So apparently ADS-B was turned off on that helicopter that crashed into the American airlines plane in DC. Maybe early to assess blame here, but they weren’t using technology that could have prevented this accident? Wow.
Mick West from Metabunk did an analysis of what possibly went wrong, which was quite compelling.
Right, but that’s all based on visual sighting. If ADS-B were “on” in the helicopter, wouldn’t both planes be shown on screen in the helicopter?
I don’t know – others will. I just wanted to mention that vid, and perhaps it supports the idea that the pilot was not using instrumentation which would have helped.
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We cant back seat it yet. The FAA already alluded to audible proof of TCAS warns and cockpit interactions they’ll not disclose yet.
But NVGs will limit PoV and brightness of displays straight away. The right people will answer all the questions eventually.
I estimate that 7 of 10 military aircraft do not turn on their ADS-S system. The 12th Aviation’s primary mission is to provide executive transport, aeromedical evacuation, and operational aviation support to senior government officials, including the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and other senior military leaders. Turning on a system that allows anyone in the public to track our leaders who are in a helicopter or plane is not a smart move. Now, sure they were not traveling with anyone but crew, it is still not something they turn on much and this unit flies along Route 1 (the route that follows the river past Reagan runway 33) all the time and every day. This was not something new to them. It now becomes a question of why the helicopter flew over the ceiling by 100 feet. Was it pilot or mechanical? I flew Black Hawks for 20 years in the Army. Not having the system turned on that allows you to be tracked is not uncommon at all.
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Actually though, you can track Air Force 1 with POTUS on board. It apparently does transmit ADS-B. When Trump came out to LAX a week or so ago, I could see it on my local ADS-B receiver screen (SkyAware). Granted you can’t see it on the global FlightAware map, but you can see it locally.
You can quite clearly see the helicopter in question on trackers via mlat. So it had ModeS and not as dark as some media headlines suggest.
Just not the gps integration for precision. But that close ground based systems can likely get a query/ response.
And at least one of them still got ‘traffic traffic’ on the recordings.