Army Black Hawk helicopters known as “gold-tops” operating out of Davison Army Airfield at Fort Belvoir, Va., are regularly used to ferry senior military officials to different installations and often make flights to and from the Pentagon, a former senior Army official told Blaze News.
Casey Wardynski, former assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and Reserve affairs, said gold-top VIP flights operated by the Army 12th Aviation Battalion are a normal part of traffic in the busy but highly controlled air corridor surrounding Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport near Washington, D.C.
“These are going to be some of the most experienced and senior pilots in the Army,” Wardynski said, “because they’re flying secretary of defense, secretary of the Army, chief of staff of the Army, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, these kind of folks around to various locations in the vicinity of Washington helicopter range. And they’re going to be doing it day and night.”
The air corridor is ‘very highly controlled.’
A U.S. Army VH-60M Black Hawk helicopter on a training exercise collided with a civilian regional airline jet inbound from Kansas late Jan. 29, erupting in a fireball and sending both aircraft into the Potomac River. Sixty-seven people were killed, including three Army soldiers, 60 airline passengers, and four airline crew members. There were no survivors.
American Eagle Flight 5342 left Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport in Wichita at 5:18 p.m. CT and was scheduled to land at Reagan National at 8:57 p.m. ET. The aircraft was a Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet operated by PSA Airlines flying as American Eagle, American CEO Robert Isom said.
Wardynski said this type of military brass shuttle service using Black Hawk helicopters is common.
“It’s not unusual for them to be flying in and out of the Pentagon at night, dropping off VIPs,” Wardynski said.
The Army has only a few true gold-top Black Hawks, he said.
“There aren’t many. They’re for the chief of staff in the Army, secretary of the Army,” Wardynski said. “I flew on a lot of the regular Black Hawk flights in that battalion, probably 20 or 30. But that helicopter is pretty much to Black Hawks what the president’s limo is to Cadillacs. It’s pretty tricked out.”
Some training missions, such as for continuity of government, are always carried out at night, Wardynski said.
‘This is an airfield unlike any other in the United States.’
“If they’re practicing for a contingency mission, which the one that was in question here was what’s called continuity of government, which essentially means moving key people out of the Pentagon to alternative national military command sites because some serious things are happening in the United States,” he said. “They have to do that at night.”
The gold-tops fly under a “PAT” call sign, which stands for priority air transport, he said. “So when they’re on the FAA radars, it’s going to show ‘PAT’ as their private call sign. And if you’re in Washington, you see a lot of PAT flights,” Wardynski said.
The air corridor is “very highly controlled,” said Wardynski, who said he has been a passenger on gold-top Black Hawks operating along the Potomac River.
“Since 9/11, Washington, D.C., has been under integrated air defense by the U.S. Army and some Air Force assets,” Wardynski said. “So you don’t stray off course.
“You fly up the river or you fly down the river, and you come into Reagan either from the north or from the south, and you don’t deviate,” he said. “And if you do, you’re on air defense radars and people are going to get excited fast.”
Reagan National Airport is unusual for the heavy level of commercial air traffic, the restricted airspace, and a lot of helicopters, he said.
“This is an airfield unlike any other in the United States in terms of the amount of control exercised by FAA and to some degree the military,” Wardynski said. “The amount of helicopter traffic is extremely unusual, because you’ve got the Park Police, the National Guard, Pentagon people, and of course Metropolitan Police flying all over there.”
Wardynski said a proficiency training flight would practice “for some sort of wartime environment in which D.C. might be blacked out. The airport’s blacked out; there are no aircraft in the air.”
The Black Hawks do not have collision avoidance systems like commercial aircraft, Wardynski said. Although even those systems are unpredictable at low altitudes, he added.
If the helicopter pilot and crew were training with night-vision gear, that can complicate the flight due to light sensitivity and depth-of-field issues, he continued.
“The light really flares, and that can be disorienting, but that’s why you practice,” Wardynski said. “It’s just maybe practicing right next to one of the busiest and most complex airports in America would be something you don’t want to do any more.”
A former U.S. Army special operator with years of experience on Black Hawk missions flown in and out of Fort Belvoir, said issues with the regional jet, the Black Hawk, and air traffic control could have played significant roles in the crash.
“Because the airline pilot had the right of way and was on final descent below 500 feet, [the airline crew] were not performing ‘heads-up checks,’” he told Blaze News. “They also had precision ground approach radar, which should have warned them of another craft in such close proximity.”
The source said the helicopter crew’s possible use of night-vision gear in this environment would be “incomprehensible, because of the restricted peripheral vision.”
Air traffic control, he said, “carries the ultimate responsibility because he allowed both aircraft to be operating at the same altitude while in such close proximity.”
A Blaze News source with air traffic control experience said he questions the decision of an experienced Army flight crew conducting a continuity-of-government exercise at a time of night with so much air traffic congestion.
“If they felt it necessary for such an exercise, they should have come back after 11 p.m., when flights in and out of Reagan have ceased,” he said.
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