AA regional jet - Blackhawk midair - Washington DC - 29 Jan 2025

The flight path did look erratic. I gather rotorcraft are supposed to stay over the river below 250'

Hmm, maybe the solution is to replace the UH-60s with MV-22s, spend more printed money!
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
Do governments employees generally have these sort of privacy rights? I mean you chose to work for the government. I think your identity, position. salary, and all official communications should be a matter of public record, unless appropriately classified.
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So why shouldn’t a public employee have the same personal privacy rights as a private employee? Regardless, I think in this case the delay in ID-ing this lady is more on compassionate grounds than anything else and has been done before. And I’m sure you would understand if your daughter was tragically killed in a very public manner and wanted some time to privately process that loss.

Winthrop said:
My understanding had been that warrant officers were created by the English Royal Navy in the 13th century.
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Except we’re talking about the US Army in this context. But what wikipedia doesn’t tell you, is in the early 1960’s when the Army’s 11th Air Assault project proved that that air mobility was viable, the Army was going to need 100s of helicopter pilots quick. So they revamped the Army's WO program to include aviation and more specifically pilots. If I had to guess, 80%+ of all Army pilots are WOs and have been since at least 1965.

Winthrop said:
As to a politician, you would not consider secretaries to be politicians because they are not elected?
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Yes.

Winthrop said:
Also, it appears the person flying was a student with some 500 hours. Per an article in the Guardian: "the . . . instructor pilot had more than 1,000 hours of flight time,
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You’ll find 500 hours is an average amount for a person who is not flying full time and 1000 hours is average for those who do within the Army. And as reported in other sources the flight was an annual requalifying flight for that officer and not “student” training. The Army uses UH-72s for actual student training at a completely different facility.

PeterNSteinmetz said:
It also appears the helicopter was flying off the approved route. Too far west and 100’ high. Evidently if they had been on the approved route they would not have struck this aircraft on its final approach course.
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I believe there have been no factual accounts that is true. The media and other sources are using ADSB and other similar data to make those assumptions which are known not to be accurate in this format. As I noted above, both aircraft were in contact with ATC and most probably if the rumors hold true the helicopter would have not hit the jet if they had been looking at the correct aircraft regardless of the physical location.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
Do governments employees generally have these sort of privacy rights? I mean you chose to work for the government. I think your identity, position. salary, and all official communications should be a matter of public record, unless appropriately classified.
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I think, under some circumstances, such rights will be granted.

Last year, the future head of a federal board publicly named several federal employees who he claimed were contributing to "inefficiency," These people received phone and email harassment, including death threats.

Several days ago, the POTUS blamed the crash on DEI...and of course, one of the pilots involved was a woman. How'd you like to be her grieving parents when Fox News publishes her name? What kind of phone calls, what kind of emails, are THEY going to get?

I see it as the Army trying to protect that family. We normally don't publicize the names of service people to avoid terrorist actions. This is just basically the same thing.

Ron Wanttaja
 
anonflyer1 said:
So why shouldn’t a public employee have the same personal privacy rights as a private employee? Regardless, I think in this case the delay in ID-ing this lady is more on compassionate grounds than anything else and has been done before. And I’m sure you would understand if your daughter was tragically killed in a very public manner and wanted some time to privately process that loss.
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I definitely understand the family’s desires. And I think in the case of private businesses it should be up to the business and family.

I also think that in the case of government however there is a strong interest in transparency which overrides such compassionate considerations.

Already we have much speculation that she was a DEI hire and consequently erred where a more capable pilot would not have. These are legitimate concerns of the public which can be answered by full public disclosure of identity and service records.

So I think we are in general better off as a society if government employees just understand that they give up such rights to privacy when they choose to take that sort of job.

anonflyer1 said:
I believe there have been no factual accounts that is true. The media and other sources are using ADSB and other similar data to make those assumptions which are known not to be accurate in this format. As I noted above, both aircraft were in contact with ATC and most probably if the rumors hold true the helicopter would have not hit the jet if they had been looking at the correct aircraft regardless of the physical location.
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I think that the error may well also have been not looking at the proper aircraft. I am also not sure we will ever definitely know what was going on in that cockpit since all of them are deceased.

I think what is clear overall is that the government running these types of flights and training for them has now killed 64 US civilians. An important question is - is the risk of this sort of thing worth it? I think not.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
Already we have much speculation that she was a DEI hire and consequently erred where a more capable pilot would not have. These are legitimate concerns of the public which can be answered by full public disclosure of identity and service records.
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According to the WSJ Capt. Lobach's last position was "in the Biden White House as a social aide, as well as a certified sexual harassment and assault response advocate."

And I think the "little bird" who said "she" was an "O-3" a couple days ago was vindicated.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
Do governments employees generally have these sort of privacy rights? I mean you chose to work for the government. I think your identity, position. salary, and all official communications should be a matter of public record, unless appropriately classified.
Click to expand...


There is absolutely not any privacy right working for the government on the part of the individual. In some cases data may be withheld, but that is not a right held by the individual, but rather a choice made by the regime.
 
Winthrop said:
So for instance neither the Secretary of State nor the dog murdering Secretary of DHS are politicians according to you. Guess you can define it that way if you want. Not sure many people in the "Beltway" would agree.
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As I noted above, anonflyer1’s definition is also at variance with Merriam-Webster. So long as the meaning of the term is properly defined in context, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. The original complaint about this type of mission can easily be re-stated as “why are we performing this kind of mission for politicians and other high level government officials?”
 
Another thing in the Reuters article got me thinking about this. It mentions the altitude being shown on the tower for the helicopter as being 200’. Now I suspect that is the altitude from the transponder return. And if so, couldn’t that just be the Kollsman setting in the helicopter being off by 0.1” for 100’ ?

This also raises questions about the design of this procedure. Was the vertical separation just 100’ ?
 
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I think we can let Gilbert and Sullivan explain.
 
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