There's no good excuse, other than cost and training and equipment integration (which are massive costs, i know) for not having some kind of learning or at a minimum high levels of automation in 2025.
not a bad question honestly.. I'd want some highly skilled humans there monitoring things but, yes. The air traffic control system of the US is absolutely incredibly amazing, but their entire mission, technology and equipment used to accomplish that mission, etc need to be reviewed, maybe rebuilt to be even safer.
We really can't have this type of accident, a midair collision happen anywhere in the United States, much less the nation's capital, especially considering the Washington area is some of the highest controlled airspace in the country. DCA has been a high-risk airport really since the jet-age, and I have a feeling this might be the end of it as a major passenger airport (at least for Part 121 operations). DOT/FAA are really going to need to step up after this and figure it out, for good.
I hope there are survivors but it is really cold in that water right now, look up Air Florida flight 90 for a completely different accident, but in a similar time of the year.
In any event, unless the weather was IMC, where neither aircraft can see because of weather/cloud, which I'm deducing is not the case if they were allowed to maintain visual separation, the ultimate responsibility for maintaining separation is with the pilot(s) .. But as I posted, we should not have this happen anywhere in the United States in 2025 & much less the nation's capital. Hopefully DOT and FAA get to work, but I have a feeling that will be the end of DCA's usefull life as a major passenger airport.
This had all the tone from the outset to just be narrowly focussed on this crash-investigation alone, but the writer did dedicate a paragraph to Egyptair Flight 990 from 1999.. An incident that really was one of the first modern airline pilot-suicide's that has never (The NTSB's conclusion) been agreed upon by Egypt. And in the past couple of decades that number has risen at an alarming pace (LAM Mozambique Flight 470 2013, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 2014, Germanwings Flight 9525 2015) < That extremely frightening and tight grouping of incidents seems to have been followed by a few years of normalcy. Then most recently the China Eastern Flight 5735 that China is still apparently working on a report for, but don't expect much in the way of admission on China's part, of course.
But at any rate, there is a noticeable problem in the corps of pilots being selected to fly for several airlines, even really good airlines.
It's not just personal blogs as many of y'all know.. this is a daily struggle in any SDE mainly working in web .. I am constantly lamenting the fact I spend like 70% of my time at my main job (large financial company) just trying to get my environment , or the application's environment in a position to actually develop on the application itself .. It's insane.
I f'n love javascript .. it's allowed a lot of us a doorway into software engineering where a lot of us realize how ... 'special' js and related web development are ;) .. But man it can make you really want to smash the computer some days.
There is so much oddness surrounding this.. First, I don't really see how you can prosecute ideas, because as much as authorities will try and narrowly-define this case as being about moderation (of a platform), and cooperation with authorities, ultimately this is really an attempt to prosecute the idea/concept of publicly available 'e2e' encrypted communications. Second though... How does that list of charges only amount to a maximum of 20 years ? lol