Sunday, February 16, 2025

"I Have Control"

Here's the usual disclaimer: all I know about aviation comes from watching Air Disasters and Juan Browne's YouTube channel, which means I know zilch. I'm not a pilot, I've never had flying lessons, and I've never had a check ride. Nevertheless, a couple of things keep bothering me about Chairman Homendy's briefing Friday.

From Air Disasters, I at least know that several landmark crash investigations have centered on crew resource management, including the responsibility of the pilot monitoring (as opposed to the pilot flying) to speak up forcefully, and in extreme cases take control, if the pilot flying is doing something really dumb. So this is a potential issue when looking at the January 29 collision.

There's a closely related issue that this was a check ride, which Chairman Homendy made clear in Friday's briefing. In this case, the pilot monitoring was Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, who was also the instructor pilot. This page outlines the respective duties of the p[ilot flying and the pilot monitoring:

the pilot flying is responsible for flying the aircraft. The pilot monitoring, or PM, consequently takes over all other tasks that do not relate to flying the aeroplane. . . . the PM constantly monitors all instruments for their proper functionality and accuracy. Most importantly, he or she oversees the plane’s flightpath and altitude [my emphasis], and if there is any deviation from the target values.

A flight instructor doing a check ride would be even more focused on the instruments. I went looking for any information I could find on how a flight instructor conducting a check ride would react to the pilot being evaluated remaining well above the 200 foot maximum altitude for over four minutes. The best I could find was this forum, where actual flight instructors gave opinions, for instance:

There are only a few reasons why an instructor would have to take the controls on an IFR [instrument flight rules] training flight, and being off your altitude isn't usually one of them. I can usually accomplish the same result by saying one word - "altitude". Depending on the stage of training, and whether we are actually on an IFR flight plan, or in actual IMC [instrument meteorological conditions], or not, I might prompt the student at 100 feet, or it might be more. But I don't think I've ever felt the need to take the controls for an altitude issue.

But the helicopter here was under visual flight rules in an extremely dense airspace, and it was consistently above the maximum altitude by 100 feet or more. The actual outcome indicates that the pilot was showing extremely poor judgment, was not correcting altitude when it was twice pointed out, and the result was a disaster. Juan Browne hasn't chimed in yet over Friday's briefing -- I suspect he wants to avoid controversey -- but I did find one skeptical aviation YouTuber:
He invited commenters to give their opinions on who was responsible, and there were several replies that I thought were informed and insightful:

The NTSB mentioned that the Instructor Pilot (IP) and the Pilot Flying (PF) had an altitude disagreement of 100' before entering the severely restricted area with a 200' ceiling. Was it therefore safe to proceed for a training flight into such a busy area? Simple answer, No. They should have turned away from DCA airspace if they had such a fundamental instrument disagreement when they were expected to operate at or below only 200'.

. . . Layman question: why, when there was an acknowledged 100 ft difference in altimeter reading between the instructor/examiner and the exam taker/pilot, did the instructor not abort the mission and fail the exam at that moment?

. . . I see it in the engineering field and most other field but extremely so in the military. Look at the pictures of the female captain pilot being evaluated and ask yourself how she climbed the ranks so fast? Then listen to the voice of the evaluator, you can assume that he is older. The female's career was dependant on passing the re-evaluation . . . the male pilot instructor was influenced by the wrong joy stick . . .

My own question before I looked at this YouTube and the comments was why the instructor pilot didn't say, "I have control", the way they say it should be done on Air Disasters, take control, and bring the helicopter down to 200 feet. But the layman question above is even better: if there was that much of an instrument disparity, it was time to abort the mission.

It also sounds to me as though Cpt Lobach was already, by any objective standard, failing the check ride well before circumstances inarguably stepped in to fail her, whatever the instructor pilot might have said. The version of the cockpit flight recording given by Chairman Homendy is probobly heavily redacted, and we don't have any replay of the actual voices as we did with the tower and the CRJ.

Tone of voice could have added a lot -- what was the actual disagreement when CWO Eaves said they were at 400 feet and Cpt Lobach said no, it was only 300? It might not have been an instrument discrepancy at all, Cpt Lobach may just have been irritated that CWO Eaves was criticizing her in any way.

My own view is pretty much that Cpt Lobach was politically connected, she was a White House aide, and she expected her career to go well. CWO Eaves, an enlisted man, was in an uncomfortable situation, and it would not have gone well for his career if he failed a favored officer on a check ride. In fact, my surmise is that Cpt Lobach was not well regarded by her peers or her subordinates, and the job of giving her the expected pass on her check ride wasn't exactly a plum assignment.

By far his best option, if he didn't want to fail her as he should have, would have been to abort the mission due to the instrument discrepancy and leave the job of passing her to someone else. He may have seen reasons why he couldn't do this, and his only alternative was to let her keep flying and hope for the best. I suspect the YouTuber in the link above is correct in his assessment that the NTSB will never discuss anything like this in its final report.

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