Human factors aviation psychologist identifies 'biggest red flag' in DC plane crash

30 January

67 people are feared dead after a fatal mid-air collision between a regional jet and a helicopter at the Washington D.C. National Airport on Wednesday night. Now, one former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is offering one likely scenario that could have caused the crash.

On Thursday, Alan Diehl — a human factors aviation psychologist — joined CNN to discuss the fatal collision between an American Airlines flight from Wichita, Kansas and a Black Hawk U.S. Army helicopter. Diehl suggested that the fact that the Black Hawk pilots may have been wearing night vision goggles could have been a factor due to those goggles limiting their field of vision. However, he theorized that the helicopter pilots may have been distracted by something else entirely at the time of the crash.

"The biggest red flag that I've noticed so far is there was a third aircraft up there that night," Diehl told CNN's Brianna Keilar. "And when you look at that very painful video of the collision, you can see the lights of another aircraft. And the thing that the NTSB will have to sort out, is it possible that the Black Hawk crew — whether or not they had night vision goggles on — saw the other target, the other airplane, and thought it was the American jet.

"And of course they were going well behind the other aircraft, but they may not have seen the American jet. It could have been hidden by part of the cockpit structure of the Black Hawk, whether or not they had the goggles on," he continued. "So that's the kind of thing that the NTSB will have to address."

Diehl, who worked on the NTSB's investigation into the 1982 Air Florida crash at the D.C. airport, went on to explain that in Black Hawk helicopters, there is a piece of metal that runs down the middle of the aircraft's windshield that is called the "A-pillar" in cars. He likened it to a driver's "blind spot" preventing them from seeing other vehicles on the road.

"If the American jet was behind that structure, it is possible ... by the time they realize that, 'oh my gosh, there's there's the American jet right in front of us,'" Diehl said. "'m a human factors aviation psychologist. So it takes several seconds for the human to respond. Plus the helicopter has got to respond. So it may well be that by the time they saw the American jet, they didn't have time to avoid it."

"Of course, the controllers are very busy, the pilots are busy. And normally this doesn't happen," he added. "But this night, things just went bad. Very, very badly. And that's what the the safety board will have to address. Now, what they'll do is they'll look at the eye position of the two pilots and the Black Hawk to see what structures might have been blocking their view of the American jet."

Watch the video of Diehl's segment below, or by clicking this link.

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