The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) held a meeting on Tuesday to discuss what their investigation revealed about the 2025 mid-air collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and a United States Army helicopter that killed 67.
The hearing comes nearly a year to the day of the crash that happened January 29, 2025. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told a reporter after Tuesday’s hearing that the incident that took place in Washington, D.C., was “100% preventable.”
Investigators said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ignored warning signs about a dangerous level of air traffic at Reagan National Airport (DCA) before the tragic crash.
“We have an entire tower who took it upon themselves to try to raise concerns over and over and over and over again only to get squashed by management and everybody above them within FAA,” Homendy said at the hearing.
Homendy and other NTSB members said the crash resulted from systemic failures at multiple institutions, including too much reliance on pilots to maintain visual separation between aircraft — the safe distance every plane has to maintain to avoid collisions.
During the hearing, NTSB members showed the most accurate recreation of the crash to date. A series of presentations showed how the Army helicopter and the American Airlines jet collided, with the helicopter blade slicing off one of the wings of the jet. Both aircraft immediately fell into the Potomac River.
According to The Washington Post, there was a wide array of issues that led to the tragedy. Per the outlet, instruments gave inaccurate readings, there was a lack of identification and collision avoidance technology on both the helicopter and the commercial jet, the airspace was crowded, and basic failures occurred including FAA maps that didn’t have clear guidance on the exact details of the helicopter’s route. The plane crew was never warned about the helicopter from air traffic controllers.
Per The Washington Post, the helicopter crew most likely confused the American Airlines aircraft with a plane that was farther away. Investigators also found the helicopter crew thought the aircraft was flying lower than it was. Investigators said Tuesday that the crash could have been prevented if the helicopter crew knew the instruments on the aircraft might have displayed inaccurate information about the altitude.
Homendy, who was visibly frustrated, said the two routes were close together and the FAA should have known the dangers.
“How is it that no one, absolutely no one in the FAA did the work to figure out there was only 75 feet, at best, 75 feet of vertical separation between a helicopter on Route 4 and an airplane landing on runway 33?” she asked at the hearing.
A controller at DCA was managing five helicopters and six aircraft after working alone for more than five hours at the time of the crash. The Washington Post reports nine times in the 18 minutes before the crash, the approaching collision alerts can be heard in the background of tower transmissions. However, investigators said there’s no evidence that any of the pilots or controllers involved that night were unqualified, impaired, or sleep-deprived — but they said the FAA did not conduct timely drug and alcohol testing for the controllers in the tower that evening in the aftermath of the accident.
Since this incident, the FAA banned non-essential helicopter traffic near DCA and closed the route the Black Hawk chopper took the night of the crash.
The helicopter had three crew members on board. The commercial jet was carrying 60 passengers, including youth figure skaters and coaches. United States figure skater Maxim Naumov lost his parents in the crash. He will compete in next month’s Winter Olympics in his parents’ honor.
