The idea is that you're supposed to train as you fight.
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The ADS-B transponder tells other planes where you are. It doesn't tell you where the other planes are. Turning it off when there are civilian planes doesn't improve your ability to aviate. it just hurts the situational awareness of the civilian planes who aren't supposed to be learning how to fight.
ADS-B goes both directions - you can broadcast, and you can listen. In this case, having it on would've told the Blackhawk crew a plane was way closer than they thought, even if the Blackhawk had broadcasting off.
This sounds very strange:
- What combat situation will require a military aircraft to be flying 30 meters from civilian jet doing routine flights?
- i don’t believe that there really is no technical solution to provide awareness to civilians of the presence and location of military aircraft without altering the pilot’s experience
- if it had told the Blackhawk crew a plane was way closer, the crew would still be alive. That’s like the whole point.
I have no expertise or n the area, but I can’t share the feeling that decision making is extremely poor, and sometimes it actually takes an outsider, who is free from groupthink and cope, to see that a decision is stupid.
> What combat situation will require a military aircraft to be flying 30 meters from civilian jet doing routine flights?
Surprise commandeering a civilian airfield in enemy territory.
A civilian airport is huge both inside, has hectares of land area and thousands of staff.
Given that this never happened to before, requires sneaking thousands of armed men into to USA and does not achieve anything obvious besides general terrorism, why do you believe this is relevant?
And if someone did commandeer an airport, why would you evacuate the president instead of putting him in the panic room and flooding Washington with military and police?
I'd note that it has absolutely happened.
Oh common, Israel vs Uganda?
> The entire operation lasted 53 minutes – of which the assault lasted only 30 minutes
They did not even control of the whole airport, let alone for a prolonged period of time. they got the hostages out and GTFO’d.
> What combat situation will require a military aircraft to be flying 30 meters from civilian jet doing routine flights?
Evacuating leadership during a 9/11 scenario?
> i don’t believe that there really is no technical solution to provide awareness to civilians of the presence and location of military aircraft without altering the pilot’s experience
There is. That’s ADS-B. Which broadcasts your position. So it’s turned off in military aircraft at times, for obvious reasons.
>So it’s turned off in military aircraft at times, for obvious reasons.
Obvious reasons to me are in active military operations against an enemy. Not flying around the airport of the nation’s busiest runway and civilian populated areas.
The article indicates it was a classified mission profile. Some things we keep secret even in peacetime.
Within reason, which is why soldiers train with blank-firing adapters and blanks, and not live ordnance when simulating combat.
Turning ADS-B on/off likely has zero effect on the training/fighting relationship.
The article says the reason is a bit different - that the route they were practicing is (in theory) sensitive information.
> But the Black Hawk did not operate with the technology because of the confidentiality of the mission for which the crew was practicing. That is because ADS-B Out positions can be obtained by anyone with an internet connection, making the system a potential risk to national security.
Seems like leaving it in listen-only mode would be wise, though.
The route is a public/known helicopter flight path. There's nothing secret about it.
Here's a map of the helicopter routes in the area. In this case, they were flying on route 4... https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3851p.ct004873/?r=0.67,0.258,0...
Yes, this group transports VIPs and sometimes does so in secret. This training flight was a "simple" check-ride for the pilot (simple in scare quotes because part of the ride was using the NVGs, which strikes me as fairly ridiculous in the DCA air space).
The route itself, sure.
When this specific helicopter/mission joins the route, how fast it goes, what callsign it uses, when it leaves the route, etc. may not be so public. Or at least be treated as "try not to make it unnecessarily public".
Overclassification is absolutely a thing, too. I recall when the Snowden NSA leaks came out, government employees were still forbidden from reading the documents, even if they were published in the newspapers. Pointless? Yes. But those were the rules.
> Overclassification is absolutely a thing, too. I recall when the Snowden NSA leaks came out, government employees were still forbidden from reading the documents, even if they were published in the newspapers. Pointless? Yes. But those were the rules.
Not just government employees. I was at a defense contractor at the time, and we were also instructed to not read any of the documents online, even for people who were technically cleared to read them through proper channels.
Edit: misremembering, wasn't the Snowden leaks, it was some earlier set of leaks on WikiLeaks
Surely either you are training, or you are on a mission, but in that case you should be competent pilot.
training on a confidential mission is just inviting disaster
Training for a mission tends to mean pretending it's the real mission, as closely as possible. People fire off $100k missiles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrhybKEzb-0) so they know what it'll be like to do it in combat for real.
Competent people still make mistakes. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near DCA airspace, personally.
The ADSB is a simple switch. All it does is broadcast the position. It would have had zero impact on operational readiness. It’s not like they were actually flying “dark” - lights were on, they were in context with ATC, etc.
Listen-only mode would be ADS-B In. Black Hawk's support ADS-B Out.
1. C-17 Globemaster III (transport)
2. C-130 Hercules (transport)
3. KC-135 Stratotanker (tanker)
4. KC-10 Extender (tanker)
5. P-8 Poseidon (maritime patrol/reconnaissance)
6. E-3 Sentry (AWACS)
7. E-8 Joint STARS (reconnaissance)
^ above have ADS-B In capability
This answer on Aviation Stack Exchange did some research into ADS-B statistics for military aircraft: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/107851/military...
