Posted on 01/30/25
| News Source: FOX News
A U.S. Air Force veteran discussed the challenges of flying a military helicopter in congested airspace, saying that “aircraft lights and ground lights all look the same at night.”
“It's really hard to tell. And I've heard a lot of people say, 'I can't believe they just ran into it,' but they probably never saw the aircraft until the very last second, or they'd already hit it,” Jim Cardoso, the Senior Director for the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute and a U.S. Air Force veteran, told Fox News Digital.
“And people find that hard to believe, but this giant aircraft at night is just two more lights added to all the other lights in the D.C. area,” he said.
Cardoso said that when he flew military helicopters at night in urban settings, he tended to take off his night vision goggles “because they washed out so much cultural lighting and became almost useless.”
“We'll find out what they were doing in that case. My sense is the airliner that's about to land, is approaching low and slow, and really they're not maneuverable at all at that point," he said. "The helicopter is maneuverable. If the helicopter had seen the aircraft, that aircraft could have probably maneuvered pretty rapidly away, but they probably didn't see it until the last second.”
The Air Force veteran said that while the video of the devastating crash was “heart-wrenching” to watch, it will serve an important role as investigators determining the cause of the accident.
“It will be incredibly valuable in the investigation because they normally don't have video of airplanes crashing. They do in this case,” he said. “So they'll be able to pull a ton of information off that to really get into the nuts and bolts of what happened here and then to prevent it from happening again.”
“The point of an investigation is mishap prevention,” he said. “What do we do to make sure this never happens again?”