that's where they were from. So tell me what that unit is like and what it's like there.
So it's very unique. It's set up in the way that kind of all the other helicopter battalions are set up, or specifically the Black Hawk battalions are set up in terms of manning and aircraft and all that. What's unique about it is its mission. So there's other VIP Blackhawk units throughout the Army, but at Fort Belvoir you've got an entire battalion, actually an entire brigade that's kind of dedicated to that mission.
And then, as Pete Hegg said, the Secretary of Defense has said the continuity of government mission is another part of what they do.
Continuity of government.
Yeah, meaning if missiles are in the air or if anything bad is happening and certain people in the government have to go to other places, then that would be the continuity of government mission.
So it's not just because continuity of government often comes up when you think of it in terms of changing from one administration to the next, but actually it means all the time.
Yeah, in this context it means all the time, 24 hours a day.
And this was apparently a continuity of the time. 24 hours a day, yeah.
And this was apparently a continuity of government mission. Is that correct?
This particular one was not. It was an evaluation, so it would have been it was a training flight.
Yeah, and it's a little bit of again kind of getting into this the reason why it's so hard to understand, because there's a lot of terms that are used interchangeably different services can use them differently, and so one of those is it was a training flight. So basically, on one piece of paper you might have where it says it's a training flight, and that would be correct, but it was also an evaluation, so it's an evaluation flight as well.
And specifically, this would have been the standardization night vision goggle evaluation. So there's three different evaluations you have to do. That's two of them. The other one would be the instrument evaluation, so an instrument flight evaluation, which is basically the night vision goggle.
one would be what? Basically making sure that you are equipped to and experienced to train to fly that aircraft wearing night vision goggles. That's right.
So every year every pilot in the army is going to go through kind of an annual proficiency check and that's going to be part of that evaluation, the night vision and standardization evaluations. Those are usually done concurrently because if you do it in the most challenging mode of flight, which is at night, then you can count those.
For instance, if you do like an auto rotation where the helicopter is going down as if it doesn't have engine power, or if you're doing a roll-on landing where we bring it in, we actually roll onto the runway Anytime you're doing those things, if you do it at night, because that's more challenging, it counts for a day iteration of it. So you can do basically two evaluations for the price of one, and so that's what they were doing.
And why specifically with night vision? I mean I've worn night vision before. I've looked through them many times on the battlefield. Yeah, I hate them. I mean, I understand the advantage they give you in combat, but they're not easy to wear.
Yeah, so everything. It's really easy to think like, oh, I can't see, I put night vision on, I can see Must be better. Right must be better, but, as you were kind of describing, it's like I actually hate worrying. There's some limitations to them. Like any system, it's got limitations, and so what you're really evaluating is how do they operate when they've got some of those limitations? One of the limitations that night vision gives you is that you can only see 40 degrees Right.
So normal human eyesight you can see about 160 degrees give or take. So it's that peripheral vision that you lose, so you lose almost all of your peripheral vision and then you've got night vision on your face and you can see. We always describe it as if you look through a toilet paper roll. That's about the same kind of field of view as you would have.
But then everything's greeny Grainy, sorry, greeny Greeny is a combination of grainy and greeny.
Yeah, that's actually, it's an official term. I I'm going to submit that to the Army see if they can get that.
Into the training manuals.
Yeah, and actually in this case it might have not been greeny yeah, because they were likely using white phosphor, which means that it was white night vision, which has its own benefits and its own limitations.
Okay, so with white, does it impact how you see light?
It does, and there's arguments about why you would use different colors and what the kind of cost benefit is. Probably the biggest reason to use white phosphor is it is easier to see in really dark environments, and so if I was going back to Afghanistan, for instance, I would want white phosphor on, because you've been there before.
It is dark, dark in some places in Afghanistan it's an electricity in as much of the country, as there is in the US, but that doesn't really apply at DCA.
It doesn't, but you have to keep in mind that this is still Army equipment and so that's part of the Army procurement process. So if the Army in total is going to white phosphor, night vision goggles, then you're just going to end up with a white phosphor night vision at some point.
Yeah, it's not going to be your choice.
That's right. Yeah, it's not going to be your choice, that's right. Yeah, it's not going to be your choice. It's not going to be the unit's choice necessarily. You just get what they get because the Army is moving to that as their one type of night vision.
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¶ Pilot Command Evaluation Insights
So you know, the NTSB is very cautious, probably as they should be, and they said that there's no, this was a night vision goggle training flight. But they're not confirming that the crew was actually wearing night vision at the time.
So I think they've done an update. Well, number one they actually said, hey, there's three types of evaluations. They actually said it incorrectly. I think that they said one was the annual. They're all annual evaluations, but then they omitted either night vision or stands I can't remember standardization. They omitted one of those. I'm sure they'll figure that out and then the final report will be correct. Um, but I think later on they did do an update to that when they released it initially.
Um, and I kind of knew the whole time hey, what they need to be looking for is when we put the night vision on, we use the term aided and unaided, aided being when you've got your night vision on. And so, because they do have access to the cockpit audio, they were saying that there's nothing that they've been able to kind of forensically go through and see whether or not they had them on for sure, just because of how violent the crash was. But I knew kind of the whole time.
Hey, what they're going to hear is they're going to hear aided. They're right front's aided, meaning the pilot on the right front of the aircraft, left front's aided, right rear's aided. That would mean them putting their night vision on.
And then if you don't hear them say unaided, then you have to assume that they'd still be on, because from a training standpoint, that's what you'd expect people to do, and I think what they've come out and said is that they heard them say aided on the tape, meaning they put the night vision on, but they never heard them say unaided so their working assumption is that they had night vision on yeah, that would be my assumption as well okay, so there were the crew on the Black Hawk.
There were three people. Let's go through them because you know them. Just explain, if you will like, how well you know them and sort of what that means to you.
Yeah, so Andrew Eaves, the pilot command and instructor pilot of the aircraft, knew him extremely well, so I was there from 2020 until 2023. He got there just a few months before I did. As a matter of fact, the guy that replaced me in Egypt Did Andrew's initial qualification. So when he first got to the unit he did his initial training.
We were trading pictures the other day Because he had a picture from when Andrew completed his initial training qualification at the at the unit and then he replaced me and then I went there. So I was only a few months behind Andrew from when he got to the unit, um, and then he replaced me and then I went there. So I was only a few months behind Andrew from when he got to the unit and then he left a few months before.
I did three years as kind of a normal rotation at army bases, um, and so three years later he left, which was just before I retired Um, but we were together and COVID in that in that unit we had to spend kind of more time isolated together because of the nature of the VIP mission, all this other stuff, so you'd kind of be stuck in a room with just your crew, a lot, and so we spent a lot of time locked in a room together with just me and him and a crew chief, and then, you know, also going out
and doing training, doing different evaluations, doing different missions. Probably the most high profile mission that that unit has flown certainly was high profile and that I flew he was my co-pilot for and I was the air mission commander for that with a flight of four Blackhawks and the secretary of defense, and so he was hugely trusted in the unit, even as a co-pilot, and then later on became a pilot in command. I did part of his pilot command evaluation.
So when you evaluated him, how did he do? He did great.
Yeah, I was kind of well known for, actually, one of my former crew chiefs from Egypt. I hope he sees this because he'll get a kick out of it. He started I have an alter ego when I'm doing pilot command evaluations and he started calling me Dallas Wrath.
Why? Because you're so harsh so instead of Austin.
Dallas instead of Roth, wrath, why? Because you're so harsh. So instead of Austin.
Dallas yeah.
Instead of Roth Wrath, because on annual evaluations I was I was going to be very straightforward. On pilot command evaluations, you were going to get put through the ringer.
You were ruthless, I was ruthless, and so on pilot command evaluations, dallas Wrath came out and I was going to find it because part of it is you want to find where the, you want to find where the chinks in the armor are Sure, right, and so if you don't really put them through the ringer, um, you're not going to see those necessarily, and it could be something where they get it wrong this time. It's not something that, um, they necessarily have to.
There's probably something they've never seen before, but now they've got the necessary kind of knowledge and they can go. Oh yeah, I do remember I've seen this before and it's not something that anybody else has ever done to them, and you can find that out in evaluation. And now they've got the experience that they need to get it right sometime later on down the line.
Sure, You're not supposed to be Miss Congeniality.
Yeah, so for me, pilot command evaluations again an annual evaluation, a little bit different person Pilot command evaluations it was going to get pretty exciting for the person being evaluated. What would you do Everything from? Because for the Army it really starts with the mission planning process, with the briefing process, and so they're even going through and doing briefings.
And if they did not have every T-cross, every I-dotted, everything kind of perfect, they were going to get torn up and it would have to be pretty close to perfect.
For me, to kind of let them through it. So how did Andrew do?
