Friday, January 31, 2025

Trump 2 The Revenge Tour: Son of Sharpie-gate

What a shameful day - 67 people die and Trump makes it all about him. 
This is really just another "Sharpie-gate" -- remember in 2019 Trump insisted that he hadn't made a mistake when he panicked Alabama about a hurricane warning, by inviting reporters into his office just to show them a doctored hurricane map with a half-circle added over Alabama. It was pathetically obvious what he had done with a Sharpie pen.
So today, reporters got to see Trump babble and argue at a press conference, then sign a so-called "Executive Order" to blame Obama and Biden for the American Airlines-helicopter collision. 
I presume he used another Sharpie pen, too.
The American media should be ashamed to "cover" such tripe:
Mayor Pete says it:
View on Threads

Other useful comments today --

First, James Fallows on how the Washington airport works.

James Fallows / Breaking the News
It Had Been 16 Years Since a Fatal US Airlines Crash.
But there appears to have been another one this evening.
...How and where did this happen? Planes on approach to DCA typically fly “up the river” or “down the river,” the river being the Potomac in both cases.
When winds are from the north, inbound planes typically fly “up the river”—northbound along the Potomac, with the cityscape of Alexandria, Virginia visible from the left side of the plane, and first Anacostia and then the US Capitol and other DC features visible from windows on the right side.
Otherwise inbound planes fly “down the river,” southbound above the Potomac, with Key Bridge, the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, and then the Pentagon closely visible from the right side of the plane, and Georgetown University, the White House and Capitol, and other sites in downtown DC visible on the left.
From news footage, it appears that this plane was flying up the river, toward a landing on Runway 33 at DCA. Somehow the Army Blackhawk helicopter flew at its altitude, directly across its inbound path.
Why didn’t the aircraft know about each other? This will be the main focus of investigation. The airspace above very busy big-city airports is very tightly coordinated and regulated. The controllers who handle traffic in and around DCA, LAX, SFO, LGA, ORD, and similar first-tier airports have the skill of orchestra conductors in the four-dimensional ballet of imagining how flight paths will intersect. (Four dimensions? One of them is time: Where each of these planes is now, and where it will be twenty seconds from now.)
The main clue available as I write is a tape of transmissions from the DCA tower around the time of the accident. If you listen carefully at around time 17:30 of the clip below [in the original post] you’ll hear a DCA tower controller asking the helicopter (with call sign PAT two-five) “do you have the CRJ in sight?” The CRJ is the inbound commercial plane. We don’t hear the answer on this tape, presumably because it was on another frequency. But presumably the controller did hear the answer. (Among the skills of controllers is handling several frequencies at once.) He then says to the helicopter, “pass behind the CRJ.”
After around time 18:00, you hear all hell breaking loose, after the crash has occurred and as the tower tells other airplanes to break off their approaches and go around.
Who knew what, when? We’ll presumably learn more. In any case, a terrible tragedy.
The culture of air safety. On his second day in office, as part of his careless-or-intentional destruction of the institutions that have made the United States strong and safe, Donald Trump disbanded a group called the Aviation Security Advisory Committee.
As I had planned to write that day, this casually punitive gesture had the potential of undermining everything that had made US aviation safety the marvel of the world. It was collaborative; it combined public, private, military, civilian, academic, and other institutions to pool knowledge; it avoided blame; but it focused relentlessly on lessons learned. You can see a list of its members here.
I didn’t write about it that day, because life got in the way in various forms. But if I had I would have said: Destroying this institution probably won’t make a difference this week. Or this month. Or maybe even this year. But in the long run, some day, it will be part of an erosion of safety —part of the thoughtless destruction of the taken-for-granted institutions that have made modern aviation as safe as it is.
That dismantling order, one week ago, wasn’t part of tonight’s tragedy—whose specific origins no one knows, as I write. But unless reversed, it will be part of tragedies in the future....
Meanwhile, @Mark_McEathron writes this on Twitter today about how helicopters fly at night:
I was a Blackhawk helicopter crew chief in the Army.
I was even a Flight Instructor. This means that I trained Crew Chiefs and ensured that they completed all training annually to maintain their flight ratings.
One massive responsibility we had was to be the eyes for the pilots. We handled airspace obstacle avoidance and communicated potential risks to the pilots.
Quite often we would train as a flight of 2 or 3 birds flying in formation.
It was my job to have my head out the window and tell the pilots that the aircraft behind us was "staggered right at 3 discs". (We measured close distances in terms of the diameter of our rotor discs).
