Hello and welcome to episode 306 of AvTalk. I am Ian Petchinic here as always with

Jason Rabinowitz. Yeah, as you can expect, this is not going to be a happy episode.

It's been a tragic week.

It's been a terrible week across the board, but particularly in the aviation industry,

it's been just a downright, terrible, terrible week.

Our plan for this episode is to give you the facts, give you the details,

and have a discussion about what we know, what we don't know, and not a whole lot more than that.

We have three topics. We're going to stick to those topics today. I think you all know

where we're starting off, but Ian take it away from here.

Yeah, we began the year in not a good way, and we'll talk about that story at the end of the episode.

But we will start with how we ended the month, which was with two crashes within three days in the United States on the East Coast. So we'll start with the midair

collision in Washington, D.C., between a U.S. Army H-60 Black Hawk helicopter and a PSA Airlines

CRJ 700 operating on behalf of American Eagle. The incident occurred at 8.48 p.m. Eastern Standard time

as the Black Hawk was traveling north to south along the Potomac River on the transition from

helicopter route 1 to route 4, and we'll come back to those helicopter routes in a moment.

The CRJ was on approach to runway 3-3 after having shifted its approach

from a runway 0-1 approach to allow for departing traffic on runway 0-1. The NTSB has been on

scene and has recovered the recorders from all three aircraft, and we got an initial

briefing on the recorder data for the CRJ 700, the 3rd of February, I believe. And that update

provided us with information about the altitude at which the

CRJ was when the collision occurred. So the NTSB says that using a synthesis of ADSB,

radar, and flight data recorded data, the aircraft was at 325 feet plus or minus 25 feet at the time of the collision.

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