Thursday, January 30th 2025, 5:17 pm
Following the recent deadly aircraft crash in Washington, D.C., News 9 pilot Jim Gardner, who has been flying for 40 years, shared his insights into aviation technology and the potential causes of the tragedy.
Gardner explained the technology that modern pilots use to avoid collisions, including ADS-B, a mandatory system for most aircraft.
"Most aircraft and it's mandatory today is to have an ADS-B, and ADS-B is run off a transponder," Gardner said. "The transponders in the helicopter squawk the code, sends a signal, and it's interrogated. What it does is tell us if there's another aircraft anywhere near us. It will actually... a voice will come on and say 'Aircraft one o'clock low, aircraft one o'clock high,' so you know to look and find that aircraft."
He said in control towers, air traffic controllers also have warning systems.
"When aircraft get too close together and start to conflict, it will set off an alarm, and it will show the air traffic controller that, 'Oh, these two aircraft are getting too close. I need to separate them to quiet that alarm,'" Gardner said. "There's a lot of technology out there to keep this from happening."
Gardner also highlighted the responsibility pilots have in collision avoidance, especially in busy airspace.
"The last thing in the Federal Aviation Regulations when you start becoming a pilot, the last thing in there says it’s up to the pilot to see and avoid," he said. "You’ve got to see and avoid an aircraft on final... any other aircraft coming in. Those are very busy airports, so they’ve got to sequence everything."
Despite the technological systems in place, Gardner was hesitant to speculate on what went wrong during the crash, noting the need for thorough investigations by authorities.
"I don’t like to speculate at all, because we really need to be thinking about the families and the relatives and the people that died in this," he said. "One of the things that happens when something like this happens, everybody wants answers. They want answers. They want to point the finger at somebody."
Gardner explained that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have all radar and audio recordings from the air traffic controllers, which will help determine what happened.
"The NTSB and the FAA... everything in a tower cab... all that stuff is recorded. They have all the conversations, all the audio, all the radar screens, everything’s recorded. The NTSB will be able to walk in there pretty fast and go through all that."
He also raised the issue of potential conflicts that may have been detected but not acted upon.
"That airliner is equipped with warning systems, so if it was getting close to that aircraft, it had to be going off in the cockpit that there was a conflict coming," Gardner said. "There’s a lot going on, and we don’t know what was going on in those cockpits at the time either. If there was something, a warning light that had come on and they were focused on it."
Gardner noted that the NTSB and FAA would likely be able to provide answers within 30 days.
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