Airplane sees helicopter. Should have been possible several minutes before the collision, the airplane was approaching from the south-southeast and the helicopter from the North, at some point they were a couple miles apart and should have been able to see each other. Air traffic control should have known about both of them from the time they were at least 10 miles apart. It’s not like one of them suddenly pulled into traffic from behind a bus. The airliner would have been on an IFR flight plan and probably mostly heads down, and there’s a good chance the helicopter would have been lost in the city lights.
The crew of the helicopter has no excuse for missing a CRJ-700 with all it’s lights on against the black night sky after ATC told them where it was. The jet would have been at their 11 o’clock slightly high,
Maybe, I’ve spent no time in a TRACON or tower to tell you exactly what they can and cannot see, all I know is I’ve heard “radar contact” several thousand times in my life.
Too low for TCAS to verbally tell them to swerve; it probably still showed the relative position of the helicopter, unless one or the other wasn’t switched on.
I kinda wonder if the helicopter wasn’t running ADS-B. ADS-B is not encrypted (because good luck with that) so there are privacy/security concerns with it. Unlike Mode A or C transponders which only broadcast a 4-digit octal code, ADS-B sends information about the aircraft, it’s how people are able to track Elon Musk or Taylor Swift’s jets. This graphic from Wikipedia gives an ADS-B derived flight path for the jet, and an “MLAT” track (whatever that is) and an “approximate flight path” for the helicopter, so it’s possible it wasn’t transmitting ADS-B because military. Which would undermine the effectiveness of anti-collision systems a bit, no?
They’d also done everything they needed to do to very formally pass responsibility off to the helo pilot,
An aircraft operating under VFR is always responsible for collision avoidance anyway. It is my understanding that the electronic systems like radar and ADS-B have systems that will sound an alarm if aircraft get too close to bring the very busy controller’s attention to a critical situation. I wonder if this happened. Either way if you’ve got two aircraft getting that close to each other a half mile from the runway it’s time to look out the window, that’s why the tower is a tower.
They’re going to find the main contributing factor to the crash is pilot error on the part of the helicopter’s PIC. Why none of the other systems worked either is going to be an interesting read.
Airplane sees helicopter. Should have been possible several minutes before the collision, the airplane was approaching from the south-southeast and the helicopter from the North, at some point they were a couple miles apart and should have been able to see each other. Air traffic control should have known about both of them from the time they were at least 10 miles apart. It’s not like one of them suddenly pulled into traffic from behind a bus. The airliner would have been on an IFR flight plan and probably mostly heads down, and there’s a good chance the helicopter would have been lost in the city lights.
The crew of the helicopter has no excuse for missing a CRJ-700 with all it’s lights on against the black night sky after ATC told them where it was. The jet would have been at their 11 o’clock slightly high,
Maybe, I’ve spent no time in a TRACON or tower to tell you exactly what they can and cannot see, all I know is I’ve heard “radar contact” several thousand times in my life.
Too low for TCAS to verbally tell them to swerve; it probably still showed the relative position of the helicopter, unless one or the other wasn’t switched on.
I kinda wonder if the helicopter wasn’t running ADS-B. ADS-B is not encrypted (because good luck with that) so there are privacy/security concerns with it. Unlike Mode A or C transponders which only broadcast a 4-digit octal code, ADS-B sends information about the aircraft, it’s how people are able to track Elon Musk or Taylor Swift’s jets. This graphic from Wikipedia gives an ADS-B derived flight path for the jet, and an “MLAT” track (whatever that is) and an “approximate flight path” for the helicopter, so it’s possible it wasn’t transmitting ADS-B because military. Which would undermine the effectiveness of anti-collision systems a bit, no?
An aircraft operating under VFR is always responsible for collision avoidance anyway. It is my understanding that the electronic systems like radar and ADS-B have systems that will sound an alarm if aircraft get too close to bring the very busy controller’s attention to a critical situation. I wonder if this happened. Either way if you’ve got two aircraft getting that close to each other a half mile from the runway it’s time to look out the window, that’s why the tower is a tower.
They’re going to find the main contributing factor to the crash is pilot error on the part of the helicopter’s PIC. Why none of the other systems worked either is going to be an interesting read.