I can tell you after doing this for hundreds of hours, even when you know EXACTLY where a Blackhawk is, and you have night vision goggles on, it is EXTREMELY hard to SEE the aircraft.
These birds are designed to be hard to see at night.
The red and green lights on the side get lost in the lights of the city below. The only "lights" on top of the aircraft are called "slime lights" because they are a very very very dim green.
Incredibly difficult to see.
If you are above the helicopter, even if it has it flood light or spot light (2 different lights) on, underneath it, it is still hard to see the bird because all of that illumination is below the airframe.
Another thing people should know is just how busy things can get on the aircraft.
Pilots are talking to each other about what they are observing on the instrument panels. This means neither are looking outside the aircraft.
The crew chief might be conducting a fuel check, where we would also be looking up into the cockpit at the fuel gages and the clock.
This CAN lead to moments where all 3 people on the aircraft are all looking inside the aircraft.
It's not supposed to happen that way. We are supposed to announce when we are "coming inside" or are "back outside" the aircraft. But that doesn't always happen.
Also, in cities like DC, the radio traffic is constant and can make it hard to filter out what is important for you to listen to.
Checking instruments, doing math, reading checklists, and listening to multiple radios all at the same time is HARD. Mistakes happen.
Anyone out there telling you that they find the aircraft collision to be suspect, have NEVER been in a flight crew and they have ZERO idea what they are talking about.
Ignore them all. Better yet, mock the hell out of them.
999 times out of 1000 aircraft incidents always come down to a series of pilot and crew errors.
Humans are involved. They aren't perfect.
Tonight, my heart and mind is with the families of those involved in this tragic event.
I won't join the chorus of idiots making speculations.
McEathron adds
One visual illusion that happens in flight is called "Motion Parallax".
This describes how things appear in relation to your motion.
Ever have that weird feeling where you are parked and that car next to you moves forward and you swear it's not moving forward but instead you're moving backwards? That's motion parallax.
Or how trees look like they are moving really fast as you are driving? That's motion parallax.
Relative motion is another illusion but can also serve as a cue.
Relative motion is why things close to you when you drive feel fast but things at a distance appear slow moving.
We all experience these things on the ground.
In the air, you lose a lot of the visual cues that help you process and recognize your place in space.
So, one form of motion parallax can happen due to relative motion illusions that lack the cues.
It's called "constant bearing, decreasing range" (CBDR).
It's when due to the relative motion you have to another object in space that is also moving at a constant speed relative with your own, appears to be stationary, when in reality, you both are on a collision course.
Contrast that with the perspective of a stationary object in the ground, like a camera.
This can EASILY explain how the Blackhawk can appear to be flying directly at the passenger plane intentionally, while their own perspective is nothing moving around them.
I'm no Einstein but I do understand relativity...
And Heather Cox Richartson writes about the overall chaos in Washington now:
January 30, 2025
...Musk and the technology billionaires want to smash the government to enable their futuristic visions, and Christian Nationalists like Russell Vought want to smash it to replace it with religious rule. Trump wants to smash it for money and power. But in the first two weeks of the new administration, their enthusiasm for breaking things has produced what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo—even before today’s frantic attempt to blame Democrats for the air tragedy—called “a fairly epic face plant.”
And the British newspaper The Daily Mail has a very detailed article about the crash, with video, audio and maps, along with a bunch of unwarranted speculation about possible air traffic control mistakes.
The New York Times just published an article about the FAA preliminary report, which throws Trump under a very fast-moving bus: 

2 comments:

Cap said...

No crash investigation has been completed so both the people blaming Trump and Trump blaming anyone but him are just flinging poo. There's no evidence and no reason think that firing senior administrators had anything to do with a crash days later. And there's no evidence that DEI or Biden had anything to do with it either. There's also nothing unusual about the tower being short-staffed due to seasonal illness at this time of year, as a friend of mine who's an ATC at YYZ told me.

As pointed out above, chances are good that the crash comes down to human error on the part of the helicopter crew who requested and received visual flight rules (VFR) then don't seem to have seen the incoming jet. But there will be plenty of time for blame analysis once the investigation is done.

Cathie from Canada said...

Yes, apparently the helicopter was flying 200 feet too high - maybe their altimeter wasn't working properly or whatever - plus air traffic control may not have had enough staff plus it was nighttime plus plus -- it may have been a series of errors.