The airport near where an American Airlines plane and Black Hawk helicopter crashed has been found to have had close calls once a month and over 15,000 instances in the past three years.
An investigative preliminary report on the crash that killed all 67 people aboard both aircrafts uncovered 15,214 ‘near-miss events’ at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) when commercial airplanes and helicopters were less than one nautical mile in lateral distance and less than 400 feet in vertical separation.
That was recorded within 944,179 operations from October 2021 to December 2024, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report shared on Tuesday. There were 85 events in which the lateral separation was less than 1,500 feet and the vertical separation was less than 200 feet.
‘Initial analysis found that at least one TCAS resolution advisory (RA) was triggered per month due to proximity to a helicopter,’ states the report.
‘In over half of these instances, the helicopter may have been above the route altitude restriction. Two-thirds of the events occurred at night.’
Most of the close calls at the airport in Washington, DC, happened on approach to landing, according to the review of data from the Federal Aviation Administration and voluntary safety reporting programs.
The NTSB concluded that the separation distance between airplanes and helicopters at the airport is ‘insufficient and poses an intolerable risk to aviation safety’, said chairwoman Jennifer Homendy on Tuesday.
‘We remain concerned about the significant potential for future midair collisions at DCA,’ she said.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy remarked: ‘The data was there. It wasn’t effectively analyzed to see we had this risk.’
Since the deadly mid-air collision, the FAA has restricted helicopter flights around DCA and commercial planes are held as choppers pass.
The NTSB has recommended that the helicopter route be shuttered and that an alternate route be created.
Homendy said the board recommends that the FAA come up with a ‘permanent solution’ for routes to be a greater distance from chopper traffic.
The January 29 mid-air collision between the American Airlines jet and the military helicopter was the worst aviation disaster in the US since 2001.
Families of several victims stated that the preliminary report ‘reinforces what we, as the families of the victims, already suspected: serious, systemic failures in air travel safety cost our loved ones their lives and continues to threaten public safety.’
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