Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "New video shows different angle of jet, helicopter collision near DC that killed 67" video.

There's a significant limit to what the pilot can see, which is why there's more people on board the aircraft. From a CNN interview with a former Blackhawk pilot, there should really have been another crew member on board so they could see all the directions to scan for that. There's also a possibility that they stopped looking for a jet when the saw the one taking off and didn't know to look for one behind them.
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@TheCozyCottageKeeper It's a routine training session, that doesn't mean they were learning to fly, just that it was training. That can mean learning to navigate the area, or it can be practice for things they already knew, but need a refresher on. We'll have to see if that factored in at all.
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@str4tegyy506 No, it doesn't, that would be an incredibly hard thing to accomplish with a helicopter. It looks like a helicopter that's just going about its business a couple hundred feet too high and running into a jet.
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There will be an investigation, I'm guessing the lack of avoidance is because they didn't see the plane and didn't realize they were so high up or for some reason the information coming from the tower wasn't properly understood. But, there'll be an investigation and we'll get an answer. I'm sure it won't be a satisfying one, but we'll get one eventually.
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@Bangaboomerang It doesn't, it looks like a helicopter flying without knowing that it was going to collide until it did.
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@Yggdrasil42 Yep, with the information we have, the most likely answer is just a pile of compounding mistakes that led to a tragic result. Helicopters are fairly slow and trying to hit a jet like that is going to be pretty tough. My guess is that it'll probably come out to an unclear command from ATC not specifying where the jet the tower was concerned with was in the sky, the helicopter not having a 4th crew member to help track other aircraft and the helicopter being much too high either due to a pilot ignoring/not noticing the altimeter readings or some sort of a defect in the altimeter that hadn't been picked up during maintenance or earlier in the flight.
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@HassanWilliams-xp5xn Because it can take some time to get notice to the family of the crew that died. The identities will be shared eventually as they always are.
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@zyrrhos The Helicopter was supposed to be down below 200ft, which would have kept it out of the way of planes. I'm sure a major point of the investigation will be trying to figure out why the helicopter wasn't where it was supposed to be.
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The visibility on these helicopters is not great. It's why they often have 4 crew members to help ensure that they can see as much as possible. I don't think it's helpful to encourage conspiracy theories when the most likely explanation is simply that it was an accident.
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@fulanichild3138 It can operate with 3, the issue is when you're in busy airspaces like this and relying on visual tracking of nearby aircraft having only 3 means that you've got a perpetual blind spot somewhere and it's hard to to maintain visuals on air craft without having a perpetual blind spot at the same time.
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Right, clearly that is the ultimate last piece that led to the crash, two aircraft can't occupy the same place at the same time. The why and how that came to be is much more interesting and probably going to come down to a few factors. I doubt that it was intentional, it would be rather tough to intentionally pull something like this off.
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@ It's not though. A jet lands at roughly 172mph in order to remain in the air until it's low enough to finally touch down. A helicopter of this type, according to wikipedia, isn't necessarily traveling much slower than that. Making it a really tough maneuver to do on purpose.
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@terrified057t4 That's why CNN had a former blackhawk piloton, and the visitibilty of the pilots isn't good at all, and they can at best see 180ish degrees, anything behind them is completely invisible and with the business of the airspace, it's common to need 4 people on the helicopter to keep track of the aircraft in the area so this sort of thing doesn't happen. If they had the 4th, this might not have happened. If they had been where they were supposed to be, this wouldn't have happened and if the ATC had specified where the plane they were concerned with was, this probably wouldn't have happened. But, even with that, there's a bunch of information that's going to be looked at in terms of why the helicopter was so high and what other options had been available.
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@Iloveyoursmile The YT comment system sucks. The ATC probably wouldn't have known as their system can easily be off by 100ft versus the altimeter just because of the error on radar. As far as the helicopter goes, who knows, it might well be an attention issue.
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@slopsec2358 Hopefully they had vetted here, but she's probably not wrong about the benefits of an extra set of eyes in such congested airspace.
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@heatshield Yep, and that's why there's often a 4th crew member on board these flights so that there's more eyes that can cover a larger section of the sky, which apparently wasn't the case here, for whatever reason there were only 3 crew members which meant that some part of the sky was not being monitored at any given time.
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