Andrew did great. Yeah, I was actually reviewing some texts that we had from where he was, you know I was sending him what route I wanted him to fly, where I wanted him to go, what times I wanted certain things to happen, and he's asking all the right questions and, yeah, in terms of how he did, honestly maybe the best of pilot command evaluations I've given, if not right up at the very top.
And not because he was your friend.
No no. So, no, we were friends in a sense, but at the end of the day, I've still, positionally, was in a place where we were friends, but we weren't that good of friends, you know, when it comes to stuff like that. I was responsible for making sure that Chris operated safely and efficiently and all of that and that far surpassed any you know kind of friendliness. Or being friends that we had who's a better pilot Me or Andrew, yeah, friendliness.
Or being friends that we had who's a better pilot Me or Andrew? Yeah, man Well, I'll put this out. If I had to have, if when I was a co-pilot because I have to compare myself to him when he was a co-pilot or when he was a pilot in command I would pick Andrew, just again like reviewing some of those texts, and he's like, hey, can I pick this up? I know you guys are on duty Days where he wasn't on duty. Hey, I saw you're on duty. You want me to go pick your guys gear up, your crews gear up.
This guy would bake birthday cakes for people that were having birthdays. He would, and that's just not. That's not directly pilot related, but just in terms of kind of how far above and beyond Committed he was yeah, that's a great word for it how committed he was to the organization, to the unit, to his job. The other thing was he was far better at one thing in particular, not that I was bad at it.
So standardization instructor pilots and instructor pilots we're a little bit like a human light that comes on when there's cockroaches out, because people know that when we're around, the other pilots know that we're gonna ask them questions or we might hear them talking about something, and then all of a sudden our ears perk and we're like hold on a second. That's not right.
Yeah.
And nobody wants to kind of be picked on, so to speak. I didn't think it was picking on them, but people feel that way sometimes, and so what happens is you walk into a room and a lot of times the new pilots or newer pilots will scatter and disappear, and so I tried to avoid doing that myself. I spent a lot of time in the we call it the stands shop, but where the instructor pilots and the standardization pilots are. You know, I wanted to.
You know I wanted to be their friends because I wanted to know what they knew. And you give more information. You mentor people more if they're your friends. More information, you mentor people more if they're your friends. So I wanted to do that. But I think Andrew is even better at it. If I walked out into the planning kind of room that we had there, there would be certain people that might kind of disappear.
He was not going to be one of them and he would definitely be one of the people that was in stands with the instructor pilots asking us questions. Again, just reviewing those texts, I was like I would have never asked, like, hey, you want to pick up your gear? And again, he was just doing it to pitch in, so I'd probably pick him over me. You know when we're at the same kind of point in our careers.
Yes, yes, I see what you mean. It makes you feel sad because he was, obviously was just a great guy. Yeah, he was, so that's. Then it must be hard to see people judging him without really knowing or understanding what happened.
Yeah, so it was really hard, I think. Initially, I think most pilots are willing to kind of withhold judgment. The digital age has changed that a little bit because everybody's opinion can be so kind of amplified and they are so easy to put your opinion out there. But crashes that I'd seen in the past.
This wasn't really as much of a problem and then I was perfectly willing to just kind of sit back and like, let's let the investigation play out, let's just kind of let the information get out through the normal channels, because it can be really complicated about how these things happen. And then I started seeing online comments. You know, like these incompetent army pilots went out there and killed a bunch of people, or it's obvious what happened.
You know they were off on altitude and that's how everybody got killed. They should have been at their altitude and they weren't off on their altitude. They were off on altitude and that's how everybody got killed. They should have been at their altitude, they weren't off on their altitude. Um or um, even outside of the online stuff, I think, um, there were two specific instances.
Unfortunately, president Trump said something which, um, focusing on the DEI aspect of it, um, and I think it's like a lot of things president Trump says, um, like a lot of things President Trump says saying this as a Trump supporter where if you peel it down, you can go. Okay, there's a kernel of truth to that. But as soon as you say something, you kind of draw attention to it and not knowing the specifics of it. In this specific instance, I don't think that applies.
Looking back at Rebecca Lobach, talking to friends of her, I know her commander very well. I know people that have trained her very well and she was the pilot she was the pilot being evaluated and then there was also a lot of comments about her specifically, a lot of, just frankly kind of crazy conspiracy type stuff.
Yeah, because she was a woman, because she'd been a, a White House social aid things like that, and there was a lot of misinformation even about what that job is and about what she was doing, kind of in that capacity, and so it kind of put this spotlight on her.
That I didn't think was fair and it was causing real damage to people that I knew in the unit, that knew her, that knew it wasn't fair but couldn't speak out because they're still in the military and I'm retired and I don't know her family.
I've never, never met her family, but I can put you know, I was thinking about what, how my family would have felt if I were in her situation or vice versa, and at some point I just couldn't do nothing anymore to see friends and you know people that I could, I could relate to their position pretty well just kind of being drug through the mud in a way that I thought was unfair.
Well, I mean, yeah, you just lost a family member, right? Somebody that you love and respect. I mean, even if they made a mistake, you want the reporting on that to be honest and to be right. I mean, maybe she didn't make a mistake, but when people jump to conclusions without really knowing anything, that can be brutal.
¶ Formation of Opinions and Misinformation
Well, and every bit of information has kind of come out subsequently, which, unfortunately what happens is when it first comes out. Everything is in the media. Everybody's paying a lot of attention to it. They're kind of laser focused on it.
Yeah, that's. You know when that light happens and the news cycle is consumed with that event.
And they're forming their opinions at that point?
Yes, Because that's when most people are hearing about it and talking about it, and thinking about it.
That's right and then over time the interest starts to wane Absolutely. You know, unless you're directly related to the situation, then the interest kind of goes down. But your opinion? Was formed here when you didn't have as much information. And now the information is coming out, but your interest is dropping off.
Yeah, it reminds me of when they came out right after the Orlando nightclub shooting, which was that gay nightclub that was shot up and they dragged a guy out and put him on television and said he was the gay lover of the shooter, and all this stuff. And, of course, a few weeks later, when the FBI said, no, this guy never even met the shooter, had nothing to do with him, never communicated him. None of that is true. In fact, it wasn't even an attack that was motivated by what they said.
It was a terrorist attack.
Yeah, but unfortunately those opinions are there and if you talk to some people 10 years after that incident they would still have that same opinion Like oh yeah, I thought there was this one thing. You're like no, it was debunked like a week later, but their opinion was already formed.
Sure, and in fact there are political operatives and political figures who know precisely how to take advantage of that attention cycle.
Yeah, and I don't think that you know, pete Hegseth has come out and said, talking about the altitude, there were a lot of other factors that if the altitude was off, which the NTSB is not even willing to say at this point, we can go into kind of why that is, you know, but had come out and said that and it's like again, it focuses now on the altitude. On the altitude yeah, as opposed to all of the factors that led up to the last four or five minutes of that crash.
Yeah.
Because that's when you really have to start looking is how did we get to that point? It started four or five minutes before that, or even started back in the risk assessment process, or a number of other things that you could talk about that led up to that particular. So is that a factor? It certainly could be, but again, it just focused everybody's attention on that and so it became.
What I've been trying to tell people is it's good to have a simple understanding of something, but you don't want to be simplistic, and so if you have a simplistic understanding of something, it's kind of an oversimplified version of it, and to go laser focused on one particular thing, in this case the altitude especially as early on, without really knowing.
Without really knowing so okay, wait, let's get into the altitude and the crash and the specifics of that in a minute, but what I just want to finish out first is everyone who was on that helicopter that day. So there was Andrew Eves who was the instructor of doing the evaluation, and then you had Rebecca who was the pilot and then the crew chief, right? So how, Ryan?
Ryan O'Hara.
Yeah, and you knew Ryan in passing.
Yeah, I knew him in passing. We were briefly in the same company. I was kind of on my way towards retirement so I was spending less time there, and then he went to another company.
After that he's what's known as a standardization instructor, which is why there was also some initial misreporting about him being a pilot as well, because I'm a standardization instructor pilot, he's a standardization instructor, and so I think it'd be really easy to kind of misunderstand what those are and that they're not actually related. And so what he was is that they're in kind of the crew chief infrastructure.
You have a crew chief and then you have a flight instructor which is a instructor for crew chiefs, and then above that you have a standardization instructor, which is the same position as a standardization instructor pilot, just for crew chiefs, and so he was a standardization instructor. So he is a very experienced, very professional, you know, heavily relied upon crew chief. You know, like I said, essentially commiserate with what the senior station instructor pilots do.
And you said specifically that you knew Ryan and Rebecca by reputation. So what was their reputation, stellar?
