SALT LAKE CITY — The skies around Salt Lake City International Airport are buzzing.
"It's busier here in the Salt Lake Valley, busier than it's ever been in my 20-something years of being here," said Martin O'Loughlin, president of Cornerstone Aviation.
O'Loughlin and the entire aviation community are paying close attention to that midair collision in Washington, D.C.
"Well, it's a very, very busy airspace but it's also highly-controlled," O'Loughlin said.
In a recording from LiveATC.net, the tower controller asked the Black Hawk pilot if they had the PSA Airlines CRJ 700 in sight. Then, the controller told the helicopter to proceed behind the jet.
"Typically, when a controller says 'pass behind', they only do that when you confirm that you have sight of the aircraft they want you to avoid. Clearly, the chopper pilot felt that he had the aircraft in sight," O'Loughlin said.
"They will usually give us a clock direction and an altitude and whether or not it's coming towards us, away from us," said Chief Warrant Officer 4 Joseph Galbraith
Galbraith is a Black Hawk instructor pilot for the Utah National Guard. They often fly through Salt Lake City International Airport's busy airspace.
"If we get a visual, they get a visual, usually that's a good safety margin," Galbraith said.
Sometimes, though, it's not as easy as it might sound.
"If there's three or four aircraft and they're between the nose of the aircraft and abeam the aircraft, it could be difficult to pinpoint which one they're talking about and so you might get clarification," Galbraith said.
"When the controller says, 'Find that aircraft,' there's no way of knowing whether, when you say, 'I have that aircraft in sight,' that you might not be talking about that aircraft over there and keep that one in sight while you're getting perilously close to the one they really wanted you to avoid," O'Loughlin said.
That can be especially difficult in a city, surrounded by bright lights.
"Well, here's the scary thing. When you're going to hit something, there's no relative motion. As you get closer and closer and closer on the same bearing, that light hasn't moved, relative to your aircraft, so it just looks like another light in the background, from the buildings, from the airport," O'Loughlin said.
The investigation into just why the helicopter and airliner ended up on a collision course will take time. NTSB final reports often take a year or more.
"As long as two airplanes are sharing the same airspace, the risk is always there that you can run into one another. An awful lot of our time goes into making sure that doesn't happen," O'Loughlin said.
Whatever the reason, O'Loughlin says, the aviation community will honor the dead by working to make sure it never happens again.
