By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
Black Hawk helicopter pilot Captain Rebecca Lobach, 28, failed to heed her male flight instructor’s warning to turn away from an oncoming passenger plane before crashing into the aircraft over the Potomac River earlier this year, killing 67.
That’s according to leaked results from the National Transportation Safety Board-led investigation into the deadly crash, which were shared on Sunday by the New York Times.
As they flew south along the Potomac River on the gusty night of Jan. 29, the crew aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter attempted to execute a common aviation practice. It would play a role in ending their lives.
Shortly after the Black Hawk passed over Washington’s most famous array of cherry trees, an air traffic controller at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport alerted the crew to a regional passenger jet in its vicinity. The crew acknowledged seeing traffic nearby.
One of the pilots then asked for permission to employ a practice called “visual separation.” That allows a pilot to take control of navigating around other aircraft, rather than relying on the controller for guidance.
“Visual separation approved,” the controller replied.
The request to fly under those rules is granted routinely in airspace overseen by controllers. Most of the time, visual separation is executed without note. But when mishandled, it can also create a deadly risk — one that aviation experts have warned about for years.
On Jan. 29, the Black Hawk crew did not execute visual separation effectively. The pilots either did not detect the specific passenger jet the controller had flagged, or could not pivot to a safer position. Instead, one second before 8:48 p.m., the helicopter slammed into American Airlines Flight 5342, which was carrying 64 people to Washington from Wichita, Kan., killing everyone aboard both aircraft in a fiery explosion that lit the night sky over the river.
[…] Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course. […]The crew’s mission was to conduct an annual evaluation of Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, who joined the Army in 2019, to ensure that her helicopter piloting skills were up to par.
That night, her assignment was to navigate the conditions of a scenario in which members of Congress or other senior government officials might need to be carried out of the nation’s capital during an attack.
Captain Lobach was the highest-ranking soldier on the helicopter, but Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, who was acting as her instructor, had flown more than twice as many hours over time.
The Times buried the lede at the very end of their story:
Instead of seeing and avoiding Flight 5342, Captain Lobach continued flying straight at it.
Investigators might never know why. There is no indication that she was suffering from health issues at the time or that a medical event affected her during those final moments aboard the Black Hawk, according to friends and people familiar with the crash investigation, which included autopsies and performance log reviews.
Two seconds after the controller’s cut out instruction about passing behind the jet, Warrant Officer Eaves replied, affirming for the second time that the Black Hawk saw the traffic. “PAT two-five has the aircraft in sight. Request visual separation,” he said.
“Vis sep approved,” the controller replied.
It was their last communication.
The Black Hawk was 15 seconds away from crossing paths with the jet. Warrant Officer Eaves then turned his attention to Captain Lobach.
He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank.
Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet.
She did not turn left.
Did she freeze up like a deer in the headlights or did she girlboss her way into the annals of aviation disaster history?
Regardless, the “far right” warned for decades that DEI was going to cause Americans to DIE and now we’re just living through the tragic comedy.
The Trump administration has done some to push back against this lunacy but they’re not doing nearly enough.
No one on either side wants to admit the “extremists” were right.