There appears little doubt that most of the blame for Wednesday night’s fatal mid-air collision outside Washington, DC, lies with the three-person crew of a US army Black Hawk helicopter. It collided with an American Airlines regional jet on final approach to a runway at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
All 64 passengers and crew died aboard the American Airlines jet. An additional three people died in the US army helicopter.
Analyses so far show that the jetliner’s flight crew were carrying out a textbook approach across the Potomac River to the Washington airport. This was despite being told by air-traffic controllers, with little warning, of a change in runway for which the aircraft had to make a last-minute manoeuvre.
The collision occurred despite an urgent warning by air-traffic controllers to the helicopter that it was on a collision course with the American Airlines jet, a Canadian-built Bombardier CRJ-700. The helicopter was advised to pass behind it.
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The pilots confirmed they could see the jet. Yet their helicopter almost immediately collided with it, leading many analysts to believe the helicopter crew was actually looking at another plane, also on approach to the airport, and slightly ahead of the doomed passenger aircraft.
Most visitors to Washington, DC, can testify to the almost constant presence of military helicopters in the sky. The Pentagon, the headquarters of the US armed forces, is 2km from the airport, and there are several other air-force, military and naval bases on the city outskirts.
Serious questions must be asked about the presence of a helicopter meandering in the flight path of landing aircraft. An airliner is at its most vulnerable while landing, and this is when most accidents occur. An aircraft approaching a landing is moving very slowly in a configuration that makes it less manoeuvrable. In addition, both pilots have a very high workload and are focused on the landing ahead of them, not things happening off to the side, especially at night.
Additional factors complicated this incident. Both the helicopter and the CRJ airliner were fitted with sophisticated anti-collision systems, known as automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast. This should have made the pilots in each of the two aircraft aware of each other’s presence. Reports suggest the helicopter had its ADS-B system switched off. This suggests not only that it was electronically invisible to the pilots of the American Airlines jet but also that the helicopter pilots themselves were not electronically aware of the presence of the jet.
An additional factor was that the helicopters crew’s radio broadcasts were on a different frequency from those of the American Airlines plane, so its pilots were unaware of the urgent voice traffic between air-traffic controllers and the Black Hawk helicopter.
This accident comes just two weeks after the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, which is in charge of US aviation safety, was in effect fired by Elon Musk. Although Musk is in charge of DOGE, a new body formed by President Donald Trump to reduce staffing in US federal agencies, he also had a personal beef with the FAA leader, who had placed restrictions on rocket launches by Musk’s company SpaceX following a series of hazardous mid-air explosions at Musk’s Texan spaceport.
The Washington disaster has disturbing similarities to the worst US mid-air collision involving a commercial airliner. In 1978, despite being warned by air-traffic controllers on several occasions of the presence of a small private Cessna aircraft near its flight path as it approached San Diego, and acknowledging that they had seen it, the pilots of a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 still collided with it, killing 144 people in the air and on the ground.
Gerry Byrne is an aviation journalist
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