Name: Former RAF helicopter pilot assesses Washington DC plane crash
Uploaded: 2025-02-01T00:26:52.000Z
Duration: 5 min 53 s
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We're joined in the studio now by Paul Kennard, an RAF Chinook pilot for 23 years, appreciate you joining us on Sky News.

Talk to us about the moments of flying a military helicopter, those moments when there's three of you, if not more, sometimes less I guess, in that cockpit, it's dark, night flying, night goggles on.

I think the important thing to understand is that the context is everything, and although that crew would have been equipped and trained to operate on night vision goggles, there's every chance the circumstances they were in, they weren't actually using them, and the reason is that night vision goggles are there to amplify light, they stimulate light, they capture photons and amplify them massively.

If you fly around an airfield such as Washington National, you'll see there's thousands of very, very bright lights there.

Those lights have an impact on what we call backing down your night vision goggles, so the goggles are almost useless because the the goggles will auto-gate to protect the very sensitive electronics that are inside them, so the chances are at the operating altitudes they were flying at that night, 200 feet, as mandated by the the traffic routes around National, they were what we would call flip-flopping, so they're probably goggles up most of the time, looking down, goggles up, because the goggles themselves would be being a distraction due to the amount of lighting around an airport.

You're in a cockpit, you're being told to observe an incoming passenger plane, how much of that can you see?

What can you see as a pilot looking out into the distance, into the darkness?

So I've actually been fortunate to fly the Blackhawk as well, so I've had a few hours flying the Blackhawk and the visibility out of that aircraft is excellent, most battlefield helicopters, most military helicopters have excellent visibility out, because you're off, unlike a lot of fixed-wing aircraft in the helicopter world, you're often flying very close to the ground within the obstruction layer, so between trees, between underneath electricity pylons, in extremists, in bad weather, so the lookout is excellent.

The key for me is what were the crew actually looking at, and I think that's where we haven't, as far as we're aware, we still haven't got the cockpit voice recorder from the Blackhawk, we've recovered them from the the CRJ.

To me that's the missing piece in the jigsaw, it's that although we've got the radio calls from the crews, we understand what they were saying to our traffic and what was being said back, what we haven't got is that crew environment, that as you mentioned right at the top, those three people in that aircraft are operating as a crew, you know, in the Chinook we had four, sometimes even more, so you're operating as a crew, you know, it's a synergistic effect, you're hoping that your crew skills are better than your component parts, but until we know that, until we have that cockpit voice recorder, hopefully it will tell us what they were talking about, what their priorities were, what their workload level was in the moments leading up to the accident, and I think tellingly in this incident, what they were actually looking at and what they recognised as the situational awareness, the air picture around them in those final few seconds.

There's lots of footage going around online and lots of commentary, people hypothesising as to what that environment's like.

At the speeds you're operating at, first of all, what kind of speeds were they operating at, and how quickly does that environment change?

We're all used to driving a car on the road, but you're on the road, you've got solid ground beneath you, you've only got kind of 180 degrees to think about.

When you're flying, how much does your environment change in split seconds?

It can change really, really quickly, and those sort of speeds that you'd be typically flying on a route like that would be around about 120 knots, 80 to 120 knots, depending on the stage of flight.

140 miles an hour, which sounds fast, and you know, if you were driving down the M4 this morning doing that, it would be fast, but in the context of aviation, 120 knots is relatively slow, and slower than a CRJ would have been on final approach to the runway.

But the important thing also, and it's a sad trick of geometry, which is if you are actually on a collision course with another aircraft in the air, there will be no relative motion.

So quite often when you think about your peripheral vision, when you're driving, your main vision is looking straight ahead down the motorway, but you are aware of stuff, particularly if a car comes into your blind spot, if you've got a mirror that gives you a little indication to say, you know it's in your direction.

If you're on a collision course with another aircraft, that constant bearing is constant.

It means there is no relative motion, and then having conducted a number of mid-air collision avoidance trials in the past, you get that sudden bloom, and really the last couple of seconds before the potential impact is when everything suddenly gets bigger on you, and then it's no longer your perception or your sort of peripheral vision, it's now bang, it's there.

There's kind of a depth perception shift.

We are creatures that are designed to operate in daylight.

At night, night vision goggles are notoriously difficult at making depth perceptions, because it's a 2D presentation of a 3D world.

Whereas if you are looking at night, a light, it's very difficult if you look at a light and say, how far away is that light?

Because you don't know the intensity of the light, you don't know the bearing of the light.

It's very difficult until suddenly it blooms at you as you're in those last couple of seconds before collision.

So depth perception at night is very difficult.

Your night vision is also impacted by the amount of light.

So if they're looking into Washington National, their night vision, their natural night vision, you think you sit down there in a dark room, your night vision improves.

Well, they're looking into a pool of light.

So you're looking from the pool of light into the blackness, their eyes won't have time to adjust to looking back into the blackness.

So it's very, very difficult to judge perception and distance at night.

Really fascinating insights as well for the moment.