What Caused the DC Mid-Air Collision?

Someone was flying where they weren't supposed to

Yesterday a Canadair regional jet operating as American Airlines 5342 collided with an Army Blackhawk helicopter and crashed into the Potomoc, killing everyone aboard both aircraft. While it’s still very early and important information has yet to emerge, I want to share some preliminary thoughts with you, especially why the US Army Blackhawk helicopter flight crew is being blamed for the crash.

First, some basic details.

The American Airlines jet had departed from Wichita, Kansas and was on a normal approach to Reagan’s runway 33 and was at an altitude of approximately 300 feet over the Potomac when it struck the helicopter, which was flying from north to south over the river.

The Black Hawk had taken off from Fort Belvoir in Virginia and was part of the 12th Aviation Battalion.

Shortly before the collision air traffic control asked the helicopter’s pilot if he had the airliner in sight, according to audio of the exchange posted to LiveATC.net.

According to the WSJ, “The battalion is responsible for transporting VIP passengers, usually top Pentagon leaders. There were three crew members on board, the officials said, but none were VIPs. The three troops on board the Black Hawk were conducting a training flight.”

Appearing at a press conference Thursday morning, the newly confirmed Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, insisted that both aircraft had been following standard routes, saying: “This was not unusual… Everything was standard in the lead-up to the crash.”

However, route maps of the area published by the FAA for use by helicopter pilots. The helicopter presumably should have been on Route 4, which runs along the eastern shore of the Potomac, on the opposite side of the river from the airport. It was considerable to the west of that. And it was too high. Helicopters are supposed to remain below 200 feet on this part of the route. The last data point reported by the plane’s automatic position-reporting system, which is presumably when it collided with the helicopter, showed it at an altitude of 275 feet. This suggests that the Blackhawk was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That idea was echoed by President Trump at a Thursday press conference in which he said that “the people in the helicopter should’ve seen where they were going.” (Actually what he said was a lot more rambling and discursive than that, and included the observation that “I have helicopters. You can stop helicopters very quickly. It had the ability to up or down, it had the ability to turn.")

I reached out to aviation attorney Jim Brauchle, and he pointed out that while the Blackhawk might have been off its proper path, it wasn’t that far out.

“That 100 ft altitude deviation is not that all uncommon,” he wrote. “The biggest issue to me is why is there a helicopter route on a final approach to a major runway and only deconflicted by perhaps 100-200 feet. To me that doesn’t seem like prudent routing.”

Midair collisions involving airliners, while a major potential hazard of civil aviation, are extremely rare. It was one such accident in 1956, when two airliners collided over the Grand Canyon, that led to the establishment of the modern air traffic control system. The system has proven remarkably effective in recent decades, with no collisions involving airliners in decades.

The last such crash I was able to find took place back in 1987, when a SkyWest Airlines Flight 1834, a turboprop airliner that collided with a small propellor plane near Salt Lake City, killing two crewmembers and six passengers.

So the system had a pretty solid track record for many years.

But lately it’s begun showing its cracks. In 2023 the New York Times reported that numerous examples of near misses had occured at airports throughout the United States.

Aviation safety is an unglamorous, even plodding business that requires meticulous attention to establishing and following regular procedure. Every single part on every aircraft is meticulously itemized and tracked; flight crew follow written checklists for every single procedure, from start-up and taxi to landing and shutdown. If a required piece of equipment is missing, or a pilot has gone one minute past his or her allotted duty time, a flight has to be scrubbed. The end result of all this hard work, if everything goes as planned, is literally a non-event — an absence of tragedy that is easy to take for granted.

Several countervailing forces push back against such efforts, including pressure for airlines to operate more profitably and for passengers to have cheaper and more convenient flights. Safe operation is particularly a challenge at Reagan, a small airport very close to the Washington, DC city center whose users include a large number of people with considerable power over the aviation system itself. Members of Congress have pressured the FAA to increase the number of flights operating in and out of the airport, despite agency concerns that the Reagan could not safely handle the traffic. The flight that crashed was conducting a route added last year as a result of pressure from Kansas Senator Jerry Moran, a Republican. “I know that flight, I’ve flown it many times myself,” Moran told a press conference Thursday morning. “I lobbied American Airlines to begin having a direct, nonstop flight service to DCA.

The FAA’s ongoing safety efforts are also under assault from the incoming Trump administration’s burn-it-down approach to governance. On January 20, Federal Aviation Administrator Mike Whitaker resigned, reportedly because he had been asked to do so by Elon Musk, who is also behind a sweeping effort to encourage across-the-board resignation of civil servants. The next day Trump elminated the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, which had advised the TSA on airline safety.

At this point, it’s not even clear what Republicans’ agenda will mean for the FAA. It’s easy to declare that government does nothing to benefit the people of the US. But one of the things it’s tasked with is making sure that planes don’t collide with one another. As the saying goes, fuck around and find out. Yesterday’s crash puts us unambiguously in the “find out” stage of the process.