Yeah, again, that's another part. Since I didn't really know them myself, I could kind of see what was going on in terms of you know we're still active in chat groups and friends with those guys and immediately we're all talking and everybody that I've talked to has has given very high, has very high regard for both of them.
I really with Ryan, I knew him more because the other crew chiefs would talk about him a lot and so I knew him in passing, but then I always, whenever kind of a question would come up, it would be like ah man, I don't know. Hey, what do you think? I don't really know. And this is among the flight instructors, you know they kind of hang out in our standardization instructor. They kind of hang out with the instructor, pilots, and so, hey, I don't really know, I don was through events like that.
Yeah, which is obvious that you know. People respected him then and relied upon him because he was good.
Yeah, he was very good, had a great reputation, rebecca Becca Lobach so Becca was.
¶ Pilot Excellence and Accountability Insights
I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk as highly about somebody just as a person and as an officer so not warrant officer but officer um, as much as I've seen people talk about Becca Lubach just in terms of how much she cared about her job One kind of anecdotally um, another standardization instructor was telling me um, that they were around her and they were, they were talking and um, this happened several times and they would just be talking about general aviation stuff, about Blackhawk
stuff, and she'd be around. This is pretty common, like I was explaining with Andrew, where it's like the instructor pilots are kind of in the room and you're trying to learn from them, and she would actually go hold on a second and she would run and run back and she'd come back with a notebook and she'd be like okay, look, start talking again and would write down everything that they were saying so she could review it later.
I don't think I've ever said anything that made somebody want to write it down that much and I definitely don't remember ever having somebody do that enough that I took note of it. I'm not saying that it never happened Like I should probably write that down, but I can't ever remember it happening frequently enough where it's like she's known for writing down everything you say because she wants to be able to retain it and she wants to learn it and, like, really be a master of her craft.
Um, I also know she was relied upon the battalion they'd gone through some inspections and they had an inspection coming up and she was heavily relied upon to kind of get the unit in this one particular way ready for that inspection. Because they knew she was really good at kind of reading the regulations and it wasn't something that they had a lot of kind of institutional knowledge to draw on.
So they needed somebody that could just read and understand and adapt quickly and so she was brought in specifically to do this one kind of job prior to this unit inspection. So I know her commander very well talked to him, she was very well liked, thought well of as a pilot and, yeah, loved baking apparently. I heard she'd bring cookies all the time.
Well, so okay, you know the unit, you know the job and for you it's hard to see this happen. You've flown the aircraft those same aircraft for 12 years, but at the same time, over 60 people died on that airplane and it crashed right into them. So somebody's got to be accountable, somebody's got to be responsible, and people want to know how it happened. How could this have happened, right?
So, um, from your point of view, incompetence wasn't the issue, because can you even survive in those jobs at that level if you're incompetent? I mean, is that even possible? There's a lot of people that get away with incompetence in their jobs. Yeah with degrees.
I mean where it's like, you know, maybe not as good or whatever, but just like straight incompetence. But I would say there's a lot of crashes that I'm very familiar with, not just rotorcraft but also, you know, fixed-wing as well.
Yeah.
But specifically crashes that I'm aware of, that I know the people involved in the crash where I'm you know have kind of a better understanding of for various reasons, and I go, oh man, good guy, good dude, he's incompetent in that moment.
Bad decision.
Yeah, moment that was incompetent, or even
¶ Predictable Patterns in Aviation Crashes
over a period of time. You know, one of the things you'll hear kind of in aviation is most crashes come back to a well, we kind of all knew that that guy was going to get into that crash. We kind of all knew something would happen at some point.
There's a lot of especially military aviation crashes where, because we do things that civilians aren't allowed to do, but we do have to have some capacity to do them, but sometimes people take some a little more leeway with that, and so then you have instances where they say, hey, we always knew, because of his attitude or because of the way that he flew, or he was always kind of pushing the envelope, we always knew this was going to kind of happen.
So it wasn't really a surprise to the people in the unit. That happens all the time.
But now this happens. But now this happens and people want to know whose fault it was.
Yeah, so was it their fault? So fault is a hard thing to say. There's going to be a lot of different layers to it. You know there's a couple different ways to think about it. You can think about it in terms of an accident chain. Sometimes we'll say where it's, like, hey, an accident chain is a series of events. If you remove one of those chains then the accident doesn't happen. You know, at this point, further down, Um, and that could be a million different things.
It could be one small mistake where it's not incompetence, and that's we may talk more about that. Um, where you go, oh man, I could see myself making that small mistake. That doesn't mean it's incompetent, it doesn't mean it was, it could have been a mistake. But those are two kinds of different things. I make mistakes in aviation all the time. I don't think you've. I wouldn't want to fly with somebody that said they never made a mistake because they're not telling the truth.
Yeah because there's so much to do. It's impossible that you're always going to be right. That's right, but those mistakes are-.
It's how you recover, right, it's how you recover, but never rise to the level of incompetence where you go. Oh, hey, I got a little bit off on altitude, or hey, I did miss a radio call, or you know. Or I misjudged the wind. Misjudged the wind. Yeah, hey, that landing was a little bit rougher than I'm used to.
I've had a few of those.
Hey, I've had landings where I go. Yeah, that was my best one, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I need to. Yeah, it made a mistake and now it's experience.
But this was shocking because, first of all, it was captured on camera. Secondly, it's a super busy airport. People fly in and out of there all the time, so a lot of people are familiar with it. And then, thirdly, you just don't see this happen all that often.
That's, I think the biggest factor is just how infrequently it does happen. Right, Because if you kind of look back at the data to say how often are aviation accidents, especially commercial aviation accidents, how often do commercial aviation accidents happen where there are actual casualties involved, where people die as a result of?
it Right.
It just doesn't happen in the last 20 years.
You think about. I mean because I've flown for 35 years. I've flown all over the world and all over this country and you see aircraft all the time. You know how busy the skies are. And sometimes you think to yourself it's a miracle there aren't more accidents, but there's a very efficient system that's in place. And I mean you can shed some light on this for me.
But my understanding, particularly post 9-11, when you are dealing with areas like Washington DC, and not just Washington DC, we're not talking about Dulles Airport or BWI Baltimore Airport just a little further away in Maryland. There You're talking about DCA. So you are close to the city, you are close to the White House, you are close to the white house, you are close to the head of the defense intelligence agency that's headquartered in alexandria, virginia.
You see it, when you take over land at dca, you are right. By all those national monuments I mean the number of guns almost across the street counter terror, that's right yeah in fact, that's the closest right going into dca. You drive right by it most of the time, so you have this area of the country which is concentrated I mean you talk about national security threats concentrated in a tiny space that is DCA. Plus, it has shorter runways, some of them right.
I mean you need to be specially trained and specially certified to land there.
Yeah, well, in terms of airline pilots, you know all airline pilots in theory could land there, but there are a lot of additional controls that happen in that area.
There are additional controls there and there are very specific routes. That is one of the most controlled airspaces in the United States of America, so for it to happen there is really shocking.
Yeah.
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Well the first thing that I heard reported was that it was yeah. The first thing that I heard reported was that it was a police helicopter.
That's right, it was confusing Again.
It's like, immediately the reporting out of the gate is kind of not right. And so I actually initially went, oh man, well, did a moral come out on that later, or whatever. And then I didn't think too much about it. And then the tech started rolling in, saying what? From friends at the unit. Hey, did you hear about it? Did you know what's going on? Wasn't one of ours?
Just to give a little more context, what I did is I reached out to a friend that was still there and I just said, hey, was it our guys Meaning? Was it the company that I used to be in? Andrew, at that time the accident aircraft was actually in a different company than I was in, and so I wanted to know was it Alpha Company, the company that I was in? Because if it wasn't, it was high likelihood I wouldn't know the pilots. You know.
Obviously you can't talk about who it is specifically and everything. And he said, no, it was, you know other company. And so I kind of went, okay, good, not good in the sense you don't want to be anybody, but you never want it to be your own friends. And then shortly thereafter I started getting texts hey, here's who it was, and so it was unexpected. I didn't know that Andrew had gone to that company.
So, that's kind of how it was.
how I found out Was that a gut blow when you found out it was Andrew, especially when you think it's not, when you think it's not going to be your guys. Yeah, when you think it's not going to be your friends. You think okay, and you kind of yeah, you kind of go to bed. Actually, I was in bed, so I kind of found that out. Okay, it's in the other company I worry about here in terms of being people that I know, and then went to bed and then, while I was in bed, I got you know more information.
Um, yeah, it's a gut blow. Um, yeah, especially kind of in the way that that that happened. Um, and then watching kind of the rollout from there, especially because when you see that it's somebody that you know is so high, so high quality, um, you know that it's not going to be just incompetence, meaning hey, well, this is one of those situations where it's like we all kind of knew this guy was dangerous, where I'm like, well, you can write that off right away, he's not.
