The primary lessons from the Reagan air crash

The tragic mid-air collision on January 29, 2025 between a United States Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines CRJ-700 flight while it was on the final approach path to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Washington DC, killing 67 people, brings out several aspects of human factors that can result in a tragedy. In all the air accident reports in India, one never gets detailed data from the digital flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. If one looks at the radar picture available to the public and the information from the air traffic tape recording, there was another flight which was behind the American Airlines flight, but approaching the main runway that the American flight was originally approaching before the American crew accepted a side step to a different runway. The ‘hurry syndrome’ Did the helicopter pilot wrongly identify this second flight to be the American flight when he reported visual to air traffic control? In this accident, a Kazakhstan Airlines flight from Chimkent, Kazakhastan to Delhi collided with a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 flight from Delhi to Dhahran, killing 349 people The pilot of the Kazakh flight was blamed for not complying with air traffic control clearance.