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So far, this is about the only criticism of the RJ crew that I can think of: accepting a change to the approach and runway that close in. In a fighter in VMC? Absolutely, no problem. But the latest that I've accepted a change to a landing runway in an airliner has been outside 10 miles and even that was pushing it. You can hardly call that causal, but it is something to think about and learn from as an airline pilot. Don't let ATC fly your plane. Had a captain tell ATC no to keeping us high and fast on an approach (my airplane does not like to slow down in any decent). He told them 'we can be high or fast, but not both'. ATC tried to shame us by then slowing us to approach speed and vectoring another flight in front of us and even made a comment to the other airplane about them being able to do it. Capt basically shrugged said 'whatever'.

https://nypost.com/2025/02/06/us-news/illegal-border-crossings-down-90-under-trump-border-patrol/ so, looks like that border bill the dems tried to ram thru wasn't necessary. more gaslighting. crossings down 90% with enforcing EXISTING border policy. imagine that.

Why wait? The only people complaining about it are the people who don't like him. The same people who complained about everything he did the first time and are complaining about everything he does this time. Some of us are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. I really hope my government is capable of that as well. This memo came out within the last couple days, which means it was set into motion one or two weeks ago. Probably before the crash when every department was told to reverse and scrub anything that had a whiff of DEI. I do not expect all government work to come to a screeching halt because of a plane crash. It sucks, it's a tragedy, and we should absolutely fix the problem. But extending your logic out means that all government work must stop if it is not considered to be the highest priority action at that moment. And as I just pointed out, that means nothing gets done. You think it looks bad because you want it to look bad. That's all.

So nsplayer’s political moratorium ended with the Biden administration? Guess I can’t blame the guy. I think we’re all trying to pretend it was just a bad dream.

Then why was the previous administration so focused on changing it?

You would certainly hope not…but there was clearly a breakdown in visual scan for both mishap aircraft. What caused that remains to be seen.

The most horrifying thing you learn about ethnic cleansing / forced population transfer is that, well, it works. The Greco-Turkish population transfers of the 20s caused a lot of human misery, but in the end, two populations that hadn't been able to get along for a millennium didn't live in the same neighborhood anymore. They might not be friends today by any means, but you rarely have Greek death squads going door to door looking for Turks in the last hundred years (Cyprus excluded, maybe). Ditto for India and Pakistan, to a degree, Germany/Russia/Poland after WWII, Jews being kicked out of 40+ Muslim countries. The sad fact is that most of the world isn't enlightened enough to live like New Yorkers, in peace with neighbors their parents would have despised and their grandparents actively tried to kill. I do wonder how much lingering savagery we've perpetuated by demanding that other peoples pretend to all get along together, rather than achieve lasting separation (see: every post-colonial African state where we assume different groups can all get along inside a single set of lines we drew).

Pretty sure IPT replaces IFT in all cases, since you get several ratings from it including a PPL.

I'm on a meme run...

Hah, ironic avatar

NOTAMs are back to "Notices to Airmen".

I want to know when we’re going to see arrests of all the leftist outwardly hindering ICE. I’ve quickly lost count of how many govs, mayors, city board members, not to mention the countless random idiots, are happily breaking laws and think they’re untouchable. Frankly I’m disappointed in Trump’s admin that this has happened yet.

I don't think anyone knows, unless it's in the comm. More than likely it's just an accidental altitude deviation. Keep in mind, they're flying over a river at night (extremely limited visual reference for height), trying to shack an altitude with very little margin for error. And then being asked to look for traffic and visually separate from it. These procedures are no-step stupid.

Didn’t get much better as a Wing Commander. Herk bros under him just about almost blanket partied him.

general chang provides excellent insight at the flag level. like him or not he is well connected and has the pulse of leadership.

Caveat up front: there are good/bad/disciplined/undisciplined pilots in every community and this is not geared toward any individual. But I'm gonna be the asshole here. In my experience, the army rotary wing community ranges anywhere from lackadaisical to outright dangerous WRT instrument procedures, airspace and traffic awareness, and flight discipline. I've witnessed a 5-ship Army Apache mission brief take place in the lobby of the San Angelo FBO that was basically: "Alright dudes, we're gonna take off, head east, 200A, everybody fall in. Questions?" "Sick. Step complete." I've been in control of a T-6 pattern full of solo students and had to send them all breakpoint straight through (half of them didn't even know what to do) because we had a 4 ship of army black hawks blast perpendicular through our pattern while talking to precisely no one on the radio. The second I saw the news out of DCA my first reaction was "goddammit some army rw clowns got everyone killed." Then I felt bad for jumping to conclusions and not waiting for the report. But after a few weeks, each new piece of data points right back to them and I'm back to being pissed. Why were they off altitude? Why are they dicking around at night in the approach corridor of a major airport? Why are they not on VHF? Why was this even an approved routing for them in the first place? Why were 28 different agencies permitted to fly helos in close proximity to DCA? These were not one-off, swiss-cheese-holes-aligning, mistakes. This was business as usual, proven by the fact there had been multiple near misses at DCA in the recent past including a helo-caused airliner go-around the day before. Obviously an airspace/procedure re-design is warranted, but I think we need to take a look at community-wide culture that was comfortable operating like this in the first place. @busdriver said it best that these procedures are "no-step stupid." The problem with that is if you've been raised in a community of hot dogging and "we'll do it live" you're probably not equipped to make a good risk assessment.

