risk

I have to fly tomorrow morning — 6:40am departure time, and I’m a member of the well-traveled dad school of thought on TSA, so I’m planning on being there at 4:30am — which means I have to fly today. When you sleep as unpredictably as I do, the only sleep you can really hazard on a day like this is a mid-evening nap. I might pass out around 8pm and wake back up at 10pm, but that’s really neither here nor there; it’s all going to happen “today” to me. It’s the last day before Spring Break on the academic calendar tomorrow, and I do not have class, so I’m getting out of Dodge [1] ahead of schedule.

I’ve got a pretty relaxed travel agenda. I’m going through O’Hare, which is always a real pain in a pinch, but it’s not so much of a pinch this time. Weather doesn’t seem too bad, though I know better than to think that the weather affects us meagre ground humans the way it does hulking metallic sky birds — so who knows — but all in all, I seem well-set for travel. That doesn’t mean I’m not ruminating about the risk of it all, though.

If you had asked me in the aftermath of the first fatal U.S. part-121 airliner crash in over a decade how uneasy I expected to feel traveling for Spring Break this year, I would have reported to you an expectation that is all-in-all much worse than the actual unease I feel now. I would not say that I am, like, well enough off about any of this though — I’m blogging about it, that’s probably enough of a sign on its own — and would characterize how I feel relative to how I expected to feel as more of a lateral shift than anything. Like, I’m still rather anxious about it, but I’m anxious about different parts of the process than I was and have different ways of feeling about those things. Obviously I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t want to talk more about it, so… here we go, I guess.

The worst part about watching the video is the inevitability… sort of. All knowledge is wordless, only ever converted into words for the purpose of exchanging the knowledge within with another person; some of it, you just can’t convert. I think inevitability captures some literal… explanation for the feeling inspired by watching the video, but I don’t think it actually captures the feeling. In other scenarios, the inevitability of what must come is a mitigating factor; like if you’re bored watching Russian dash-cam collision footage where nobody dies, and you know every video results in collision, that inevitability contributes to some of the boredom inherent in consuming that content — you know what is about to happen, to some limited but real extent, and that reduces the emotional intensity of watching the video. When people are condemned to death at the end, though, that inevitability starts to feel less like a mitigator and more like a multiplier. It feels patently foolish to point out that we feel utterly incapable of doing anything while sat on the couch watching a screen — it’s just true, we just are — but it’s a huge part of this phenomenon to me. Sitting there feeling like there’s nothing you can do about people crashing their car in Russia? Who cares! You can just change the channel! But sitting there feeling like there’s nothing you can do about people dying in a horrifically televised plane crash? Many cares, to say the least. Changing the channel doesn’t stop the plane from crashing in the same way it doesn’t stop the acccidents from happening; but changing away from car accidents provides mental relief from thinking about car accidents much quicker than changing away from a plane accident.

Irrespective of how it felt to have live coverage of this beamed directly into your quite-receptive soul at 9:30pm, the details of the real crash inspire similar feelings. Preliminary reports paint a picture of a similarly-inevitable collision that never needed to happen, putting a point on the reactive and outmoded “written in blood” saying we all heard repeated like a good thing one million times.

Aircraft-aircraft collisions are stupidly rare. A lot — most of this, apparently — comes down to technology, and lots of technology on the subject has been “innovated-in-blood,” if you will. A lot of it also has to do with how fucking horrific they are. It was a midair collision between United 736 — a DC-7 propeller-powered civilian craft — and a U.S. Air Force F-100F-5-NA Super Sabre, killing all involved, followed up by another civilian-military collision with only 1 survivor, that led to the creation of the FAA in the first place back in 1958. These are things that even your pro-measles grandpa find utterly appalling, terrifying, and obscene; and he should, because they’re preventable, just like any other aviation disaster, or really any disaster.

Yet, as is often the case in the history of U.S. regulation, nobody ever seems too concerned with preventing the first of something. Boys, girls, and theys — do not be misled by whatever media you consume, we definitely just saw the first instance of the type of fuckup that killed 67 people on January 29th.

A review of commercial operations (instrument flight rules departures or arrivals) at DCA between October 2021 and December 2024 indicated a total of 944,179 operations. During that time, there were 15,214 occurrences between commercial airplanes and helicopters in which there was a lateral separation distance of less than 1 nm and vertical separation of less than 400 ft. There were 85 recorded events that involved a lateral separation less than 1,500 ft and vertical separation less than 200 ft. — The NTSB’s preliminary report.

So, just to recap, that’s 15,214 times two aircraft [2] were only separable in the vertical dimension — on top of eachother! — and by less than 400ft no less. The other 85 events represent aircraft that might as well be not at all separable on the vertical axis — they should be treated as if they’re at the same altitude! — and less than 1,500ft apart. Given the speeds of these things are usually given in “feet per second” even on approach and takeoff, this should terrify even a four year old. It should come as no surprise, then, that:

Initial analysis found that at least one TCAS resolution advisory (RA) was triggered per month due to proximity to a helicopter. In over half of these instances, the helicopter may have been above the route altitude restriction. Two-thirds of the events occurred at night. — The paragraph above the one above, same report. Page 18.

That’s from a much longer period of time too, going back to 2011. Yep — one Traffic Collision Avoidance System alert per month related specifically to helicopters. If you’re curious about the distance needed to trigger a TCAS alert, it’s a bit smaller than the close call distances in the first quote — but not by much. And again, the one-per-month figure comes from helicopter-civilian aircraft close calls alone, military helicopters only in that exact area due to their flying a route the FAA now considers dangerously irresponsible to operate.

I won’t belabor the point, because I’m hungry and this was a remarkably draining piece to write for reasons that should be clear. I’m afraid of flying because people need to die first in order for resources to be spent on studying and solving the hazard that caused people to die. I have no reason to fear for my safety flying the specific route that I am about to, but on January 28th, nobody on earth “had any reason” to fear the fate of American Airlines 5342. And the NTSB is making very clear that that’s just not true at all. Individuals who cannot define or even name informed consent but expect to be granted it by a cereal box of all things love to rush out to tell you that our regulations are written in blood and that it’s all very safe, really, you’re crazy I swear — but this callous dismissal of an anxiety (that’s just like any other anxiety — irrational!) is further complicated by the fact that if you’re dying from something new and insane, they only care after you fucking die! “Written in blood” is not the pinnacle of human safety regulation paradigms it’s made out to be — it’s not even, like, the only way to do shit like this commonly used in the world — and it requires blood to write with before the regulations can be written in the first place.

To sit here and say that ‘written in blood’ is both necessary and sufficient as regulatory underpinnings to the most flight-addicted country on the entire planet is the exact same thing as telling civilians that the arrangement between helicopters and civilian aircraft on approach at DCA only became hazardous the second it actually killed people. That’s just not true. They shouldn’t have died, and every power of foresight was available to help effect that. And because the president is too busy tariffing our allies to censor the NTSB’s work here, I anticipate that the degree to which this is splayed out before us will only ratchet up in the final report.

End Notes

[1] I didn’t know the origin of this until 30 seconds after writing it. Neat.

[2] Technically, where their transponder was reporting the aircraft at. There are questions about whether or not the helicopter was estimating its own altitude properly — this would have made things much worse.