The National Safety Transportation Board has found that helicopter traffic out of Ronald Reagan International Airport posed an “intolerable risk to aviation safety by increasing the chances of a mid-air collision” ahead of a crash last month that resulted in the deaths of 67 people.
“It is stronger than an oversight,” said NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy at a news conference in Arlington, Virginia, where the DCA airport is located, on Tuesday.
Sixty-seven people were killed on January 29, when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines regional jet mid-air over the Potomac River in Washington D.C. American Airlines Flight 5342 was on its descent into Ronald Reagan International Airport from Wichita, Kansas, with 64 people on board, as three soldiers on the helicopter participated in a training mission.
It’s believed the service members were traveling above their 200-foot allocated air clearance and wearing night-vision goggles that could have obscured their vision.
Black Hawk helicopters frequently flew along Route 4, an airway spanning from Hains Point to Wilson Bridge, before the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a restriction after the crash, which is in place until March 31st.
The agency is now calling on the department to barr helicopter operations along the route when airport runways one, five and 33 are being used for departures and arrivals, in addition to establishing an alternative route to facilitate military and law enforcement travel when the helicopter route segment is closed.
The agency is not issuing a recommendation for an alternative route, instead calling on the Federal Aviation Administration to determine a suitable airway.
“As that deadline nears, we remain concerned about the significant potential for a future mid-air collision at DCA, which is why we are recommending a permanent solution today,” Homendy said. “We believe a critical safety issue must be addressed without delay.”
Through initial data analysis, investigators determined airport officials fielded one traffic collision alert per month from 2011 to 2024 due to helicopters. Over half of those instances showed helicopters may have been above the route altitude restriction. Two-thirds of the incidents occurred at night.
A significant percentage of the close calls involved helicopters flying along Route 4 and planes landing on Runway 33, the same landing strip that was to be used by the American Airlines flight.
More recently, from October 2021 through December 2024, there were 15,214 instances of close proximity events between commercial airplanes and helicopters in which there was a lateral separation distance of less than one nautical mile and vertical separation of less than 400 feet. The airport logged 944,179 flights during that time.
Existing separation distances between helicopter traffic operating on the route and airplanes landing on the runway are insufficient, Homendy stated, announcing the agency’s preliminary report into the incident.
Responding to a report question regarding her sentiments about the recent collision, Homendy said: “It does make me angry, but it also makes me feel incredibly devastated for families that are grieving because they lost loved ones.” Several of the crash victims were children and their parents returning from a skating competition.
The data the agency used to compile its report was pulled from a voluntary safety reporting system that the FAA could have accessed at any point, the chairwoman noted.
“They could have used that information any time to determine that we have a trend here and a problem here and looked at that route. That didn’t occur,” she said.
The Independent has emailed the FAA for comment.
The tragedy marked the first in a series of US aviation disasters at the start of the year. Two days after the incident, a medevac jet crashed in a residential and commercial area of Philadelphia, killing seven people on board, including 11-year-old Valentina Guzmán Murillo and her mother, Lizeth Murillo Osuna, 31.
The pair had just left Shriners Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, where Valentina spent five months receiving life-saving treatment. The National Transportation Safety Board issued its preliminary report on the crash last week.
This is a developing story…
