The National Transportation Safety Board enters a second day of public hearings Thursday on the January midair collision between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a passenger plane that killed all 67 people aboard the aircrafts.
On the first day, investigators highlighted a number of factors that may have contributed to the crash and the warnings about helicopter traffic that FAA received years before the tragedy over the Potomac River.
It’s too early for the board to identify what exactly caused the crash. The board’s final report won’t be released until sometime next year. But it became clear Wednesday how small a margin of error there was for helicopters flying the route the Black Hawk took the night of the nation’s deadliest plane crash since November 2001.
The January incident was the first in a string of crashes and near misses this year that have alarmed officials and the traveling public, despite statistics that still show flying remains the safest form of transportation.
NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said an FAA working group raised concerns about all the helicopter traffic around Reagan airport and the risk of a collision in 2022, but the FAA refused to add a warning to helicopter charts urging pilots to use caution when this runway was in use.
“This is the very event that this would have been the cautionary note for,” she said.
Video and animation presented during the proceeding’s first day showed the helicopter flying above the 200 feet (61 meters) altitude limit before colliding with the plane.
Investigators said Wednesday the flight data recorder showed the helicopter was actually 80 feet to 100 feet (24 to 30 meters) higher than the barometric altimeter the pilots relied upon showed they were flying. So the NTSB conducted tests on three other helicopters from the same unit in a flight over the same area and found similar discrepancies in their altimeters.
Dan Cooper with Sikorsky helicopters said that when the Black Hawk helicopter involved in the crash was designed in the 1970s, it used a style of altimeter that was common at the time. Newer helicopters have air data computers that didn’t exist back then that help provide more accurate altitude readings.
Chief Warrant Officer Kylene Lewis told the board that she wouldn’t find an 80 to 100 foot discrepancy between the different altimeters on a helicopter alarming because at lower altitudes she would be relying more on the radar altimeter than the barometric altimeter. Below…
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