My wife thinks it was deliberate. I tend to think it was negligence. So our government should work real hard and tell us the truth. It is like these mysterious drones in NJ. Trump's new press sex plainly explained what they were and whose it was. Why didn't our government tell us the truth so conspiracies did not form.
In my Opinion, thers no conspiracy here, it's simply a horrible intersection of small errors and misunderstandings that came together to create a horrible tragedy...
The chopper pilot evidently mistook an outbound plane for the aircraft mentioned by the ATC and never clearly saw the inbound plane until a split second before he impacted it...
How's that possible (?) you may ask...; well..., the pilot was wearing NVGs which limit his peripheral vision..., and the plane appears to have been descending from his left (port side), while he was slightly ascending (for reasons unknown (that would be a major error on his part but gaining a 100 feet in a Blackhawk doesn't take a major input to the flight controls)...
The landing aircraft did nothing wrong (outside of not aborting the landing..., but the crew had no reason to believe that the helicopter would deviate from its correct altitude and probably identified and discounted the incoming helicopter as a threat, then moving onto focusing on landing procedures...
This was just a horrible intersection of factors that shouldn't have occurred had the chopper maintained its altitude below the flight path of the inbound plane, in my Opinion...
We'll get the NTSB Report 5-6 months from now but it won't change what occurred...
My take on how to avoid this sort of thing is to limit the number of aircraft landing at Reagan to those containing individuals involved with or doing official business with the US Government... (or maybe even limit it to Senators, Congressmen, and Cabinet members)... All others (visitors/tourists), should be diverted to Dulles or BWI...
Dulles has a Metro (subway) connection to D.C. and the way I recall it there's a railroad line to D.C. from either BWI proper or a connection very near it..., at any rate if you're not heading to D.C. for official business you can spend an extra 40- 80 bucks and find auxiliary transportation into the Capital... Doing this should cut the flight load into Reagan by a significant amount, in my opinion... This would also enhance the airspace security of the Capital... Seems like a no brainer to me...
The above wouldn't have prevented this accident given the specific circumstances involved but it would lower the odds of it happening again just due to a lower number of inbound flights subject to similar circumstances...