Hearings will dig into unanswered questions in deadly D.C. plane crash

Army and Federal Aviation Administration officials are expected to face tough questions this week over their management of the crowded skies around Washington’s Reagan National Airport, as safety investigators hold public hearings about January’s deadly midair collision that killed 67 people.

For three days starting Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board will grill witnesses and release thousands of pages of documents as it strives to answer crucial questions about the cause of the nation’s first fatal commercial airline crash in more than 15 years.

The Jan. 29 collision – between an American Airlines regional jet arriving from Wichita and an Army Black Hawk helicopter on a training mission – killed 64 passengers and crew on the airliner and all three crew members aboard the helicopter. The helicopter was flying on a dedicated helicopter route that follows the Potomac River and passes beneath a landing path for one of the runways at National.

The NTSB has said it is examining why the helicopter was flying too high as it sped south over the river. Also unclear is whether its crew mistook another airliner in the night sky for the American Airlines flight.

Even under normal circumstances, there was little margin for error between the helicopter route and the landing path; a Washington Post examination found the gap was as little as 15 feet. But on the night of the crash the helicopter was flying 78 feet higher than the 200-foot altitude limit on the helicopter route, investigators have found.

The hearing is a key part of the NTSB’s investigation but a final determination on the causes of the crash will probably not be reached until next year. The Army has disclosed little about its own review of the accident, frustrating family members of the victims, many of whom were figure skaters returning from a development camp in Wichita.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy has previously said she was angry that the FAA had not identified the risks in the busy shared corridor, despite having evidence of the dangers available in its own records. She has also said she is seeking information about a government working group set up in the years before the crash to manage the risks of helicopters in the area.

“We never want this to happen to anybody else,” Homendy said in an interview Monday. She said she and other board members have met multiple times with family members of the victims, who will be briefed ahead of the hearings on what to expect. She added she hopes to have the investigation wrapped up by the anniversary of the accident.

Aviation safety expert John Cox, who spent decades flying in and out of the airspace around the D.C. airport as a commercial pilot, said he anticipates investigators will be training their attention most closely on what happened aboard the Black Hawk.

“I think everything will focus on the helicopter crew because the jet was pretty much where it was supposed to be,” Cox said.

The first session, on Wednesday, will examine the systems on board the helicopter, including its altimeter – the device that tells pilots how high they are flying – while a second panel includes an overview of the helicopter routes.

On Thursday, the NTSB reviewers will examine air traffic control procedures and training at National. On the final day, Friday, the safety board will examine safety data and safety management by government agencies.

Here’s what to watch for as the hearings unfold:

Why was the Army helicopter at the wrong altitude?

On older Black Hawks, like the one involved in the crash, there are two main ways to determine the helicopter’s altitude. The first is through a barometric altimeter, which measures altitude based on air pressure changes. The second is through the radio altimeter, which measures altitude through the time it takes for signals from the Black Hawk’s antennas to hit the ground and bounce back.

The barometric altimeter has to be manually adjusted by the crew before and during each flight.

Former Army Black Hawk pilot Brad Bowman vividly remembers twisting the knob to set the reading as a standard part of the procedure before takeoff. Bowman flew in the 12th Aviation Battalion – the same unit involved in the crash – in the early 2000s and is acutely aware of the small margin of error in the vicinity of National Airport.

“It really, really matters,” Bowman said. The Black Hawk’s altitude reading can be “off significantly if you don’t have the right setting.”

If the barometric altimeter wasn’t set or was set incorrectly, it would affect the altitude the crew was seeing in the cockpit. Summaries of cockpit voice recordings previously released by the NTSB indicate that moments earlier during the helicopter’s southbound flight along the Potomac River, the instructor pilot said that the Black Hawk was at 400 feet, while the pilot under evaluation during the training flight said the helicopter was at 300 feet. The two crew members did not flag or discuss the altitude discrepancy, the NTSB has said.

Shortly after the crash, NTSB investigators reported that the Black Hawk’s radio altimeter was reporting the helicopter at 278 feet at the moment of impact, but investigators have cautioned that they found conflicting data in the flight recorder. They have not released the barometric altitude reading the pilots may have seen.

