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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
I ran a search for airborne conflicts and near mid-air collisions at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) for the last five years in NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), and found six of them (~1.5 per year if we exclude the 2020–2021 period of virtually no traffic due to COVID–19). 🧵
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kripcat.eth 🎩
@kripcat.eth
Is this an abnormal amount of near misses for a major metro airport? If not is there something about the design of this one that makes it more prone to collisions and near misses?
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
This is the important question, really. I checked LGA for comparison — as it is also a coastal airport on the Eastern Seaboard, very congested, and with rotary wing traffic mixed in. There were multiple reports over the same period, mostly involving drones (which ATC can't do anything about); and only one involving a helicopter (ACN 1682814). This one was also a near-miss between a landing Embraer ERJ 190 and a crossing helicopter, leading the pilot to write: "It would be good to know at what point LGA controllers should no longer issue a crossing clearance with an aircraft on final to Runway 22". To me, rotary-wing aircraft are the sky equivalent of mopeds on car-congested roads: they fly at speeds and trajectories (incl. vertical) that are so different from those of fixed-wing aircraft, that it's always challenging to separate them, especially visually (as is very often the case for low-altitude helicopter flights that operate VFR).
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