Not A Conspiracy

There are many people who want to make the place crash in DC into some sort of deliberate attack. There is a saying- Don’t ascribe to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by incompetence. There is a video that I will embed below, where an instructor pilot explains how easily it would be to have such an accident with a relatively inexperienced pilot in crowded airspace. Some of the items he discusses are:

Her 500 hours of flight experience is laughably low. He points out that 500 hours is long enough for a pilot to THINK they know enough to handle everything, even when they don’t. I know from my own experience as a SCUBA diver that this is the case. There is a point, right around 40 to 50 logged dives, that a diver becomes confident in their abilities, but that usually comes to an end when the diver gets themselves into a situation that they shouldn’t have been in because they were overconfident in their abilities. That is where accidents happen. I think that was the case here.

Military people don’t have as much experience as their civilian counterparts. For example, the Captain of the last cruise ship I was on had been sailing as an officer for 45 years, and had been a captain for 25 of them. How many Navy captains have that level of experience? Zero, that’s how many. The same goes for pilots- the captain of a commercial airplane has thousands of hours as a copilot before taking command, then has thousands more as a captain. Your average airline pilot with 5 years’ experience will have between 3,000 and 5,000 hours of flight time.

He also says that the helicopter was going too fast for the conditions. When a helicopter is moving quickly, it is tilted forward, and in the UH60, this limits visibility of aircraft that are in front of you and at your same altitude.

He points out that the altimeter may have been set incorrectly, which an inexperienced pilot may easily forget to do, and this could account for the incorrect altitude.

It was a cascade of minor errors that an inexperienced pilot would make, and doesn’t require a conspiracy or a deliberate attack. I know that the video is half an hour long, but it is worth watching if you find this sort of thing at all interesting.