TCAS (collision avoidance) can use Mode A/C/S however it depends on if the aircraft has the earlier or later model TCAS: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/90356/does-tcas...
They'll all have both in and out capability. (It's typically the same device.)
Military aircraft have permission from the FAA to turn off one, or both, for fairly obvious reasons. https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/communications-navigati...
I don't think the Black Hawk can support ADS-B In and usually its the surveillance type aircraft that carry it. I updated my post above. There is limited cockpit space in Black Hawks anyways. There might be a specific modernization occurring for a variant of UH-60 that has ADS-B IN, but vast majority do not.
Every aircraft in controlled airspace is required to have ADS-B transponders, and any aircraft with Out has In as well (In is the easy one; it just listens; you can even build your own with a Raspberry Pi - https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build/ and a $36 receiver https://flightaware.store/products/pro-stick). You can buy a portable ADS-B In receiver the size of a wallet for $400 and get traffic alerts on an iPad. https://flywithsentry.com/buy
My dad's little four seat hobby plane has both In/Out. You can track him on FlightAware as a result, because it's continually broadcasting its location; it's certainly not rare or sophisticated equipment.
Here's a military Blackhawk toodling around as we speak: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae27fc
https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/blackhawk-ads-b-was-off-...
> The Army Black Hawk helicopter crew involved in the midair collision with an American Eagle CRJ700 last January at Reagan National Airport had turned off ADS-B because they were practicing a classified flight profile, according to a New York Times investigation.
We are both in agreement that ADS-B OUT is required. But, I am referring to ADS-B IN which most military aircraft do not have as a matter of practice. If ADS-B IN was running in addition to ADS-B OUT on both aircraft then it might have provided additional situational awareness assuming the Black Hawk pilot was operating the helicopter properly. The original comment was about putting the receiver in listening mode and that's simply not possible with the Black Hawk.
I have been running an ADS-B receiver at home for 6 years via PiAware along with an AIS receiver. So yes, low cost :)
The route they were training for was to evac government personnel during an emergency (terrorism, incoming attack, etc.). ADS-B is live location whereas transponder is delayed. In a real scenario, you wouldn’t want to be transmitting live location, since whatever the emergency is likely involves targeting of VIP government personnel. But in training, that would not effect your training, since the ADS-B is for others benefit, and doesn’t change your situational awareness or capability.
edit: To add and make clear, the route will be known for a training or real situation, but it will be delayed. So for training, turning off the ADS-B does not protect the route information and that is why there is no reason to fly with it off for training.
If you train to turn the ADS-B on, there's a decent chance you'll turn it on during the real thing. That's the point of training.
You are insisting that this was a training thing. But realistically, military just doesn’t like to be tracked and would rather put everyone else at risk.
I’m not insisting - it’s stated in the article.
We shouldn’t take the article at face value. Reporters are lazy and don’t do in-depth reporting. It’s to drive clicks.
They were coming back from Langley. I'm told it was just to "refuel."
On one hand, I've got a reputable news organization publishing an article with specific information from experts, pilots, etc.
On the other hand, I've got an internet rando who once told me to Google up MGTOW saying "I'm told".
Which one would you find credible?
It wasn't coming back from Langley. That's misinformation from people who don't know the subtleties of what's displayed by flight tracking sites. For more info see https://x.com/aeroscouting/status/1884983390392488306
I get that but in DC airspace near Reagan?
Yes, you're right, lousy airspace design. Flown perfectly the chopper should have been no closer than 75' from the airplane if everyone is flying exactly on altitude (which never happens, you have to give at least +/-50'). Couple that with the difficulty of picking out an airplane against the hundreds of backlights of the valley and disaster was inevitable.
The FAA says that I can't fly closer than 500 ft to a shed in the desert, but a Blackhawk is fine to be within 75 ft of a part 121 airliner in a bravo.
Yeah but the Blackhawk requested visual separation. It shouldn't have, it couldn't tell the difference between the CRJ and any number of lights around it. Anyway, at that point the request was granted and you see how it ended.
I recall the tower establishing that they could maintain visual separation, not a request being made from the helicopter. My point is that if everything had gone perfectly, as little as 75 ft of separation would be provided. This is unacceptable in this context for reasons should have been clear ahead of time, but very unfortunately are made clearer in hindsight.
Let's refresh recollections. TFA: "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.” [...] "Visual separation approved,” the controller replied."
There's no ambiguity here.
This doesn't really address my point, but the ambiguity arises from the fact that there are often implicit understandings tunneled through standard phraseology that may or may not be intended. We don't know exactly what the Blackhawk crew said. Clearly tower thought they'd be staying clear of the CRJ, but the Blackhawk crew (to some degree) thought they'd be staying clear of some other lights in the area.
Regardless, 91.119 applies (harshly, and unambiguously, in some cases) to significantly safer operations than 75 ft visual separation from passenger aircraft in bravo airspace. That is absurd. Failure was built into the design from the beginning.
Its a switch in the cockpit. Does train as you fight mean you gotta hit the chaff dispenser aswell? Wheres the line?
Almost certainly moving after this fiasco.
Wasting innocent civilians out of sheer stupidity, checks out.