The DC Plane CRASH Is WORSE Than You Think

0:00 on January 29th at 8:48 p.m. disaster struck when American Airlines flight 5342 collided with a Blackhawk helicopter doing a routine training exercise it's really tragic because there was complete loss of life the 60 passengers on board the four crew on board the American Airline flight as well as three Army Personnel in the helicopter and there were no survivors obviously there's going to be a lot that we're going to learn from this during the investigation but while it's fresh on our minds there's actually one really important point that I like to make so let's see if we can't figure this out together I'm Ricky and this is tubit Vinci so this is the flight in question American Airlines flight 5342 it was actually operated by American Eagle their Regional carrier and it was a crj

0:46 701 ER Regional Jet took off from wiah with a flight time of about 2 hours and 11 minutes and everything was fine all the way until it reached the Washington DCA Airport airspace now this is some of the most restricted and controlled airspace on Earth and as a result they have really tight quds they have to fly through now this airplane was operating with a clearance for landing on Runway 33 so it's coming this way for Northbound traffic it gets even more difficult as you have to operate along the pomac and then kind of bank at the very end but they were coming in from the south and on Final Approach right around 148 UTC which is is Greenwich Mean Time and that's about 5 hours ahead

1:32 of the Eastern Standard Time right about here the last data transmits and then we lose everything now I wanted to show you this video um obviously this is a little bit disturbing because it involves an explosion but we'll just take a look here so this is from the zoomed out view from Earth cam out here a couple of kilometers away from the airport this little dot here is the helicopter the Blackhawk this is the American Airlines flight on Final Approach and this is a secondary airplane which we'll talk about here in a second but you can see that that dot kind of converges and that's where the explosion happens now there's a zoomed in view here so this is a little bit easier to see so here's that Blackhawk it does have lights on the aircraft the American Airlines plane is really bright because we're looking right down at it it's headed for this

2:18 Runway over here and the landing gear lights run so these are the landing lights that come on on the nose landing gear and it's on it's really bright and there's actually a plane taking off here as well so if we look here and move it ahead this is the helicopter and the helicopter is heading right to it and they collided in midair this is a picture of the wreckage of the airplane you can see that the the helicopter and the plane are kind of entangled you know First Responders have been hard at work trying to recover what they can they they were in the pomac in the river in freezing temperatures trying to trying to see if there's anybody that they could rescue but unfortunately it was um not the case there was no um there were no survivors if we look here this is a a little diagram of the the route that the

3:05 helicopter was on the Blackhawk and this here was the American Airlines flight again following their very tight corridors and some of the most congested airspace in America they Bank on their Final Approach and this is the runway here that they're headed on and the Collision happened right around here before I get into why this is so congested which is going to be most of this video Let's just kind of review what else we know this is looking at the minutes before the crash and this is playing you know not exactly real time but you can see that these are the different inbound flights that are coming in and you can just see there's flights taking off there's flights coming in and um that's when the crash happened over

3:52 here and you can see that every plane is being diverted now all these planes have been told to go to other airports and you can kind of see that uh the airport has been shut down and nothing else happened after that again uh 148 UTC is 8:48 uh Eastern Standard Time which is when this happened this crash didn't happen on the runways it didn't actually affect the airport right but ATC air traffic control and The Operators of of all these airports are trained to immediately divert traffic because we just don't know what happened it could have been you know excessive Bird activity and a bird strike it could have been a midair Collision as the this was right lightning strikes so we don't know what it is so the best thing to do is divert all traffic until we have some sense of we're okay to restore flight

4:39 operations now there are some weird questions that people are going to get into this video I want to focus on something different that I'm going to get to here in a minute but I will touch on some of the questions that remain one of them is that the corridor that the Blackhawk was operating in has really tight restrictions on the mean sea level that they can fly at like the ceiling of of operations and it's normally around 200 ft and the reason is because we have air traffic potentially coming taking off and landing above and below that and this particular Blackhawk report said we're flying closer to 300 350 ft which would have put it on a uh Collision Course that could have potentially been false reading in the instruments with the altimeter we don't we just don't know but the way to look at this is

5:24 first you have to kind of look at the different things there's the environment right there's the Machinery there's the machines and then there's the people here in terms of environment the weather was good winds were around 15 or 20 knots which is not a problem for either the helicopter or the aircraft and so the weather wasn't really an issue the machines didn't appear to have any issues there were no maydays or any other warnings issued by any airplanes in the vicinity at the time and as you saw the American Airlines flight was on Final it was on glide slope it was coming in it was holding a steady course and seemingly the the helicopter seemed to have collided with it now obviously the black box hasn't been recovered just yet as the time of this recording which is January 30th luckily the part of the pic where this all happened is pretty shallow so they're going to be able to get in there and look at that but

