Army pilots might have struggled to see passenger jet before D.C. crash

WASHINGTON – Before an Army Black Hawk crashed into a passenger jet on the night of Jan. 29, the helicopter pilots told the air traffic controller guiding them near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that they saw a nearby jet and would steer clear of it.

But experienced Army aviators told the National Transportation Safety Board during a hearing Friday that American Airlines Flight 5342 might have been difficult for the helicopter pilots to keep in their sights.

Federal investigators will release their findings early next year about the cause of the midair collision, which killed 67 people – the worst airplane crash in the United States in nearly a quarter-century. But one question is whether the Army pilots ever actually saw the airplane that the air traffic controller flagged in his communications with them that night.

In their testimony Friday, Army experts explained why that might have been difficult for the pilots, Capt. Rebecca Lobach, who was undergoing her annual flight evaluation, and her instructor, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves.

At night, light pollution from Washington, the Pentagon and the airport itself is a common problem for pilots. It can be worse when flying with night-vision goggles, as the Army pilots were using the night of the crash, the aviators said. Further complicating matters were exterior lights on the commercial jet that were dimmer than those on more modern planes. Even the configuration of the Black Hawks can cause sightline problems.

All those factors could have complicated the Black Hawk pilots’ ability to keep their eyes on the correct airplane, even after telling the air traffic controller they could see it.

“We have several illusions that can happen while we’re flying,” Army Chief Warrant Officer 5 David Van Vechten Jr. told investigators, adding that it was not uncommon to “look down for a second, maybe write down a fuel calculation or change a radio,” then “look back up, and that aircraft’s gone.”

His testimony lined up with what other military pilots said in interviews with investigators about the difficulty of seeing other aircraft when flying near Reagan National Airport, transcripts of which the NTSB released this week.

Multiple pilots said that the way the Black Hawk cockpit was built could create blind spots, obstructing their view of lights in the distance.

Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 Karl Halterman, a pilot with the Army’s 12th Aviation Battalion, said in one of the interviews that he has lost sight of a plane “maybe 25% of the time, just to end up staring at it, fixating on that spot to wait for something to move and then regaining again. And that’s because the structure of the helicopter blocks it from my view.”

In some instances, others added, it could be difficult to distinguish between static structures and moving aircraft, depending on the angle of the helicopter pilot’s view.

In one interview, Capt. Phillip Gallon of the Army’s 12th Aviation Battalion told investigators that depending on a helicopter’s position, a moving airplane “may look like it’s actually in a fixed position.”

The practice of using night-vision goggles – which display all lit objects in a single color, white or green – could make that challenge even harder, increasing pressure on the pilots to use their peripheral vision to orient their views.

Part of the problem is related to how the goggles work. They automatically dim to restrict the amount of light that comes in, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Matthew Ingalls said in a different interview. “That’s when it can be a challenge,” he said.

There was also a feature of the passenger jet that could have made it even more difficult to identify – or discern how close the helicopter was flying.

According to the NTSB, the jet was equipped with incandescent exterior lights, not LED lights. That is not surprising, given the Bombardier CRJ-700 was about 20 years old. But the incandescent bulbs would have appeared dimmer, pilots testified, and thus farther away.

One of the NTSB board members, J. Todd Inman, asked if that would have made a difference in the pilots’ depth perception.

“The brighter light will appear to be closer,” Van Vechten answered, “but that’s not necessarily the case.”

It may have been a factor in a troubling pattern that NTSB investigators identified with that type of plane along Routes 1 and 4, helicopter paths near Reagan National Airport.

According to data that the board unveiled during the hearing Friday evening, Bombardier CRJ-700 planes in those areas were involved in more midair encounters with helicopters – when two aircraft come dangerously close to each other – than any other type of fixed-wing plane.

The airline that had the most encounters with helicopters along those routes was PSA Airlines, the subsidiary of American Airlines that was operating Flight 5342 on Jan. 29.

NTSB investigators also noted late Friday that PSA Airlines was a reliable and consistent reporter of narrowly avoided collisions, adding that many airlines and the Army were likely underreporting such incidents.

It was not immediately clear how the Federal Aviation Administration had compiled its comparative data about encounters along the helicopter routes near Reagan National Airport.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.