And then further kind of as more information came out, seeing like how that situation played out, applying it to myself and I think this is true of certainly everybody at the unit that I've talked to that I served with at the time, that's out now or that's still there, we look at it and we go. Man, I could have had the same thing happen to me because the situation was complicated.
What was so complicated?
Well, so the first thing that happened is, as they're coming down there, keep in mind, this is a normal event for them in terms of the training that they were doing, the evaluation that they're doing, a normal event for them in terms of the training that they were doing, the evaluation that they're doing. This is very normal.
This is a. This is a every you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday if there's guys going out and doing stuff, just like this, crew members going out and doing this kind of stuff, so this is a normal day. When I kind of saw the route, I went oh, they're coming back from, they're coming back from training. I know exactly where they are and that's where we'd usually come back and in that direction they're going home.
they're going home for the night, they're done and that's something I just want to point out is that these routes there are routes in and out of every airport, every base, I mean, and these are specific, well-known, standardized routes that everybody uses, which is part of how you keep it safe yeah, and actually at that unit you actually have to spend more time there when you first get there flying with an instructor yeah um, then you ordinarily would in the army because it's so complicated.
So even though when I got there I have a lot of other experience coming in there, I'm one of the most experienced people in the unit and I still had to spend more hours flying with another instructor just to get you kind of used to the routes and everything. But by the time you're through that, and especially as you go for the next couple of years, you get really used to the area and so a few different things that happen in this scenario.
So Tower at some point calls PAT-25, so that's their call sign, pat-25 being the Blackhawk. So they call PAT-25 and say, hey, your traffic is a CRJ just south of Wilson Bridge at 1,200 feet descending.
And the CRJ is for the civilian plane. That's right. The American Airlines flight.
Yeah, so it's actually PSA Airlines and they actually go by Blue Street call signs. So Blue Street 5342 would have been their call sign that they were using on the radios. It's an American Airlines flight number. So Blue Streak 5342 would have been their call sign that they were using on the radios. It's an American Airlines flight number. And so, looking at the point where that radio call was made, hey, you need to be looking for traffic. This is their location.
The helicopter, essentially, is on the opposite end of the runway, so the airplanes are coming in to land on the runway. The helicopter is beyond the runway, on the other side of the airport, and so, from the helicopter's perspective, again, it's at night. They're wearing night vision, more than likely.
You're looking straight down the runway and you're seeing not just the airplane that you need to be looking at, but also every other aircraft that's landing on that runway, which, because of night vision, you can see aircraft for 50 or a hundred miles, ones that aren't even going to land there, ones that are going to go land to go land at Anacostia Bowling, are going to go land at Andrews, which are both there, that are going to go land at Davis and Army Airfield,
where you're going back to, you can see all of that.
And what do you see? Is it mainly the lights? It's the lights, yeah, and I know people have said there was the lights of Crystal City right. That was behind that.
Yeah, that does play into it, but that plays into it later on. So initially, you can look out and you can just see this line of aircraft, and so you're going to pick out the light that you think is the one that they're talking about and focus on that one, and you know that's the one that you're supposed to avoid. Okay, so then Andrew requested visual separation, which?
is what.
Which just means I can see them. Hey, air traffic control, you don't need to. You don't really need to pay as close of attention. You don't need to be responsible for making sure we don't hit each other. Because I can see them, I can avoid them. Okay, which that was a pretty standard procedure there. As long as you could see the aircraft, you'd request visual separation. It's a way of kind of taking some of the burden away from air traffic control, because they're super busy as well.
And you're letting them know that in the aircraft we see what you're talking about that's right, yeah, traffic and side request visual separation. But is it possible, he was looking at a different aircraft.
I would say almost 100% likely. So I think that probably what happened is they picked out the wrong aircraft because part of that air traffic control communication the last part of it was they said, talking about the airplane that they're supposed to be going to is circling to land three three. So the runway that they're kind of looking down is runway one. Yes, that was the more commonly used runway because it's 7,200 feet long. Runway three three is only 5,200 feet long.
So it's more challenging.
Yeah, so it's more challenging down runway one. They're expecting that aircraft to land runway one because that's what we would usually see. Matter of fact, I never one time saw an aircraft land on runway three three while I was there. It's not because they weren't I can go into more detail about that later but they're kind of already preloaded for, because that's what I've always seen. And that last part, circling the land three, three was actually cut off in the Blackhawk. So what do you mean?
It was cut off. So the NTSB reported that that part of the communication was not recorded by the Blackhawk, meaning it can be, for any number of reasons, where their traffic controller set it, but due to antenna position or atmospheric conditions, or, you know, there's a limited number of radio frequencies that we use for aviation and so there there's duplicates.
But that could be a duplicate one that's a hundred miles away and just somehow it's uncommon but occasionally will get picked up by your radio and you don't actually hear what they say, but it just cuts your ability to hear them off.
What are the chances of that happening?
Very, very, very small. Yeah, so very small.
But it's confirmed by the NTSB from the recordings from the flight launch.
That's what the NTSB is saying right now is that, based on the, they're calling a cockpit voice recorder. My understanding it's really not a cockpit voice recorder per se, because it's not a microphone, it's just. It's a different system. But essentially that last part of the communication was never received by the Blackhawk and they may never know why that is, but it does happen. And they may never know why that is, but it does happen. It's relatively rare.
But in that moment the chances of it happening too, where it's that last little critical bit of the information in this particular scenario, that it's a helicopter, like all of that, is just again one of the chances, infinitely small, but it did happen.
And so now the Blackhawk doesn't really have the, the Blackhawk crew members don't really have the critical piece of information to understand that, oh, there's an airplane that's not just going to come straight in here and we're going to go to the left of them and never cross paths Down runway one, down runway one, we're going to stay over the river, they're going to stay over their side of the river and we're never going to cross paths.
They're missing the critical, which now means there's actually an airplane that's going to cross their path once to go over to the east side of the river and then it's going to take a hard turn to go into runway 33 and cut right in front of them, and they never heard that critical piece of information.
So what happens next right after that?
Yeah, so the next thing that happens in the sequence of events, the CRJ, the American 5342, they continue their approach. They just when they get about at the bridge they start to break off and turn over the kind of Eastern shore over Maryland, and they're still descending. The Blackhawk is slowly getting closer and closer and closer to kind of the point of impact. Another thing that usually would happen to us there's a place called Haines Point. It's actually on the helicopter route charts.
It's depicted on there If you're looking at kind of a map of the area. It's a little island that's just kind of south of the harbor. In that area it's kind of the last. It's the island's closest to the airport. Haines Point's the southern tip of that island and so what would typically happen? There's a reason why I said I never actually physically saw anybody land there is because air traffic control would typically hold us at Haines Point and so when you're north they would just make a call.
You know, pat, whatever hold at Haines Point, they wouldn't even necessarily tell you why you're holding. And when you're at 200 feet and you're trying to hold, especially at night, a lot of other factors, that's a low altitude for anybody. For helicopter it's still low altitude, um, so your hands are pretty full, so you're not really worried about why I need to hold. I'm just worried that I do need to hold, and so you're. You're busy, kind of turning there in circles.
I know guys that would slow back to a hover, um, which comes with its own difficulties. It's kind of just a dealer's choice. I could see an argument for either one of those, sure, but because of that you never really see anybody land runway three, three and you never crossed that path when they're landing runway three, three.
Because you're, because you're staying there, you're holding.
Because you're holding in this place. That's about a mile North. So that was my experience. I don't know if that was a rule or not. You know I don't have a reason to suspect that it was, but I do know that that was what was commonly done and that again, just it would reduce your kind of situational awareness to what the airplanes do when they're landing 3-3.
But you don't know if that's what happened.
No, I don't this evening, so that's, that's you speculating, so I know that for a fact. I don't know what the rule actually says, so I wouldn't say that this is a case where anybody necessarily did anything wrong. In this event, the controller likely just thought they've got visual separation, not knowing that that last critical bit of information was cut off. There's no way for the controller to know, because he said it.
Yes, so this is a key point in the investigation. We have some video here of the. This should be from the tower right. Traffic 2 is up for runway. Can we listen to this and just see what your thoughts are on it? This is the tower telling the helicopter crew that there's traffic just south of the Woodrow Bridge.
That's right. So it says PAT-25, telling them where the traffic is. Now, keep in mind, pat-25 is due north of runway one. They're looking down the runway and they're seeing those other aircraft. What you can't really see on here is that there's a bunch of other aircraft Every three miles basically, there's another airplane also lined up to do an approach to runway one. So that's what they're looking at. They're looking at a series of lights and trying to pick the right light out.
