We have been told that this Blackhawk helicopter was on a routine training mission at an extraordinarily busy international airport. The Blackhawks are supposed to fly at 300 feet over the Potomac, and the commercial jet was doing a routine, but complicated 3-turn descend-to-land maneuver and was "routinely" at about 600 feet when it was hit (and exploded). This means that the Army is using a busy commercial airport for training and that their helicopters have just a few hundred feet of separation. One might say that we (citizen flying passengers) are being used as guinea pigs in a training obstacle course. This actually is not my observation, it came from a senior retired Armed Forces General a few hours ago.
I rarely take a plane (I think it was 1985 when I last flew) largely because I have had a sense that there is still considerable fine-tuning to be done at airports, and that air traffic control is routinely overburdened.
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