Way above my pay grade, but I honestly don't think the reduction in turbine time in a traditional military environment is a great idea. Flying a cessna is a great way to become familiar with the concepts of aviation, but significantly reducing T6 flight time seems like a bad idea.

One of my buddies I commissioned with is the T flight commander at Columbus. He passed me all the info about the locations. I was at Laughlin this weekend talking to a couple guys at the 47th WG, they told me the plan for Laughlin to be the last to start this spring. They confirmed all students will be required to go. It’s to compensate for the shortened T-6 syllabus.

You could have your ATP and would still be required to attend. They are sending everyone no matter what you have. I’m going to enjoy the free money TDY learning things I’ve already done.

If anybody has questions about UCT just hit me up, I got picked up on last years board and am in the pipeline right now! Can give you a solid lowdown of the different airframes and opportunities, there’s some really cool stuff you can do.

This decision has sparked mass protests* from military families. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/hegseth-protest-dei-transgender-germany-military-rcna191636 * “about 2 dozen people”

Of all the things to be worked up about and speaking about TRUST...As a service member I would have thought you'd be more worked up about the previous guy who had checked out, had surgery and stayed at home for a week without telling POTUS or anyone in the National Command Authority.

I love how everyone on the left is now pretending like it wasn't a very big deal when these quick changes were made a year or two ago, but now it must be consuming their entire schedule to undo them. "What happened? They changed the acronym? "Yup" "Change it back." "Ok." You are absolutely intelligent enough to know that waiting for "all the big problems" to be solved before attacking the low-hanging fruit means nothing gets done. That's been the strategy in DC for decades, and now that someone isn't following "the rules," it's a full on panic.

Ahhh....Panzer Kaserne! I do miss it!

OK, I lied...

Last one...

To be fair, they didn't suck at war. They were far better at it man for man than the north was. If the Confederate Army had the same population, economy, and industrialization to draw from that the Union Army had, the world would be a very different place now. I'm a solid northerner, but to say the Confederates sucked at war because they lost is like saying Sparta sucked at war because they were conquered by Rome. And to the FAA thing, HeloDude is spot on. The only reason to change it in the first place was politics, so to call out someone for lack of focus for changing it back is a bit ironic.

IDK, it seems we have a fair amount of GOs that were educated in the old system we pine and argue for but undercut the requirement of pilot training and effort it takes to train a mil pilot by pushing this Next UPT or UPT 2.0 that minimizes actual training and frankly denigrates the heavy / crew side of the LAF… going to fly heavies? Well, it’s not really that big of a deal so let’s just min run your training and call it good… some of these guys, a lot of them flew heavies and from my point of view they’re cuckholes watching our career path get banged away while in the corner whimpering it’s ok because…. grow some balls and just say no to being made a second class pilot track in fact and in the eyes of your peers This is incredible tech and it will supplant some of the human in the loop but not all, I mean the people who make the technology and sell the technology are also the people saying we need to run head long into it seems conflicted but as with BVR missiles, the first generation of that tech was way overhyped and not ready to fully commit to, we learned that in Vietnam the hard way, I argue for us to be not skeptical but require several steps of empirical proof and experience before we go that route even half way, the best hedge is to improve our processes and current tech while prudently investing in the new… My hope is that someone at the level that could stop this direct flight to shittsville training would put their reputation on the line and say the emperor actually has no clothes on Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Agreed with all points except this one. If the helo crew had been spot on their altitude, that would have not been anything close to comfortable separation. Would their altitude error have garnered more than a downgrade on a checkride? Unfortunate that these deaths are what it took to highlight that unsafe margin. …but I guess that’s the nature of unsafe margins; it’s all well and good until it isn’t.