But that last part and it's on here it says setting up for runway three, three. I hear it as circling runway, circling runway three, three. Either way, it's essentially the same bit of information. That's the part that's cut off, that last part, so there's. So they would be making the assumption that, oh look, they're all set up for runway one. They must be coming into land runway one. They lose that last bit of critical information.
And so the way that the helicopter routes there route four follows the eastern shoreline the airplanes go straight into land on runway one and kind of never cross over the helicopter route after they cross the bridge.
Okay, let's play it and see what happens here this difference proof.
American 1630 tower will be one lot boy chapter up for only three. This has one small funnel. Yes, that's where the visual separation is approved. The controller's probably thinking, okay, they can see them, they're going to avoid them, but he doesn't know that that last bit of information was cut off.
So it's likely at this point pat 25 is looking at the aircraft behind them which is going to land on runway one, and they don't know that there's another aircraft circling the land, runway three, three, who they're getting closer to and at this point, if you can pause it for one second, that terrain um, if you've been there before, I think it's Colonial Heights there, but there's rising terrain there. You've also got more lights along the shore.
There's the Ferris wheels right there, the casino is there, and so you've got rising terrain.
You've got all the stuff. Yeah, the MGM Grand is right there.
And so the CRJ is slowly kind of descending closer to those things, or even to a point where they'd be, from the helicopter's perspective, potentially below them but at the very least real close to them. If they're looking at the wrong aircraft and thinking it's the correct aircraft now at this point, that's probably in their night vision for the most part.
Meanwhile, the other aircraft that's going to eventually hit them, or vice versa, is outside, on the peripheral vision, where they can only see through their unaided night vision, and it's working its way kind of further away from their central field of view, which is making it more difficult to pick up Included. It's down closer to the lights and all these other factors.
And so at this point it would be really hard, missing that key piece of information, to look over there and try to find them, and they're not even necessarily trying to find them because they think they're looking at the the right aircraft. And then, if you continue, plan it, it gets more complicated. All right, and if you could pause that for one more second? So he said do you have the CRJ in sight Now?
Keep in mind, from a helicopter, with airplanes, and these speeds, with lights facing you, they're all just lights. So to say that it's a CRJ, because there are actually two different types of airplane there. One's a CRJ and one's an Airbus 319. There are two different kinds of airplanes but they're all just lights to the helicopter crew, especially with night vision on Sure kinds of airplanes. But they're all just lights to the helicopter crew, especially with night vision on.
It's just, you know, you've, you've seen traffic before with night vision on, and so I'm sure you can read it Like all you see is the headlights, you don't know what's behind them, and so even if they were looking to say it's a CRJ, that's not really critical or helpful information. Um, where it is would have been helpful again, but the controller doesn't know. They missed that critical part of information before, and now he's asking to confirm.
The reason is because they got a collision alert inside, uh, inside the tower, which is on their radar. So that's the controller seeing a kind of like a beeping red light and an alarm that's going off saying hey, there's this, two aircraft are getting too close together, and so the controller now is going oh, I gotta say something again.
I never was asked again if I had aircraft in sight there, so that would be highly unusual, and so I would suspect that at this point in the PAT-25, they're probably going. Huh, that's kind of weird. I've never. You know, that's unusual. They would ask us if we have them in sight, but again they're looking at the wrong aircraft. Also, the part that says pass behind was also cut off.
In this case it was cut off because in a Blackhawk the way that you key the mic, the microphone or the radio is by pulling on a trigger. Okay, I've had it happen to me before. Almost every pilot I know has had this happen before, where you hear air traffic control talking. But you were about to say something.
Yes.
And so you step on each other. And you kind of step on each other, yeah, and just, you're not quick enough, your mind can't think and do everything and your fingers kind of already moving. And so you briefly kind of step on each other and so, in this instance, that's what happened. The other one, we don't know why. This one, we do know why, it's because they did intended to, and from their, from their mind, I would imagine, they're looking at this other craft.
They're like, well, yeah, I was, I'm gonna pass behind them. A matter of fact, we're never going to cross paths yeah um, not really an issue, and but they may have had a where they're like hey, I wonder if our situational awareness is where it should be.
So there's a reason they're asking me again right it, just it's it's unusual, but it's not um completely clear but it's not completely clear about why they're asking and so, again, this will all come out further investigation with the NTSB about what the conversation was in the cockpit. But this is going to play into the altitude situation right now. So you can see it says 003 on there, that's 300 feet. I'm not an expert on the way that the, the radar, reports everything, but it is.
It is essentially a rounded up number.
uh, to kind of oversimplify it so pat, two, five zero zero three kilo, so that's saying 300 feet I see and the crj is at 500 feet at this point and so that's kind of like the plane is higher, it's above the, the plane's higher and it but it's descending to come into land on that runway that runs, uh, to run to the northwest there. Which one?
So there's one runway that's more or less straight up and down. There's a smaller one that's going northwest, like that. So they're going to make a left turn to land on that shorter runway, north and northwest.
Okay, so let's play it and see what happens.
So again, they approved visual separation. But PAT-25 is looking at the wrong aircraft, likely at this point. Yeah, so at that point both of those aircraft are in the water at this point.
Is that where it happens? Yeah, they're right there.
Yeah, so that replay of it has already happened at this point. So another thing that happened that's not shown on this. I've seen it in a few other places where I've seen it's kind of where there's more breadcrumbs, if you will, kind of left by the aircraft and it also shows their airspeeds.
It looks to me I don't know if this is 100% going to be the case or not, but it looks to me like the Blackhawk slows back from a hundred knots, so a hundred nautical miles per hour, a hundred knots to probably 80. So as they get close and they get asked the second time about about then they slow back to 80 knots. There's a lot of good reasons for that. A hundred knots and 80 knots are two very normal Blackhawk speeds for a variety of reasons.
I'm not going to go into the details but but they would be normal, comfortable air speeds for a Blackhawk. One of the things that you do as a helicopter pilot if you're not sure about what's happening in front of you, is you slow back. Sure, hey, let me build myself some more time. I'll build myself some. You know time buys you options. Yeah, right, so I'm going to slow back to 80 knots here and maybe it doesn't even articulate it.
Maybe she does, but starts to slow back and then, kind of, the third option would be you start to realize that it's a little bit tense or situation and big muscles beat little muscles, and so as you start to get tense you know humans just- in general, we're all familiar, I think, with you start to get tensed up.
Well, if you're flying a helicopter and you start to have that kind of sympathetic muscular response and you pull back on the controls a little bit, in any of those scenarios where you're intentionally slowing back or you unintentionally pull back on the cyclic a little bit, you're going to climb.
But what you know for sure is that that helicopter slowed down.
That's what it appears to me, based on some other stuff outside of here that I've seen, and so it looks like they slowed back and that would be a really unfortunately. Is it possible to hold it right at 200 feet? It is. It's difficult to do if you're flying right at the max altitude that you can be at to begin with. It is difficult to do to do if you're flying right at the max altitude that you can be at to begin with. It is difficult to do but it can be done.
But again, this is one of those where I say this isn't some level of incompetency, this is a level of, honestly, a pretty normal execution of that particular kind of maneuver if you will. In the abstract, the Army allows a plus or minus 100 feet in that maneuver. Sure, because that's what your altitude allowance are. Now this case, 200 feet, is a maximum altitude for those routes.
Um, so you kind of don't have anywhere to give if you make a mistake yes, you've gone outside of the, the maximum allowance if you're flying at 200 feet yeah. So that's where I see that altitude. If it gets off by you know, 50 or 100 or 150 feet, I would would go. Okay, not the best execution of that, but it's also where I go. If I put myself in that seat I'm like, well, I can't say that like I've always gotten it exactly right.
And if I start that maneuver at my max altitude, the chances of me getting off there, it's a fairly high probability that that'll happen. So again, not bad piloting, but it is a little bit of a mistake, right?
Okay, let me ask you the dumb person's question. Okay, just from watching that video, what I think a lot of people saw is you're always looking at that as a civilian and wondering why can't they just see what's in front of them?
Yeah, so that goes back to some of the limitations we talked about with night vision Sure, where you're looking through a 40-degree field of view, where you think you've got the thing you're supposed to be looking at, where air traffic control is drawing your attention to that thing, even by mistake, but they were kind of used to that. Yeah, they were kind of used to that.
But once it's drawn your attention in, because you lose that peripheral vision and because you don't have peripheral vision as much.
If that's the case, right, that's the case. It's not for certain, but yeah, but it's just the thing that's confusing here, and maybe it's a question of timing, yeah, but you've, what you see is the black hawk heading straight for a plane, and you're wondering why the hell I mean isn't the top of a back yeah why could they not just see what was in front of them?
yeah, well, so from the black hawk perspective, you know some of the things I've described, but also descending into the lights. Another thing is, again you having looked through night vision before, when lights are facing you, they're super bright. But if that car turns a little bit now, you can tell what kind of car it is.
