I haven’t read Chris Hayes’ book on attention, but the asymmetry has to be addressed. There is no Fox News for the left. No talk radio. No Rush Limbaugh. I don’t know if that’s because people on the left are smarter or less insane or what.
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Why have one person manning the tower when we have an automated AI bot manning the comms, also on the blockchain because why not? - DOGE
I’m joking but and hopefully this stuff gets around being automated eventually, but that’s what blind cost cutting is going to get you
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The left has incorrectly assumed change would come through appealing to logic, empathy and common sense(and the spread of these ideals) rather than base instincts. They were wrong about that and the GOP was right and this is the consequence.
How do you fix that? I’m not sure but it seems intuitive to me the first step is to stop taking ourselves so damn seriously. I have a fb feed full of 40-60 year old people talking about calling congress and the like. It’s insanity and it looks insane and it is not at all attracive to the median voter.
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The point is to tie elected Republicans to Trump. People should not see Trump as something special with respect to other Republicans.
Many people are saying that the staffers who should have been in the tower accepted the resignation offer a couple of days ago.
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Any ATC WFH?
This isn’t accurate. There are a lot of FAA rules that the military is exempt from but this isn’t one of them.
Also not accurate. There’s an ATC recording where they’re clearly communicating.
I haven’t seen any evidence that they were. Any public data we have is going to have errors that could easily account for +/-200 ft. Flight Aware tracking data updates every 15 sec. I’ve seen what claims to be ATC’s radar scope showing the helicopter bouncing between 200-300 ft, which is rounded down to the nearest 100 ft, so you’d guess they’re cruising between high 200’s and low 300’s from that. An airplane will aim for a 3 degree approach angle and the accident occurred about a mile from the runway so some basic trig would put that at 275 ft, although that could vary significantly depending on what angle the airplane was actually on (either intentionally or unintentionally) and my own estimated measurement of a mile. The aircraft’s altimeter itself is allowed to have errors +/-70 ft. Atmospheric pressure was rising rapidly all day yesterday in DC, enough for altimeters to read up to 30 ft lower if they were using a setting approaching an hour in the past (and they’re typically only updated every hour).
These altimeter errors are common enough I’d never expect ATC to question things if they think you’re 100’ off. 200-300 maybe if it’s critical. It’s usually when you’re 300-400 ft off that they’ll check in to figure out the discrepancy. Not that this wasn’t a critical situation, just giving you an idea of the scale for significance.
Maybe the helicopter was flying closer to 300’. Whatever, I’ve done it on that route. 200’ is so low, especially at night, nobody takes that 200’ max guidance to mean aim for 100-150 or something, you aim for exactly 200. If you’re primarily looking outside you can drift up to 300 or down to 100 in seconds and barely notice. ATC will never question it either. The separation standards are not so tight that that should ever be what kills you. Did it in this case? Sure, maybe. But if the helicopter had been flying at 200’ and only missed because the airplane crossed over at 300’, everyone involved will shit themselves and tower will give you a phone number to call when you get on the ground to discuss what the fuck that was about. I’d still put the error 99% on the pilot not giving themselves enough lateral clearance and 1% drifting too high.
We know the pilot was aware there was a plane in the area. But there were actually multiple planes in the area. Maybe they saw another one. The full accident investigation should help figure that out, with two pilots they were likely talking about what they were seeing. If they had seen the correct one, yes they can slow down or turn or any combination of evasive maneuvers. ATC can give specific instructions but they’re not going to do that for every helicopter because they can literally have 7-8 helicopters they’re managing with 2-3 on a given route with a constant stream of jet arrivals and departures (or more, just referencing a usual busy day based on my experience). It’s not practical for traffic management and it actively hinders helicopters from getting where they need to go. So when a pilot says they’ll maintain visual separation ATC tends to trust that they’ll do so. And probably a hundred times a day for the past 20+ years they’ve approved visual separation between a helicopter and a jet and it’s worked out.
Yes.
I don’t think ATC realized they were on a collision course. Coming close enough to potentially collide, yes, but that happens every 5-10 mins in DC. It may be a reasonable proposal to insist on more traffic separation to the point where potential collision paths are less frequent, but that will require cutting DCA flights and/or limiting where helicopters can go. That may be what we move towards, but the policies that existed yesterday have been in place for 20+ years and this is the first major accident so ???
They have pretty decent software that alerts them early if two aircraft are going to be in conflict. But again the best you can do with that is alert the pilots early. And that’s what happened. After one of them says they see the conflicting aircraft and they’ll do what they need to do to avoid it you have to put some trust in that.
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Sort of a side question, but when we hear these ATC recordings, is that pretty accurate to the audio quality that pilots are hearing? I don’t know if it’s just me, but I can only make out like half of what they’re saying. It often sounds too garbled. Do pilots just get very good at figuring out what’s being said?
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TIL Kansas has a Democratic governor. Kansas. (Kentucky I did know about).
Christ, what an asshole.
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Great. He can sign another presidential memorandum next month when there’s a bridge collapse or a train derails or planes have to divert because of an Elon rocket explosion or whatever shit. And another the month after that. But keep pointing out he’s the fuck up.
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His face when he’s looking around the room, like “See? You all hearing how this isn’t my fault?”
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Elevating competence over everything is one of those right wing messaging things they have nailed. It makes sense on it’s face until you start to dig in to what it really means. It’s basically the opposite of Democrat messaging where you start out with something really scary sounding like CRITICAL RACE THEORY or the GREEN NEW DEAL and then work our way backwards to the good parts of it that everyone agrees with.
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It’s reasonably close. It’s easier to understand when you know what you’re expecting to hear. When things outside of the usual need to be said it will be slowed down, more plain English, more careful pronunciations. In either case sometimes you’ll still need to ask ATC to repeat themselves and it’s fine.
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I’m seeing some maga adjacent Joe Rogan types raising eyebrows over Trump’s dei caused this claims. I have zero confidence it matters but it’s better than the alternative I guess.
Vox Populi, Vox DEI
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