6:10 preliminarily what we do know was that there was some air traffic control communication they told the Blackhawk do you see the aircraft that's in your in your pattern and the Blackhawk pilot responded yeah we we got them but if you remember in that video the really tragic part they might have been referring to this other aircra CFT up here so um they might have missed what was right in front of them especially because while that looks really bright to us that's because we're looking right at the landing gear lights it wouldn't be quite as bright from the from the pilot and uh they might have been talking about this plane over here I actually got my private pilot license in 20 2008 I let it laps I didn't keep it it was it was a little bit stressful but I really wanted to fly I actually wanted to be a Navy fighter pilot at the time and so when I

6:57 got my private pilot license I remember thinking just how stressful it is to be up there especially if you don't do it very often I was still pretty amateur probably had about 50 or 60 flat hours but while I was up there there was so much to go through right between Communications with ATC all your flaps and landing gear uh settings and everything else making sure your conf configurations are clean and then flying the airplane and keeping visual flight rules so the Blackhawk was flying in visual flight rules which means that they were responsible for visually making connections to what was going on and not just flying by the instrument which is what you do normally at higher elevations and everything else when you're flying one of the first things they tell you one of the scariest things is a m Collision um because you can try this experiment at home take something

7:43 far away and look at it like an Arms Reach like an Arms Reach away right you'll see that if you take it now and put it at half the distance from Arms Reach it barely seems any bigger it's very imperceptible and then if you take in half again and all of a sudden the final little bit is when it becomes really big right it's just this the angle that which you're looking at so if you see an airplane at five knots or so it looks like there's little blip in the sky all of a sudden now it's at 2 and a half knots it's come halfway the distance between you and it it's imperceptible almost it doesn't look that much bigger and then all of a sudden when it gets really close it just becomes massive all at once right that is one of the real hard perception things that make it difficult to fly especially in VFR flight rules um it's

8:29 It's Tricky he that could have been that could have been a a mistake or something that happened again we'll know more but we do know that the air traffic control was aware of this kind of Collision Course told the pilot about it the pilot confirmed yeah you know the aircraft is in sight and then by the time any further Communications happened um it was too late so we'll know more though when the blackbox data is recovered I wanted to make this video because what it normally happens is there's a lot of interest in things like this when it happens but the NTSB who's now on the scene you know they left let the First Responders tackle potential for saving lives first and now they've had one full day now to get into this they've started investigations and we will have more answers on what happened and what we could do to mitigate this right um but the reality is I used to actually work

9:15 on this mishap response team for the Navy back I think the last one I did was in 2011 there was a F-18 crash in El Centro so I remember kind of the the adrenaline and the rush of getting there and looking at what happened and trying to piece things together but then it was you know it was like five or six months until we had our report and by then people barely even remembered what happened and that's going to happen here as well so while this is fresh on everyone's mind I wanted to bring something to your attention check out this post here on X I just saw this and um I've had actually the same exact reaction Kyle selski says I took this video 6 days ago leaving Reagan International Airport and thought it was kind of crazy seeing all these Choppers right next to us I wonder if it was

10:00 something like this that caused the Collision tonight I've actually flown into Reagan and to the DC area in general probably 20 or 25 times I used to work out of a place called pungen River Maryland here this is um the flight test center for the for the Navy so I'm I used to fly in and out of this airport quite a lot and I had the same reaction that Kyle from X had every time I flown to DCA it was it was two things at the same time one was amazing there was never an airport I've ever seen where you'll see I I remember seeing v-22s one time or helicopters military planes and you're just flying in the middle of it it feels like you're on Safari of exotic cool aircraft it's cool but then I have that same thought it's

10:46 like man this is kind of insane there's a lot of activity happening civilian airliners used what's called VF which is very high frequency for communications military normally uses UF which is ultra high frequency for Communications and so there's this orchestrated dance of air traffic controllers who have to keep all these different things in mind and keep everybody safe I want to I want to just show you how close this is to everything here is the White House okay this is the White House right here okay we're talking about 5,000 m so about 3 miles from the White House right here's the capital over here right about 3 miles and it's even closer to the Pentagon so CA which is Ronald Reagan International

