Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
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Frens, I was a pilot from 1984 to my retirement in 2016 and still retain my licenses and ratings today. I have provided flight instruction to beginning pilots and jet pilots. All those years I never broke an airplane or had anyone get hurt or killed while i was responsible for them.
With respect to the DCA crash I believe there were two primary errors made, and I am concerned.
One, the CRJ pilots should not have accepted the controller's request to switch their landing runway from runway 1 to runway 33.
Two, the controller should not have put the pilots in the position of having to make that decision.
The controller had an aircraft set up to depart on runway 1 prior to the arrival of the CRJ and for some reason the timing wasn't working out. Maybe departure control wasn't ready to accept that aircraft, maybe the aircraft was slow to get into position, maybe the controller got behind the curve because he was working two positions at the same time.
Regardless, this is why the controller requested the CRJ to change runways. Without this request the accident doesn't happen.
The CRJ pilots had their landing approach configured for runway 1. Accepting the change to runway 33 on short notice disrupted the planned, stabilized approach to landing.
Flying at perhaps 120 mph (two miles a minute) that close to the airport does not give them enough time to prepare properly and most likely put at least one set of eyes inside the airplane instead of looking outside for traffic.
Certainly as professional pilots they could pull it off, but it turned a standard straight in approach into an unplanned, visual circling approach. Circling approaches are much more demanding (the rules change), and in the congested, highly regulated DC airspace the level of awareness and preparation increases the required performance level.
Someone should have said "...this isn't going to work out..." but didn't.
Controller error? Pilot error? Either one of them could have said "...let's do something else...". The fact that neither did is extremely troubling to me as a pilot.
+1 Always important to have a pilot’s perspective and knowledge about the details and how things work and are supposed to go.