The lights are way less bright, and so in this scenario, the jet is actually turned slightly away from the Blackhawk, and so it's not, and so its lights would be, by comparison, dimmer than the ones that are coming straight at it yes. The other issue from the jet's perspective about why didn't the jet see number one. The NTSB is saying that they think that the jet did see about one second before impact.
Because they heard some indication.
Yeah, they said there was an auditory indication in the cockpit. I don't know exactly what was said it sounds like something was said, but also they went to full deflection. It's probably another OPE, yeah something, but they went to full deflection. I've never one time gone to full deflection, so that means you were startled and really trying to what is full deflection?
That means when you're pulling as hard as you can, meaning you want to pull back as the airplane? Will go. It's awful.
But because of that, airspeed jet engines have a spool of time, a bunch of other factors, one second before impact. It's not going to do very much for you. They did everything they could do. It's just because of those factors. There's not much.
But I would say in terms of the airplane not being able to see the helicopter because of the way they were coming in on that approach it would be virtually impossible with this big left turn in they have to look at a helicopter that's essentially below them, kind of out, where there's parts of airplane. There's not windows there, and so they're making this big turn in. They're under the impression that anybody there air traffic control has told them to avoid them and all of that.
They've kind of only heard one half of that conversation because they're on different frequencies.
Well, that's the other thing, yeah, is that now ntsb has to go and take those different conversations right and piece them back second by second to look at them, to understand what each person was hearing? The only person who was hearing both conversations was air traffic control. That's right. Yeah, um, and so you know what's amazing to me?
I know these guys deal with this kind of stuff all the time and obviously you, you know you can't panic on the job, but the guy's pretty like even keeled the entire time.
Yeah Well, this is. It just gives some indication of just the familiarity with the area. What's really frankly impressive to me is what happens afterwards and we got to hear a little bit of that, but just the, they immediately go into telling other aircraft to do go-arounds, telling other aircraft to go to different places, right, um, and they're not. They're not panicky, they're not screaming they're not flustered, you know they're.
Clearly there's a more, there's a level of intensity with their voice, sure, um, where it picks up a little bit, um, but from the moment of impact all the way through everything that happened after that, it seems to me like air traffic control did excellent job, um, of maintaining control.
You don't have the luxury right of coming apart in that moment because there's so many other planes and you have a lot of responsibility riding on you. And now you have a catastrophic incident, and that's only going to make things more stressful.
In aviation I always say you have to have a memory of a goldfish, right? Because if I made a mistake here, I can't let it compound, right. So I just have to kind of forget about it and maybe we'll debrief it, we'll talk about it later on, but I have to let it go and move on and just try to continue to do better and better and better.
That's also true of our traffic controllers, where whatever happened before there might not be anything they can do about that, but but how they um, you know how they're able to execute. What they need to do now is going to impact people in the future so, okay, if I were to boil it down.
Listening to you, right, I know from speaking to you before that you would never get ahead of the investigation, and that there's so many complicating factors that you know the devil is always in the details, right and so, and you know, even altitude itself is not simple, because it could be altitude.
There's so many complicating factors, the devil is always in the details, right, and even altitude itself is not simple, because it could be altitude above sea level, altitude above ground level, the different levels of altitude that were cited the instructor, pilot saying one, the pilot saying something else can be explained away if the helicopter was descending at that time, yeah, and so, once you get into it, there's a lot of detail that changes your perspective.
But at the end of the day, right now, when you sit back, based on what you know about the unit, about the area, about the flights, about the aircraft and about what happened, is you're leaning towards just the fact that they were. It was that part of the radio traffic that was not transmitted or heard.
I would say it's kind of a holistic system failure, where there shouldn't be an opportunity, where, if you miss this one little bit of critical information. Or when I actually heard it the first time, I didn't know that they'd missed it, but I thought, man, it'd be really easy to misunderstand that. Not meaning I didn't hear it, meaning I just didn't understand exactly what they said. I heard what they said but I didn't interpret it right.
Yes, it'd be really easy to do that based on hey, I always see them land runaway one, so I'm always kind of expecting that, and then they say wrong way, three, three. But I don't exactly process it, that's what I initially thought it happened, which again is a whole reason for why you have to withhold judgment.
But then as soon as I saw the more recent NTSB update that said that part was cut off for the Blackhawk, I was like oh, now, that makes sense, there's nothing, there's no way to kind of regain your situational awareness from there, but to complicate matters because of the fact that we normally be held north at Haynes Point, which procedurally would seem to be a better way to do things. Now, there might be a hundred different reasons why that controller didn't, in this moment do it.
So I would hesitate to say like, oh, this controller did a bad job, or the controller broke the rules, cause I'm not, I'm not aware of any rules that were that were broken. Um, you know, that'll come out in the investigation. If there was a policy that said they were supposed to hold there, um, but it appears that again, the controller, where it's like you know, would have been good to have more information. Yeah, but it looks to me like they did give what they're required to give.
But again it's this whole kind of procedure to get down there, the route itself. To further complicate things, the chart says you're supposed to fly at the highest altitude, so would it have been good if they were at a slightly lower altitude? Yeah, it would have. Would have been good if they were never allowed to cross on that route when aircraft are landing 3-3 on runway 3-3. Yeah, that would have been good.
So to me it's kind of a bigger system failure that was relying on all these little individual instances that you have to get right when, if you just take one of them out and the accident doesn't happen, you know if they're allowed to fly at a lower altitude and there's some nuance to that conversation. But you know, when I was in the unit it was certainly put out, and I would agree with the position, that you should fly at the highest altitudes unless weather or ATC tells you to fly lower.
And so again they were doing what they thought they were supposed to be doing and what you're talking about here, just for people who don't know, the context is that, given the nature of the area, the sensitivity of the buildings that are around there, the national security issues, the busyness of the airport, right, the amount of traffic that's there that there are at certain, on certain routes, at certain levels, you're restricted.
Right, it's restricted airspace, so you are restricted to certain, to obeying certain rules, right, and part of that is, at a certain point you can't go above 200 feet, you can't go below it, Below it, yeah, what it says on the helicopter route chart.
It actually says helicopters are expected to fly at the highest of the altitudes unless? And the two things that it allows you to deviate from would be weather and ceilings. So in other words if the weather's too bad, which? at 200 feet wouldn't really ever happen, or is directed by air traffic control, and so you should be flying at the maximum altitude on the route. Again, now, because of all the way that everything else played out, it doesn't really give you anywhere to go.
So if you don't execute that precisely and get it right, then you're automatically going to be off. That's right. So it's kind of like it's maybe not the you know. Should that have been written a different way? Is that really what the FAA wanted us to do? Because that's what they wrote?
You know, I'm not really sure, but to me it's a, it's kind of a whole picture where all of these little things happen, that if they don't happen that way, you know, if they hear that they're landing runway three, three little bit, and then they release, and then it never happens. Um, if they're allowed, if, if the chart says that they can fly at a lower altitude, would, would they have flown? Or picked a different altitude instead of 200 feet?
Would they've been 100 or 150 and not climbed up high enough to hit the airplane? Yeah, that's certainly possible. Um, you know, if at the last minute they got a little more fidelity, uh, from air traffic control in terms of which airplane they're supposed to be looking at, hey, your traffic's, you know, 10 o'clock, confirm traffic inside, or something like that.
Again, I don't think the controller necessarily did anything wrong there, but you know, would have been helpful, yeah, so there's like all of these little things that piece together that just it didn't work in that moment.
So sort of like a perfect storm.
It was a perfect storm. Yeah, Because you could have that happen a million times and it could be just fine. And yeah, just one time it happens.
Okay, so I got to tell you something when I did a little bit of homework. You could call it and talk to a few people, so I'd be curious to know your thoughts on this. So I'd be curious to know your thoughts on this.
Some of the folks that I know who work in intelligence were tracking they regularly systematically track conversations among certain bad actors and those networks, and, especially when there is a catastrophic event of any kind, you know they're immediately, uh, hyper focused on whether they hear any chatter, because it's an, it's a? It's one of the first questions that comes to mind. Right, you have something so unusual happen, especially involving a military aircraft in such a sensitive?
area and that's their job, Okay. So what did they find? Well, a lot of celebrating. Obviously, that's not surprising, yeah. But then and I want to find the exact words here Then the conversation quickly turned Let me find where I wrote it down To what they said was coming next, which was SeaTac. And I said what is SeaTac? Do you know what SeaTac?
is. I do know what SeaTac is, I'm sure you do, I'm sure you know.
Now, I do know now, but you could probably explain it better than me.
Yeah, seattle Tacoma International Airport yeah.
