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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37412 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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A plane crashed into an army helicopter over Reagan airport and everyone died. Of course, before the black boxes can be dug up come the recriminations. Trump blamed DEI; posters here may be familiar with the case of the FAA hiring lawsuit over a 'biographical questionnaire' designed to increase diversity in air traffic controllers. This leads to the always fun "please let it be a _____" game played by ideologues on both sides. Why not just let a sober investigation determine the causal factors first? And of course you can't draw conclusions about a 'competency crisis' simply from headline grabbing anecdotes. The point of moving away from DEI and such systems was to tamper down racial tensions instead of focusing even more attention on it.

I consider this the equivilent of blaming global warming whenever a hurricane or wildfire hits. You can tell a convincing story about how these processes increase the risk from their associated disasters, but it's still pretty nebulous whether any given event can be attributed to them.

The takeaway for me is to avoid operating helicopters in crowded airspace. I think this should retroactively update our assesment of the FAA's airspace restrictions in response to Hurricane Helene.

Not really. Emergency operations have a very difficult risk tolerance than regular ones, as well as much lower stakes (a handful of guys in a helicopter crash they signed up for vs a passenger plane full of people who didn't)

I went flying in a small plane in San Francisco recently, and it was freaky how close they let us get to jets full of hundreds of people just because the pilot had some sort of instrument rating. Multiply engine/control/pilot failure in small aircraft by the number of SFO passenger-flights a day, and you get a much higher expected fatality rate than a few weeks of letting people fly supplies into small towns.

If you were in a Class B, you had TCAS.

I hate to be the technocrat nerd here, but TCAS is literally magic -- it directly spits instructions for both planes to avoid a collision entirely autonomously. It's such magic that the FAA has instructed pilots to immediately obey its commands and then when possible inform ATC.

According to this Reuters article, TCAS does not function below 1100 feet, which is where this crash occurred.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=huVFZ__q2rI

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