The technology that would have allowed air traffic controllers to better follow the movement of an army helicopter before it comes up against a jet of passengers above the Potomac river last week at the time of ‘Accident, said Senator Ted Cruz, a republican of Texas. An interview Thursday.
Members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, of which Mr. Cruz is president, received a briefing on closed do. And a black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan National Airport, which killed 67 people last week.
The senators, including Mr. Cruz, have been updated in the investigation and said that the NTSB should collect precious evidence of the helicopter still resting in the Potomac. The wreck of the helicopter should be recovered on Thursday.
The senators shared some details after the briefing, saying that many more questions had to be answered before they could determine what did not work that night. What we know is that the army was carrying out a Black Hawk training mission in order to allow one of the pilots to receive its annual certification.
But Mr. Cruz said he was concerned about the fact that the Black Hawk monitoring technology was disabled during the training mission. When used, technology, called automatic dependent monitoring monitoring, or ADS-B, diffuses the position, altitude and speed of an airplane.
It allows air traffic controllers not to count solely on monitoring the radar, which can be delayed for a few seconds. It thus provides an additional safety layer to help avoid accidents.
Military helicopters can deactivate technology during what is called the “government continuity” missions so that no one can follow where civil servants are being piloted. But Cruz said it was not the case on January 29, the night of the accident.
“In this case, it was a training mission, there was therefore no convincing national security reason for ADS-B to be deactivated,” said Cruz.
The army refused to comment on what Mr. Cruz said about helicopter and technology.
“We are going to let the investigation take place and not be ahead of the NTTSB conclusions,” said Colonel Roger Coverness, army spokesperson.
Mr. Cruz said the helicopter was equipped with a transponder, a device that diffuses its location, but ADS-B is considered a much higher technology.
Mr. Cruz also called the FAA to examine all the helicopter routes that cross the commercial airspace to see if other widespread changes were to be made to the way they travel along the occupied routes.
Jennifer Homendy, the president of the NTSB, said Thursday in an interview with journalists that the preliminary conclusions of the vocal recorder of the Black Hawk cockpit indicated that the pilots used night vision glasses at the time of the collision .
Ms. Homendy said that if the pilots were flying without the night vision glasses, they would generally declare themselves “without help”, but this statement was absent from the data recorder of the cockpit vocal recorder. A more in-depth analysis is necessary to achieve a final conclusion on the glasses, she said.
The former black hawk helicopter pilots interviewed by the New York Times noted that the combination of dark sky and lively lights surrounding the airport could have affected the ability of the pilots to see the American jet of airlines when approaching The landing if they wore the glasses.
Also on Thursday, the FAA said that it would slightly reduce the number of flights per hour in and outside the national Reagan due to the bad weather and the fact that a track remains closed during the investigation into the accident.
Eric Schmitt Contributed reports.