porculator said

Some pics I took from the ATC tower at DCA a few years back. There is just so much stuff around DCA and they keep adding more and more flights (either getting waivers from FAA or just changing the rules for it) and this almost seemed inevitable. Pilots make mistakes, and in this case it seems that the heli pilot mistook a larger plane further away for the ERJ that he was supposed to be avoiding (due to size of plane the lights would look similar in the dark with the larger one further away)
My impression of the ATC process itself is that it was very "analog". Just a bunch of folks who had a process that worked that seemed like organized chaos to an outsider. I often think about the transition from some of the boomer "old heads" to younger folks with shorter attention spans and less ability to focus, in regards to the critical mundane jobs like this that keep the world running.

Looking north at DC -



Looking east - runway 33 with Joint Base in the background

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