Looking at the events leading up to the mid air collision of helicopter and CRJ, there is a clear problem screaming for a solution. The air traffic controller asked the helicopter: Do you have the CRJ in sight? Both times the helicopter said they did. When I was watching this I immediately thought: you have something in sight, but how can you possibly be sure it's a CRJ? All you saw were lights in the night sky. There were at least 2 other aircraft in that line of sight. Solution: install red/green/blue lights and have the planes lining up pick a unique color (different from their neighbour). Then include that in your communication.
Tower: Do you have a red CRJ in your sight?
Helicopter: Negative
Mid air collision avoided
I realize that in practice RGB are the wrong colors to use because they already have a meaning. I picked this for simplicity of explanation of the concept. Please feel free to suggest other colors or perhaps strobe patterns? Morse coded flashes? Press a button to temporarily highlight yourself to others? Other?-- ixnaum, Jan 31 2025 Instead of the obvious solution, that being to require a divert whenever any two planes seem too close regardless of who is responsible and regardless of who sees who, they'll probably add yet another warning system to an overloaded pilot's attention and yet another procedure to an overloaded tower. When those cause a collision next year they'll add yet another.-- Voice, Jan 31 2025 I like this a lot but you're right about the colors.
How about spotlights on the plane that illuminate the top and bottom of the aircraft with purple, orange etc? Worth looking into. They are speculating that there was confusion where the helicopter was looking at the wrong plane.
Project or have an LED indication 3 letter indication of the plane being referenced? Scrolling laser drawing the letters on a non-window portion of the plane would be pretty easy to do. Maybe make it scroll around as well like a stock market ticker. Mount the lasers on the wheels. [+]-- doctorremulac3, Jan 31 2025 Ooh, that's a good idea. A set of three lights, top and bottom in unusual colors for airplanes. "Do you see purple, green, yellow?" It doesn't need to add to pilot load, just leave them on at all times.-- Voice, Jan 31 2025 How about simply not having helicopters ascending or descending at the same time, in the same airspace as commercial planes which are doing the same thing? Madness.-- xenzag, Feb 01 2025 One of the problems here is that the heli pilots were using night vision goggles - which, for purposes of amplifying the light, use monochrome green phosphor display tubes (green being the color human eyes pick up best). Hence, regardless of whether you have pink or orange or aqua lights on the aircraft, the NVG wearer just sees green. (There's some newer monochrome white phosphor NVGs, so the wearer just sees white. <insert frowny emoji in the "improvements" column>)
However - LEDs can be flashed very rapidly. Your standard TV remote control just uses an infra-red LED flashed at about 40kHz. (Why 40kHz? well, the earlier TV remotes used ultrasound, and when they switched to LEDs, they just put the LED and receivers into the same circuit where the ultrasonic emitters and detectors were before, no need to invent a new coding scheme...) No real need to flash one on an airplane that fast; make it something processable by a microcontroller on an NVG (or a cockpit mounted detector that feeds info into the pilot's HUD) and just have the light flash the plane's squawk code. 1kHz would still look like a solid "on" light to the naked eye.-- lurch, Feb 01 2025 If the plane the copter pilot saw had been identified as being on final approach, the misidentification of the CRJ that was taking off would have been avoided.
Why was the copter pilot so far west at such a low altitude? Just keeping to the east shore of the Potomac would keep the low-flying copter well below any approach.
Some unexplained confusion here but some have already decided what the “reasons” are. So cruel and just so wrong.-- minoradjustments, Feb 01 2025 Agreed.... he who knows everything and decides everything had the cause figured out within seconds of being informed of the accident.-- xenzag, Feb 01 2025 There is already kind of a better version of this in the works called CDTI where airliners will be able to share flight info using ADS-B, and ATC can issue instructions based on that such as "follow Delta 216, cleared for the visual" and the pilots can see who that is on their traffic display. It is currently being trialed.-- DIYMatt, Feb 10 2025 random, halfbakery