11:31 Airport is about like under a mile and 3/4 from the Pentagon so what we've done is we've built this airport and we I'll tell you why they built this here in a minute we built this airport in the heart of the American Military government apparatus at the very heart of it this is where we have civilian flights flying in and out of about 12 million passengers a year fly through DCA and to me that is kind of insane I actually fly United so the United Hub is Washington Dallas International Airport over here about 20 M 25 miles away from DC I bring this up because I was actually just there I went

12:18 to Pax River Maryland in December of 2024 just a month and a half ago to my Old Navy boss's retirement party and I flew into Dallas I made the huge mistake of landing at 6:00 p.m. and it took me an hour and 10 minutes to travel 12 miles this gets to the reason why people prefer flying into DCA it is very centrally located you can imagine all the dignitaries government employees contractors military personnel if you were going to pick to fly in you'd want to fly to DCA because it's so conveniently located also one little story that I heard was that the crew of the Blackhawk was a crew of three so um normally that's the minimum size you need that's totally fine to fly a Blackhawk with three people but normally

13:05 there's a crew of four they were doing a a training exercise to evacuate important Personnel military personnel dentaries whoever the case might be and so they were using night vision goggles which do help you to see better in low light conditions but I mean this is a very highly lit area it could potentially be uh dist distracting or potentially even harder to see and your situation awareness your periphery your you know your field of view could be compromised and stuff one of the really staggering statistics that I read recently is that one and three of our military personnel that that pass away it happens in training or in exercises and not actually in the field so one and three that's an insane number and this

13:50 ties into why I think there's a bigger problem that we probably need to address to me the fact that we have this civilian airport two under 2 miles from the Pentagon and under 3 miles from the White House is absolutely insane I can't believe this airport was ever made um let me share a little bit of perspective with you this is Beijing all right the the the capital of of China and they're they have two airports actually but they're about on average 20 25 miles from the heart of the capital right and I don't know why I picked Beijing and and at Russia this is the Russian airport but similarly about 30 km away

14:36 so this is their airport and this is the heart of Moscow in in Russia 30 mil apart right that to me sounds like a healthy separation and that would be dullas International like I mentioned um which is a United Hub that I fly into all the time I probably fly through Dallas five or six times a year and it is almost exactly 25 Mi yeah about 35 km 25 mi from DC so I would propose that we give DCA to the government to the military DCA should be used for dignitaries military personnel Joint Chiefs of Staff the president it should be a military operational Airfield and we should not be doing civilian flights into DCA this helps everyone involved first of all I mean like terrorist

15:22 attacks and stuff after 9/11 they really tighten the air corridors into DCA so you don't just fly over stuff you have to fly along the p you have all these really strict flight rules but we're still flying miles from the heart of the American government right so this would be advantageous for the military because obviously you can operate you could do training exercises or you can fly people in and out and not contend with constant civilian traffic civilian traffic is constant right these planes are coming in every 5 minutes whereas military traffic is much lower and it's also really high priority so when they need that airspace they'd have it and it also helps us because we wouldn't have such close restrictions like civilians flying into DC wouldn't have this problem but the major pain is traffic the reason why

16:09 people fly into DCA is because this Beltway the 495 that runs all the way along here along DC and all these arteries are some of the worst traffic I've ever seen I live in San Diego I live near La I drive through La all the time I'll tell you this is probably as bad as traffic in America gets it's really really bad and that's why if you flew in Dallas you'd have a huge time so here's my solution to that we have a boring tunnel underground that connects dullas to DC and if you want to make it even easier we can keep dca's airport infrastructure for parking for car rentals and the terminals and the kiosks and stuff but when you check into your flight or or you know you're ready to go you go through security you go underground and you take a bullet train

16:56 going 100 miles an hour get you over to dullas and out of Dallas now I've thought about this a lot because like I mentioned before I can't believe DCA was approved and operational I like it's hard to imagine that um just from a national security perspective from from like Air Management that it just seems like a a tough pill to swallow so I I've kind of pulled this up and thought about this a little bit here's a list of the busiest airports in America okay number one Hartsville Jackson Atlanta the massive Delta uh Delta Airlines hub right you have LA's number two LAX okay Dallas Fort Worth all the way down here is DCA right Ronald Reagan the the airport in question and it carries about

