Not Much Actually New Here

The @nytimes story on the January DC plane crash hides its takeaway until the last sentences: the lady helicopter pilot ignored multiple warnings from her right seat about altitude (and his directly telling her to turn away) and flew straight into a passenger jet.

The end. Ugh. pic.twitter.com/7emtYkZTwQ

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 27, 2025

There's a new fuss over what seems to be a previously unreported excerpt from the cockpit recording of the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into an American Airlines jet at Reagan National Airport on January 29.

Three months on, new details published by The New York Times revealed that the pilot made more than one mistake leading to one of the worst catastrophes in aviation history.

Not only was Lobach flying her Black Hawk too high, but in the final moments before the impact, she failed to take advice and instruction from her co-pilot to switch course.

. . . Just 15 seconds before colliding with the commercial airplane, air traffic control told Lobach and Eaves to turn left, but she did not do so.

Seconds before impact, co-pilot Eaves then turned to Lobach in the cockpit and told her that air traffic control wanted her to turn left. She still did not do so.

The one bit of new information appears to be the exchange with air traffic control when Lobach was directly instructed to turn left, and the instructor pilot repeated the same instruction. The rest of the recording has been released for more than two months. Without the new exchange reported over the weekend, this was the surmise I had as of February 15:

[NTSB] Chairman Homendy makes the point that the maximum altitude for the helicopter when passing over the Memorial Bridge should have been 200 feet. However, at 8:45:30, the instructor pilot told Cpt Lobach that they were at 300 feet altitude at that location. But at 8:44:27 [of a February 1 news conference], the instructor pilot had already noted to Cpt Lobach that the helicopter was at 300 feet and needed to descend to 200. For some reason, this descent never took place, even though the instructor pilot clearly expressed the need for it.

. . . this gives a two-minute span between the Key Bridge and the Memorial Bridge where at least the instructor pilot understood they were at 300 feet, should have been at 200, but there was no discussion about this. If anything, if Cpt Lobach thought they were at 400 feet, she should have seen even more urgency to descend.

. . . The fact that the collision occurred indicates that the helo's altimiters were close enough, and the pilots were fully aware this was too high, whatever the exact numbers may have been. This would also be irrespective of whether the helo crew had parts of the ATC transmissions blocked when they were keying the mic.

The big question as of the February 1 news conference was whether the helicopter crew heard air traffic control's instruction to "go behind" the jet:

The transmission from the tower that instructed the helicopter to go behind the plane may not have been heard by the crew because the pilot may have keyed her radio at the same second and stepped on the transmission from ATC, the NTSB added.

The whole issue at the time was obscured by the possibility that the crew didn't hear this transmission. But now we learn there was a whole 'nother, even more specific, transmission from air traffic control telling the helo to turn left. This must have been available to the NTSB at the same time as they were able to scan the earlier transmission, but it appears that they left it ot of the February 1 news conference, and it's only been leaked now.

But even without that specific transmission in the record, as of February 15, I still came up with what I think is the only reasonable conclusion:

This was a check ride that Cpt Lobach had to pass. During the ride, more than four minutes before the collision, the instructor pilot doing the check noted that the pilot flying was too high, and indeed, although she had four minutes to get down to 200 feet altitude, she never did this. At the same time, the instructor pilot inexplicably told the ATC twice that he had the jet in sight and was maintaining visual separation, which he clearly was not.

Was Cpt Lobach already failing her check ride even before she ran into the jet? If she wasn't, was the instructor pilot complicit in conducting a silly charade that was going to pass her no matter what?

This, of course, doesn't appear to be anything like a full transcript of the helo's CVR from the whole flight. My surmise, during the two-week period before the NTSB would release even a redacted portion of the CVR, was that its contents would prove deeply embarrassing to the Army and the memory of Cpt Lobach. For now, I think I was right, and I would bet there's still more to come.

Looks like I was in fact right. More pressure needs to be put on Chairman Homendy to explain why this transmission was left out of the February 1 news conference.