Okay. So, right after that happened, the traffic that was picked up and when I say bad actors, I was specifically. What do you mean by bad actors? And what they talked about was well, states, foreign adversaries, states, but also just to make sure that, right, you know the way they describe it is advanced, persistent threats.
So these are, you know, the kind of groups, hacker groups that you know from their actions tell you that they're working with state adversaries, but you can't quite prove it, because all of this is happening in the cyber realm, where it's very easy to mask where these are coming from.
And, in fact, one of the reasons it's particularly difficult for us to figure this stuff out is because President Obama, as one of his last actions, gave away control of the internet to a group, an international consortium, which included many of these state adversaries. Right, I mean, that's a fact. People can go and look it up. I knew at the time when it happened, I reported on it.
You know, repeatedly people kind of gloss over it as if it doesn't matter, which is just amazing to me in some ways, because it matters so much. But one of the things when you give up jurisdiction and you give up control over the internet, you make it easier for bad actors to mask their tracks in the cyber world and so you know, and the signatures that they leave behind, right is, those are the things that we track. So they made it much harder to track that when they gave up jurisdiction.
But there are other ways still to look at these things. And so what they documented in real time was chatter on these, as they call them, bad guy networks, where there was a lot of celebrating, and then they said SeaTac will be next, and then what happened a week later? Do you know?
No.
At that airport there was a collision on the runway. Oh, with the yeah Well not really a collision, but with a two, the tail of one aircraft. You know, as they were, one aircraft was moving taxiing.
Yeah, I mean, what I can say is that, um and probably your intelligence sources would say this too a lot of times when, when something like this happens, there's a uh again, I'm not an intel guy, this is, this is more of a lay person speaking here um, there is a high uh degree of chatter. That happens, sure, and there's a lot of people trying to take credit for things. Sometimes when you find out later there was no credit, yeah, for anybody to you know.
Oh yeah.
Everybody wants to take credit for something like that.
Oh, you mean kind of like when the Taliban used to say they killed 270 Americans.
Yeah.
And there wasn't one dead on the raid.
Yeah, or you know A lot of instances where that happens. So I wonder if there were other airports mentioned as well. But we're not focused on that because we found out that SeaTac something happened there. But what I can say for sure in both of those instances that there was no ability for any hacker network or anything.
Just on the Blackhawk side because again that's where my expertise lies I saw a lot of comments about could they have taken over the helicopter, for instance, and the answer is no. The helicopter's technology is like straight out of the 60s and 70s. It failed in 1978. It hasn't significantly changed in any way. There is no way because that's pre-internet.
Essentially there's no way for anybody to take over that helicopter, which would be a kind of spoofing right. Yeah exactly, you would be sending data to that aircraft. That does not match reality.
That helicopter is analog. There is no way to spoof any— Even the GPS.
The altitudes.
Well, the GPS, that's another conversation. It is possible, but they were on route.
But you're talking about the altimeter, but they were on—yeah. The altimeter, specifically, which measures the altitude right Exactly, since that's the main— which is a different thing to the GPS.
That Also the NTSB has said they were en route, yes, and so they were the only thing that you could potentially do, but were they at the altitude that they were supposed to be at?
Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. That's right.
So is GPS spoofing possible? Yeah, I've been GPS spoofed before in other countries, but is that a thing that can happen In theory? Did that happen here? It wouldn't appear so because they were where in. It wouldn't appear so because they were where. In terms of X Y axis, they were where they were supposed to be. It's the Z axis that's in question.
Right. So if they had been moving on a different route, you would have then looked at the GPS data, yeah, but even then the pilots are flying generally visually there.
Andrew's been there for this is going on his fourth year. You know you fly over the river there, so it's not something that like. When I look at that number one, there's no possibility to take over that aircraft. Number two spoofing it wouldn't have any impact, and so I think whatever credit if anybody tries to take credit for that you can just chop that off. That is not what happened here. 100% that is not what happened here. Even if there were attempts, it just wouldn't be possible.
And when you say never. So you know, because I'm a journalist, I'm always trying to look at words like that. Right Because Well, hopefully you'll notice I haven't said never or at all. Well, you said, that could never happen.
That could never happen in that particular, in the way that this, that particular series of events and a crash at that location could never be attributed to somebody taking over the aircraft, over the aircraft, that particular aircraft, because again, we're talking about specifically the Lima model.
So a UH-60L a.
Lima model Blackhawk, because the Lima model Blackhawk lacks kind of the upload capability and also the ability to get any of that information into the flight controls or into the instruments. It's just the way they're designed. Right now it's not possible because, frankly, because it's really old technology.
Yeah, which is, in this case, may have been a good thing.
Yeah, it may have been a good thing, certainly if that's a concern where you know you don't want people to have the ability to do that. Now, on a broader sense, that's not possible in virtually any airplane ever or any helicopter ever where you can just digitally take it over. I'm not going to say that that's never going to be possible.
Um, you know, people have seen, hey, there is in fact DARPA has a Blackhawk that can fly itself, which is kind of like an advanced technology segment of the DoD where they do have a Blackhawk that can fly itself. But that's one specific Blackhawk that's been kitted and retrofitted with all kinds of other technology. So it's easy to kind of take that information and then apply it in this scenario, uh, incorrectly, if you will so when you say that it's not possible, it is possible with ships.
So why is it not possible with aircraft?
it is possible with ships. I don't. I don't know as much about ships, but I do know that is possible. But I think they're kind of remotely controlled sometimes, uh-huh, um, because their crews, you know, they go with the skeleton, you put it on course you put it on course and then the crew can go to sleep, is my understanding. And so you are able to kind of control it from a centralized control facility? Yes, that is not the case in aviation today.
So when you're flying a Black Hawk and you have all those instruments, are any of those instruments besides the GPS hackable?
No.
Well, that's a good thing.
Yeah, not in terms of, like you know, hacking them as in real time or anything like that. Like are there, you know systems that you can. You know malware is always an issue and obviously sometimes the systems get updated in different ways. That is possible.
But that would be kind of a different scenario. What do you mean by that?
Well, certainly like China, for instance, has had places where they've been able to put malware into certain components.
Well, I'm glad you raised that because, that is what people in the Intel world are particularly concerned about is that so many of these parts are manufactured in China and the Chinese are inside our electronic systems yeah, I mean, I do think that it's a, it's a concern, it's something we should should certainly kind of take note of and be trying to prevent that.
We are trying to prevent you know I'm sure there are people in the Pentagon right now trying to prevent that kind of stuff, but again, is that even having that capability where we have seen them do it they still wouldn't have the ability to take over the aircraft. That aircraft doesn't even have autopilot. So there's no aside from a human we call them meat servos, right.
So you know there's a human that has to move those controls, and so that's just an additional kind of in this case, a safety feature, if you will. That would prevent that from being possible, because you need a human, at the end of the day, to move the controls. So if you're going to try to crash in an airplane, you still have to get a human to do that, and so that's why I can say like, in this particular instance, that's definitely not the case.
There's all these other factors that would lead me to believe this is how it could have happened, but I can say for sure that it was not any kind of control being taken over by somebody else or anything like that. That's one of the things that I heard online that kind of made me start speaking out as well.
What about all the people that said, oh, this came from the CIA and this follows the flight path of helicopters going into the agency up to Langley?
Yeah, so I mean, obviously you can look on a map and figure out where all that is. This was a training flight, again, I know that, all the people on the aircraft. Now I would say, if you look at the mission of that unit maybe you could ascertain why training in certain places. Again, I don't know that they landed in Langley or didn't, but you could make some assumptions about why they may or may go into certain places, even on training flights.
Is it normal to be that route is normal for training flights, right that?
route is very like. I said, it's a normal Tuesday. I can't remember what day of the week, but it was normal. Whatever day of the week it is, that is a normal day of the week for them. That is the most kind of vanilla mission that they do is go out and fly on the helicopter routes.
And where did it take off from?
I think it took off from Davidson Army Airfield. So they took off from 12th Aviation Battalion, fort Belvoir, and then inside of Fort Belvoir you've got Davidson Army Airfield. So again, that's where the 12th Aviation Battalion is. That's where the flight originated from. They may have done some stuff kind of otherwise en route that I'm not aware of any of that stuff.
But again, had they that would potentially be normal for them, but flying the helicopter routes themselves, taking off from Davidson, flying around the helicopter routes, super normal flight.
Now one of the things because people raised the CIA right One of the things that's obviously very common in that world is you can be a training flight but also be put down as a support mission.
Yeah, that is possible I guess, but I can say that I never saw that there. When I say that's possible, I guess I'm saying for other organizations to do that.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know that 12th Aviation Battalion does that. I never saw that while I was there. You know there was, and also I can say I never flew to Langley while I was there. Yeah, I flew to Langley while, I was there. Yeah, I can say that unabashedly. As far as I know, I never took anybody from the CIA. It's a military mission. Yeah, you're supporting military customers.