17:41 12 million passengers a year interestingly San Diego which is a single Runway airport San Diego is the busiest single Runway airport I think in the world it carries around the same 12 million people and Dallas is even less than San Diego at 12 million 73,000 people I bring this up because Dallas has the potential to take on that extra 12 million so their 12 plus other 12 24 million passengers that would put it in line with San Francisco International Airport um Again by the way SFO is 15 miles south of SF it's not in SF that's a really common thing it's not it's not really that common that you have airports like right in the Heart of the City and it's not just any City this is

18:28 DC this is the capital it's a Center of America and um we could we could make that shift now if we did that all we would have to contend with and the real drawback to that is of course the traffic which nobody wants to deal with I've dealt with it just dealt with it a month ago but if we had a underground bullet train basically connecting DCA as it is today to dullas and then we re invest and we upgrade Dulles which as I'm making this point I have to admit I absolutely dislike Dulles it's a horrible airport um it is old there's really bad infrastructure like when you check in here up here you have these old diesel big trucks that take you to your

19:13 gate which is insane any modern airport would have like a mono rail or some sort of automated rail system and you don't have to burn fossil fuels it's crazy but yeah it is loud obnoxious things you're contending with cross traffic and everything else it's a huge mess but what better reason to actually upgrade this now the other reason why dullas is a good option for this is they have over two mile long runways and they have two of them here and then a third one over here for shorter planes so like that uh that Bombardier Regional Jet would have maybe even be able to fit in this one but you have room for the bigger aircraft you know a380s can land here for example and uh it's it's well poised in terms of land and because of all these runways like I mentioned they have the same amount of yearly passengers as Sandy go a one Runway airport so they

20:01 potentially have the capacity to increase this to that level so if we did that we would move the nation's capital airport we could rename it every time I say Dallas as a United flyer I this is an airport I contend with often I fly through Dallas all the time everyone thinks I'm saying Dallas and I'm saying and I'm having a stroke or something yeah I'm shocked actually how low how how few flight operations they actually have we rename it call it DC national airport or call it you know whoever's Trump International it doesn't matter okay we do that and then we have a bullet train system and we keep DCA for the military but we leave parking right so you can park your car right here in DCA hop in the bullet train go take off and we have our you

20:47 know car rentals and all the other infrastructure in place so you get the best of both worlds you're right here in the city you're right in the heart of DC without having this congestion problem as a designer that's what I would do in my mind I'm not sure who at fault or whatever I'm not really looking at that I look at this as a systematic problem if we have military aircraft we have you know transport helicopters fixed Wing rotary I mean this complex web of military airplanes mixed with civilian airliners we're praying that everything goes right now ATC Air Traffic Control has immense pressure to keep up with all that's happening then we have the pilots who need to know hey traffic is in sight but which plane am I looking at the right plane did I get mistaken to thinking yep airplane you know traffic

21:32 Insight I got it but actually there's there's a plane right here that I didn't I didn't know we have to contend with the fact that we could potentially have a conflict and have issue with any part of this chain and that's just a risk that we're going to keep taking I'm honestly pretty amazed that nothing has happened in decades here this airport this it's a testament to the incredible men and women who run ATC the FAA all these Pilots all the military Pilots all these people who've made this work but this is a bad system other countries don't do this you don't have civilian airports and runways and flight operations miles from your military Hub and center from the White House and to me it doesn't make sense I could not tell you how this has ever been allowed

22:20 to be and after 911 the best idea that they came up with was to change the corridors and to bring flights away from it's just not not enough I think we could do this and I think we could get started now we could start a massive overhaul of dullas which is an airport that absolutely needs to be renovated but it has the land and the runways to do it and we could make this less likely to happen this is air travel one of my passions like I mentioned I even have done mishap response work for the Navy I had my private pilot license I love airplanes more than almost anything else in engineering it's one of my huge passions and so I take these things very personally when they happen it's always a tragedy we uh hearts are out thoughts and prayers with everybody who's been affected by this it's really tragic and

23:06 um we'll know more you know in terms of the fine minute details but I'm not even thinking about the fine minute details when we have this massive thing uh covering over us the fact that this Runway and this airport situation just does not make sense I understand the traffic but we can solve that right the engineering me says underground bullet trains running on a track right just back and forth back and forth all day 5 minutes apart just have them zipping back and forth makes that easy and then when you pop up your head out you're in DCA just like you were before but now you're 25 miles away from the heart of the capital right like Beijing does it like Moscow does it like most people do I think that is a systemic solution that

23:53 we should 100% be employing thank you guys so much appreciate you uh don't forget check out tv.com you can support what we do as a member uh we have courses we have giveaways a lot of stuff always happening uh we really appreciate all of you and God bless we'll talk soon