A plane flies as people attend a candlelight vigil in Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. on February 5, 2025 for the victims of the collision between American Eagle flight 5342 and a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
The tragic mid-air collision on January 29, 2025 between a United States Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines CRJ-700 flight while it was on the final approach path to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Washington DC, killing 67 people, brings out several aspects of human factors that can result in a tragedy.
In this case, the first was having politicians jump the gun by blaming others, even before a formal investigation began and the bodies were yet to be recovered from the watery grave of the Potomac river. U.S. President Donald Trump was quick to blame former U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for diluting U.S air safety standards, forgetting that it was he who held the reins in the interim four-year period.
Pressures, opaque investigations in India
One saw the same kind of political one-upmanship just after the air accident at Mangaluru in May 2010 when the Minister of Civil Aviation, Praful Patel, declared that the airport conformed to all standards of ICAO Annex 14, volume 1. Dutifully, the court of inquiry committee that was headed by a retired Air Marshal of the Indian Air Force, glossed over all the blatant violations of the Airports Authority of India, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the airline, i.e., Air India Express, by blaming only the pilot. In all the air accident reports in India, one never gets detailed data from the digital flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.
Unlike in India, where the truth is hidden and restrictions placed on all access to information on the accident, photographs or data on the state of infrastructure, it is open in the rest of the world where one can analyse data with vital clues that are available. There is a big lesson to be learnt from the air accident in the U.S. The radar track and the air traffic control audio tracks were openly available and one could analyse and disseminate the facts instead of having doctored data and reports that have been vetted by a bureaucrat who ensures that there is nothing incriminating against the government and its agencies is published in the final report.
Let us take what has been put out by media sources in the U.S. What is generally known is that the American Airlines flight was given a runway change by air traffic control to accommodate a departure. The change was accepted by the crew. The helicopter, PAT25 (or Priority Air Transport) had taken off from a base nearby for a Proficiency training flight at night and had been informed about the passenger flight. The air traffic controller had asked the helicopter crew whether he had the passenger flight in sight. The pilot responded by saying he was visual with the plane and he was given clearance to maintain visual and pass behind the passenger flight. This is where the human factor plays a big part. The flight was at night. Other than the navigation lights and the rotating beacon, the helicopter pilot had no other clue to make out the type of aircraft he had visual sighting with. His only information was based on the flight number.
If one looks at the radar picture available to the public and the information from the air traffic tape recording, there was another flight which was behind the American Airlines flight, but approaching the main runway that the American flight was originally approaching before the American crew accepted a side step to a different runway.
The ‘hurry syndrome’
Did the helicopter pilot wrongly identify this second flight to be the American flight when he reported visual to air traffic control? If one looks at the radar track of this second flight and the track being followed by the helicopter to “cross behind” (as instructed by air traffic control), it is quite likely that the helicopter crew had focused on the second flight rather than the American Airlines flight and were fixated on being behind the aircraft they had perhaps misidentified. As both the helicopter and the American Airlines flight were below 1,000 feet above ground level, the collision avoidance system would not have sounded as it would have been inhibited below 1,000 ft.
In aviation parlance, this is what one calls “Press-on-itis”, or the ‘hurry syndrome’, where once you get fixated, all other inputs cannot influence your judgement. One needs a fresh and clear mind to be able to maintain situational awareness and spatial orientation. Fatigue and stress have a major role in these situations. The initial reports indicate there was only a single air traffic tower controller at Reagan handling the flights when, normally, two controllers are on duty.
Soon after the Reagan accident, the visual media in India went on overdrive, with graphic presentations of the Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision in India, near New Delhi, on November 12, 1996. In this accident, a Kazakhstan Airlines flight from Chimkent, Kazakhastan to Delhi collided with a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 flight from Delhi to Dhahran, killing 349 people The pilot of the Kazakh flight was blamed for not complying with air traffic control clearance. What people are not aware of was a DGCA official who was in-charge of the investigation was removed from the investigation when he submitted his findings. It was another official who finalised the report. It is needless to say that the last nine minutes of the digital flight data recorder of the Saudia flight was a blank.
In the recent crash in South Korea, in December 2024, where a passenger flight landed with retracted wheels and crashed into an embankment housing the instrument landing system localiser antenna, South Korea, like India at the time of the Mangaluru crash, had not complied with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Annex 14, Volume 1 Standard that mandated that all structures in operational area shall be frangible (from January 1, 2010). Yet, ICAO gave them a clean chit during the audits conducted. The Korean jet’s digital flight data recorder was also blank for the last four minutes.
Incidents in Bengaluru, Tiruchi
Let us not forget the case of two Indigo flights, on January 7, 2022 — one bound for Kolkata, and the other for Bhubaneshwar — that were departing from parallel runways at Bengaluru airport. The air traffic controllers had cleared planes for take-off. In the two runways at Bengaluru, one runway was to be used for take-offs and the other for landings simultaneously. It was a narrow escape for both planes.
Neither the airline nor the air traffic control reported the matter but the incident came to light during a safety audit. The lack of situational awareness and the lack of knowledge of the pilots on the functioning of the collision avoidance system were safety issues that were all swept under the carpet.
On October 11, 2024, an Air India Express flight from Tiruchirappalli to Sharjah experienced hydraulic failure in one system. It circled for close to three hours before landing. But the political class in Tamil Nadu and the media went to town making a hero out of the captain who had exhibited very poor judgement when he could have made an overweight landing immediately.
This is another example of people with no knowledge of aviation passing judgements and influencing investigation agencies. The mid-air tragedy should open the eyes of the travelling public and know that safety is being compromised for brownie points.
Captain A. (Mohan) Ranganathan is a former airline instructor pilot and aviation safety adviser. He is also a former member of the Civil Aviation Safety Advisory Council (CASAC), India
Published – February 07, 2025 12:16 am IST