For the most part, you know Secretary of Defense on down, and so predominantly generals, secretary level positions, that kind of thing. Cia's got their own assets to move them around.
I would assume it seemed like there was just a spate of things going wrong with aircraft around that time and since then. Is that just because things are being highlighted, or is it real?
Yeah, I think that's one of the things that's going to really have to be scrutinized in the investigation, because obviously people are paying more attention to now.
There's the Delta that flipped over in Canada. There's that aircraft. It's just like. It just feels like. Suddenly you're looking at it thinking should I be flying?
Yeah, I mean, I think in general again, if you kind of talk about the probability, this is one spike on otherwise a very good trend that we've had for the last 20 or so years in terms of aviation, or so years in terms of aviation. You know, I crossed we ate before we sat down to talk and I was there when we were picking up the food and crossed the road four or five, six times that is, I also flew in today.
Of those two things, crossing the road four or five or six times was far more dangerous to my life than getting on the airplane that I got on to fly up here, not even close, and getting in the car to drive from where I was to get to, um, you know, to the studio far more dangerous than getting on an airplane. In terms of probability, um, you know, I think there has been a um kind of microscope put on it because of um, specifically because of the path to five crash.
I think that drew a lot of attention to it. Um, and then the Delta crash. Again, you've got a lot of number one, the ability to record these things and put them out on the internet and kind of everybody sees it really quickly, and so it becomes kind of sensationalized.
It's also so catastrophic right. And catastrophic yeah the thing is that you could say don't want people die slipping in their bath, you know than car accidents or whatever. But it's not like you have a good chance of surviving when you slip in your bath. You know then, even then you know then car accidents or whatever. But but it's not like you have a good chance of surviving when you slip in your bath and it's you know, you, you crash.
Well, but apparently you know, if you look at the crash in Toronto, everybody survived. So it looks, it looks really horrible. Which is unusual for aircraft, and it is really unusual, obviously, but everybody survived. So again, like, if you just look at the probabilities, it's still a very, very safe way of traveling.
Yes.
I think you know, obviously we talked about the. There was an incident the day before with a pad aircraft in DCA. As it relates to that stuff specifically, I think there's a lot of analysis that's going to have to be done. You mean, for another Black Hawk, Another Black Hawk?
Helicopter, another Blackhawk helicopter, Another Blackhawk.
Yeah, that happened the day before where there was kind of another incident when it was supposedly close to an aircraft that chose not to land.
But they were separated by a thousand feet.
They were. They had some vertical separation. But I think kind of in the analysis the NCSB is going to have to do is how often were there close calls happening like this Because of the different frequencies a Blackhawk could cause? A close call could cause an aircraft to do a go-around or all these different things could cause we didn't talk about TCAS, but basically cause the airplane system to notice that there's a helicopter down there to tell the airplane to climb.
It would be entirely possible, because you're not on the same radio frequency that you'd never know as the Blackhawk that you caused those. So another question is going to be what was the reporting like and how often were these incidents happening? Because if they were happening with increased frequency, if you look at DCA, they had a million passengers go through there in a year in 1946.
By the 80s it was 16 million, now it's over 20 million and so you've just had this kind of exponential increase in the use and frequency of airplanes going to DCA.
It's my favorite airport. If I'm going to DC, it's right by the city. Why would you fly in there? Yeah?
And so I'd kind of want to put that across and then do the analysis and say hold on, were we having a lot of collision alerts on the radar? Were we having a lot of resolution? Advisories is what it's called when the airplane gets to climb or is told to climb. Advisory is what it's called when the airplane gets to climb or is told to climb. Were there a lot of those? Was there an increasing frequency? Were they happening at specific times of day?
And then, furthermore, beyond that, were those being collated and were they being reported to the army and to the rest of the department of defense? Because if you're ignorant of it, if you don't know that it's happening, then it's hard for you to do anything about it.
Right, then you're not going to fix it. Okay, so can you give me a sense of what is the feeling inside the unit? I mean, um, that's pretty bad, it is.
Yeah, I mean, I think because of the increased level of scrutiny. You know, because if it's just the three crew members, this is on the news for a day or two and then maybe some people hear about it but maybe not. You know, again, I've lost a lot of friends in aviation accidents. I've certainly been in the army for long periods of time where there were accidents and you could just see that there was some level of interest.
You know kind of, but even sometimes family members kind of wouldn't have known that it happened. You know and this is coming from somebody that's a Blackhawk pilot, and so sometimes you might get a text hey, was this you, um? But then a day or two everybody's kind of forgotten about it, um and again. Even sometimes my own family members would be like oh, I didn't know that there was a Blackhawk crash, you know, but um.
So in this one it's unique because there's also 64 other people involved, um, who were killed, and so that just really turned up the level of scrutiny. Number one, because the amount of civilians when you have a military and this isn't totally unprecedented. I think there's been four to six incidents where there's been mid-air collisions with military aircraft and civilian aircraft.
It's just been a long time, and so, because commercial aviation has become so safe, everybody's particularly interested in this. Because it's a military aircraft, it's a civilian aircraft, everybody's particularly interested and because 64 innocent people died. Yeah, because 60, I mean I would say 67 innocent people died. It was just, you know, a difficult circumstance, and so the level of scrutiny and the level of visibility in national media was turned so high up.
And again, because of kind of the things that drove me onto this show and onto other shows and started speaking out out where it was like, oh, this incompetent crew or some of the um, you know, even stuff like, oh, you know, becca low box, why would they pull her social media off? And I'm like, well, I could see where my family would pull my social media off, there's something on there. But like, why give anybody fodder?
Um, you know, and making comments about, you know, her serving as a White House social aid, which was did not take her away from her job duties, did not make her a worse pilot. Or about her, specifically Becca Lobach's, the time that it took her to make pilot command, which was actually a pretty normal amount of time that it took to make pilot command.
And so there were all these like kind of arrows being shot at all the crew members, um, and again, because there was a simplistic take, which is they're off an altitude, everybody died. Um, that I think was was wrong. Not necessarily at that, but for patients not important. But there's a lot of more Um, and so they were just watching all these kind of uh arrows being shot at their, at their dead friends, um, and so morale was pretty bad.
You know, I was quoted an article and my brother read it, and then he read the online comments and texted me back right away and said if you haven't read the online comments, don't. And I said well, what are people saying? And he goes. I've never seen people. I've never seen people say the kinds of things they're saying about the military right now or about military members.
That must have been the New York Times article.
A number of. I don't think it's unusual because there's other media that I've looked at and I have looked at the comments on so New York Times. I don't think they're unique in terms of the kind of vitriol the public was putting out.
What were you quoted as saying?
Not, I think it was. I honestly don't, I don't remember. It was again just specifically about the routes or something like that. I think it was about the risk, just general risk.
Right.
But he wasn't talking about my comments specifically. He was just saying the comments from the public on the article. Because the article was about a bunch of other stuff as well and I saw comments out there about some of the stuff. Just like everybody knows what happened. These people weren't competent, they killed everybody. That kind of attitude that was out there and that stuff was getting back to the unit and getting back to their friends and, worse than that, family.
You know people in the military were tough, we can take it, you can tell, because they all kept their mouth shut because that's what good soldiers do they just let it roll off their back and they deal with the blows. But worse than that is the family members who I think are still hearing stuff like that and are still aware of it. And it's particularly painful for them.
Well, I need to let you go because you have a flight to catch and I know it was important to you to make sure that everybody knows that you're not speaking on behalf of the DOD or any airline or company or anything else, these are your personal. This is your personal choice and these are your personal views, based on you know what you feel in your heart.
Thank, you yes.
And that you wanted to speak up for people who are not necessarily in a position to speak for themselves. That's right. I mean, I learned a lot from you. I'm sure a lot of other people will, and I just thank you. I just want to say thank you.
Thank you for extending the invitation and for having me.
Well, and you came all the way out here and that's important because you know I mean right or wrong, and maybe you'll be right about everything. The investigation will come out and back you up and maybe there'll be other things we don't know about right. That can still come out. But, either way, having people with knowledge and experience add their voices to the debate, because you know that public square is here to stay and it does a lot of good.
Yeah, I hope so.
But the way you mitigate any of the downsides is for people who know to speak up. So it's great to meet you, Austin. I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much for having me.
Dare I say fly safely on your way home, yeah thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, so thank you for watching Going Rogue with Laura Logan on your way home. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, so thank you for watching Going Rogue with Laura Logan. I think I'm supposed to say something about where you can go at this point, lauralogancom. Look on the website. I'm the worst salesperson in the world, but I do appreciate your support. Take care.