A passenger jet and an Army helicopter could have collided with the worst U.S. air disaster within 20 years due to equipment and communication issues, flight safety investigators said Friday.
The airliner had landed at Reagan National Airport, just a few miles from the White House, when it collided with the Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk on a training mission, killing 67 people.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said at a press conference it has established a timeline for the events that will lead to the crash on January 29th, but said that a full investigation could take up to a year.
NTSB Chairman Jennifer Homendy said air traffic control warned Black Hawk pilots minutes before the disaster occurred that the disaster was turning by crafts from the US Eagle Airlines.
However, data drawn from the helicopter's wreckage showed that the message was chock-up and the word “swirl” was obscure.
It appears that the Black Hawk's cockpit voice recorder (CVR) has not picked up any important instructions to escape from the Bombardier CRJ-700's pass seconds before the collision.
“8:47:42 – or 17 seconds before the shock – radio transmissions from the tower were heard on both CVRs telling Blackhawk to pass behind the CRJ,” Homendy told reporters. He spoke.
“CVR data from Black Hawk shows that the portion of the transmission, which he said was the 'back path', may not have been received by the Black Hawk crew. ”
These words appear to be muted as if communicating with the tower by the microphone key on Black Hawk radio, she said.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly linked the causes of the crash to diversity, equity and inclusion policies, but none of them have been mentioned as factors.
NTSB's branch chiefs of Vehicle Recorder Division, Homedy and Sean Payne, said investigators would investigate the inconsistencies between the actual altitude of the Black Hawk and what its crew clearly saw.
The passenger seat recorded an altitude of 313 feet (95 meters) two seconds before the collision.
“Now we're very confident in Black Hawk's radio during the crash. It was 278 feet,” she said.
“But I want to be careful, but that doesn't mean that the Black Hawk crew were looking at on the cockpit barometric altimeter. We're seeing information that contradicts the data.”
Aviation experts went home to see whether helicopter crews could see through military night vision goggles.
Homedy said there was nothing to suggest that the crew had removed the goggles, and that testing was underway to establish what both crews could see in the event of a crash.
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