The public also has not been told if the crew had the most accurate readings available on the altitude and location of the commercial jets around them. Some older Army helicopters do not have an integrated ADS-B system, which stands for “Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast.” There are two elements to ADS-B: “out,” which would have broadcast the Black Hawk’s position, and “in,” which could have provided the crew with real-time information on the aircraft around them. The crew was not transmitting ADSB-out because it had spent part of that night flying sensitive routes. It had checked out an ADSB-in device to have on the flight, but it was still not clear if it was using it at the time of the accident, three Army officials told The Post.

What impact did night vision goggles have on the collision?

Flying into National at night can be magical, with the national monuments, White House, Capitol Hill and city development lit up on either side of the Potomac River. But it can also add up to a lot of light pollution. That’s not an ideal setting for night vision goggles, which the NTSB believes the crew was wearing at the time of the crash. At the time of the crash, the Army’s policy was that if one of the crew was in night vision goggles, all of them had to be. The Army said that policy has not changed.

The goggles amplify the light and make it brighter. In the case where there’s multiple ground- or air-based sources of light, it can create a situation in which it’s hard to discern between different sources of light.

But most important, night vision goggles limit a crew’s field of view, much as wearing a swimming mask can reduce your field of view.

“And field of view in aviation is everything,” Bowman said.

What did the pilots on the jet know about the danger they were in?

Mark Tomicich, a former FAA attorney who worked on several high-profile aviation accident investigations, said a reconstruction of what happened in the moments before the collision will offer important information about what went wrong.

While many experts have focused on the Army helicopter and its three-member crew, he said he is interested in detail about what took place in the cockpit of the regional jet, after pilots were instructed by the tower to shift course and land on Runway 33 rather than Runway 1.

The regional jet had a collision warning technology known as TCAS, an automated cockpit warning system that advises about conflicts with nearby aircraft. According to the preliminary report released by the NTSB in March, about 19 seconds before the collision, the cockpit crew for the operator of the American Airlines regional jet, PSA, received a TCAS alert that should have signaled the need for heightened awareness, Tomicich said.

“In some respects, with TCAS, the PSA crew had an electronic advantage over the helicopter crew and over the controller’s radar,” Tomicich said.

Could air traffic controllers have done more to prevent the crash?

The controller managing the helicopter’s journey past the airport first alerted the Army crew to the landing jet about two minutes before the crash. The helicopter crew, at that point more than 6 miles from the plane, said they had the jet in sight, and the controller approved their request to continue using “visual separation.” That means it was the pilots’ responsibility to avoid the plane.

The controller received a conflict alert about 20 seconds before the crash, according to the NTSB – a sign that something was amiss.

Within a few seconds, the controller provided instructions to the Army pilots to “pass behind” the jet, and they again responded that they had it in sight.

Visual separation is widely used near airports, experts said, and it allows for greater volumes of traffic to navigate busy airspace. But Scott Dunham, a former NTSB investigator, said the hearing could be an opportunity to scrutinize how it is applied. While the helicopter crew reported having the jet in sight, experts have said they might have confused two aircraft, and it’s impossible for controllers to know for certain whether pilots are looking at the right aircraft.

Controllers could have directed the helicopter to pause while allowing the incoming jet to land. Former Army pilots who have flown those routes said they have been directed to fly ellipses about a mile north of the airport when airspace is congested.

Did the Black Hawk pilots miss key radio transmissions from the controller?

The NTSB has indicated that the controller’s instruction to “pass behind” the airliner might not have been heard from the helicopter crew because they had briefly pressed the button on their own microphone, blocking the transmission. Information that the jet was “circling” to Runway 33 was also not audible on the helicopter. Experts said what the helicopter pilots understood should become clearer with the release of the full transcript of their conversations as logged by the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder.

What did the FAA know about the risks of helicopters near National?

In March, the NTSB urgently recommended that the FAA make changes to its helicopter routes, saying the corridors near National posed an “intolerable risk.” The FAA swiftly closed the corridors to all but emergency and other essential flights.

The Post reported in February that in the decade before the crash airline pilots had received more than 100 warnings about helicopters from their collision avoidance systems – incidents that were also logged by the FAA. Controllers at the National tower had raised questions about the helicopter route past the airport, including proposing shifting it over land to the east, The Post has also reported. That would have moved it further from the landing path, but no changes were made.

At a Senate hearing in March, Homendy said she had been seeking information about a Washington-area helicopter working group but had been unable to determine who served on it or obtain minutes of its meetings. If investigators have now obtained those records, they could provide vital insight into how the FAA, the Army and other agencies that fly in the area collaborated on safety.