So after watching that video, I'm only reinforced in my view that the airlines have become way too high-speed-abort-phobic. I actually had this problem in a 737 Max a couple weeks ago. At the 80 knot check my airspeed indicator read 65. I was shocked when the captain decided that we were going to continue, but our procedures, unlike a go around, stipulate that a the captain that has sole abort authority. We got lucky, the problem was gone while straight and level and the airspeed split never exceeded 20 knots. This Captain was in no way competent enough to handle a raw navaid approach with either the stick shaker or the overspeed clacker going off. Anyways, I started asking every captain I fly with what they intend to do in the event of unreliable airspeed at 80 knots, and shockingly about a third of them say that we will continue to take off. I'm sorry, but if you are more afraid of a aborting at 80 to 90 knots, stop flying airplanes. I think the real problem is that our airline has hammered a fear of high-speed aborts in every Sim for years now, without inserting the nuance. How long is the runway? What exactly is the malfunction? We have a caveat for aborting above 80 knots: "fear the aircraft will not fly." But in 7 years I've never heard a single discussion about what triggers that fear. Personally, having to fly an aircraft with no flight director or autopilot using pitch and power settings that we practice once every few years and *never* look at during normal approaches, is much scarier to me than stopping the plane on a runway when we have an automated braking system for aborts and we know there is enough runway before V1. This particular malfunction is just another example of an instance where I would rather perform a high-speed aboard below V1 then go airborne not knowing if I'm going to be able to see the instruments or speak to the other pilot in 30 seconds. Another Captain I flew with, Junior to me, had the best threshold I've heard yet for whether or not he will abort above 80 knots. "Am I going to declare an emergency for the malfunction? Then I'm aborting" Be safe out there

If Trump fires B3 I’m starting a petition for his face on Rushmore.

There should not be circling at night at this point (for airlines). An rnav rnp approach can be built to any runway from any spot with all sorts of crazy turns. Both DC and LGA have them. But then you wouldn't be able to treat it like a visual maneuver and let helicopters fly right under the final approach course. This was about packing as much traffic into a shitty airport that should have been closed or fixed decades ago. That's it. Everybody already knows all of the things that shouldn't have happened because they knew about them while they were happening. Yes, ultimately the helicopter crew is at fault in this specific case. But a whole lot of people higher ranking and with way more experience than them tolerated the absolute dumpster fire of DCA because it was easier than taking a stand. Just more "good dudes" who aren't willing to tell their bosses no. Maybe this changes with Trump. He's certainly putting people in power who didn't spend the first 40 years of their adult lives being Yes men and yes women. But at this point we probably need to immolate 75-90% of the managerial class in both corporate America and the government. Somehow while we were all fat dumb and happy the sociopaths took everything over. On the corporate side that's going to happen with a revival of labor unions. On the government side it'll be with elections obviously. But I'm not sure individual events like this are going to be enough to turn the tide. Probably going to take something bigger to really flip the table.

I agree that they (CRJ) should have cleared final prior to landing but I wouldn't label this as causal. There's a certain amount of trust I'd have on the tower not clearing me to land with potential conflict on final. They weren't landing to an uncontrolled airfield.

When the refs don't help you win....AND the crowd booed Taylor Swift.

Actually, he doesn’t think we need pilots because everything can be done with autonomous drones and therefore pilot production can be zero by cancelling the program altogether, so you don’t even need the /s there. Boom, money saved.

How about everyone starts in an A-10? Slow, multi engine and can probably do enough clover leaves and aileron rolls for the new guys to get a quarter chub. The transition to heavies or fighters after flying an A-10 should be a little easier than not flying at all.

Didn't get enough of a response to your other account?

What lack of SA is the CRJ guilty of? The RW was on a different frequency, invisible via cockpit tools and they weren’t alerted to their presence. I’m seeing RW causal and ATC contributing but pretty tough to fault the dudes kept in the dark about conflicts while flying a night circle to short runway.

this

I stole this from the interwebs.

The problem has never been adhering to the grooming standards. The problem was the standards themselves. Beards can have standards. Mustaches too, without looking like a butthole brush. There are more ways to look professional than a high and tight. Set the rules to a reasonable level, then enforce.

Does it matter? They are a dependant state of the US. They want to act like otherwise, then a few weeks of 25% tariffs will remind them. Germany tried hitching their wagon to Russia, how'd that work out? The populations of the world need a come-to-Jesus moment. This appears to be it. Also, what help do we need from Canada?

The standards I worked on. I was in Stan/Eval so standards were in there somewhere. If dude on the ground wanted a round of 105 he better get it. Right where and when he wanted it. And another If the gunners mustache was too long, I didn't give a shit. If the nav had the wrong color purse, I didn't give a shit. If the eng had his hat on backwards, I didn't give a shit. If the pilot had the wrong socks, I didn't give a shit.

BUT BUT BUT ITS GOING TO US DEFENSE COMPANIES!!!!!!! /s