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The runways at DCA see 800 takeoffs and landings per day, or one every minute.
The target for Air Traffic Controllers at DCA is 30 controllers on duty and on the night of the latest collision, there were only 19 controllers to handle air traffic.
I'm not going to get into the political blame game. Although the investigation is not complete, it would seem to me that if you don't want a repeat of this tragic incident that occurred the other day, the number of flights to and from DCA should be reduced until you have enough controllers to handle the air traffic.
Discussion (80)
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New York Post: Air traffic controller was doing the job of two people during DC plane crash due to tower being understaffed, FAA says
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The investigation will cover the issue of the workload in the tower last night. But I'm getting a bad feeling about this.
The Cockpit Voice Recorders and the Flight Data Recorders are going to be important – the CVRs in particular.
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Sounds to me like the pilots had no idea anything was wrong, until the collision. So how could the CVRs be useful in that situation?
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This crash is giving me the vibes I got after Challenger crashed. That proved totally avoidable, yet inevitable. Avoidable because if NASA had followed its flight rules it would not have happened. Inevitable because NASA had been ignoring flight rules relating to safety for six months before Challenger - which meant an accident was waiting to happen.
From viewing the video of the crash, I get the feeling the helicopter crew saw a different airliner after being warned to avoid the airplane they hit, and moved to avoid the aircraft they saw rather than the one they were told to avoid. Neither aircraft saw the other one until they touched.
The reason I say this was avoidable yet inevitable was that the US government should not have been routing military aircraft in a path where they could potentially collide with an airliner on final to the runway. Especially when multiple government organizations are involved (DoD and FAA in this case). Doing that was a convenience rather than a necessity.
Even given very low odds of a collision, do it enough times and you are going to get bit. From my years in manned spaceflight, I have learned that the best way of avoiding disaster is avoiding actions that provide an opportunity for that disaster to happen unless that action is absolutely required. I don't think routing a helicopter through a path that takes it through a final approach path to a busy civilian airport falls under the heading of absolutely required.
I am not pointing fingers at the helicopter crew. Spotting other objects in your airspace is incredibly difficult at night. Missing something, sometime is almost inevitable. You only have to be unlucky once.
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So would you consider that a "human/pilot error" on the part of the helicopter, that may not have been avoided even if there had been the expected 30 flight controllers on the job?
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