There’s new insight into the cause of the deadly midair crash between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines jet over the Potomac in January.
Attention has focused on the Black Hawk’s altitude, which was too high and placed it directly in the jet’s landing path. But, a new report from The New York Time’s reveals the failures were more complex than previously thought.
The co-author of that report was New York Times reporter Kate Kelly. She joined WTOP’s Sarah Jacobs to break down the new information she found.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sarah Jacobs: Kate, I’ve read the takeaways on this report. There’s a lot in it, but can you give us some of the top-line new information your report found?
Kate Kelly: Our reporting found that there were a variety of factors that played into this tragic event. The first one is that the Army Black Hawk made multiple missteps, and we don’t entirely know why, but one of the central issues was that it was simply flying too high for the prescribed altitudes.
The FAA, in that airspace near DCA requires you to be at 200 feet or less if you’re flying in the manner that they were, which is something called visual flight rules. And they were higher than that at the time of the accident — they were almost at 300 feet, which put them right in the path of the landing jet.
There seemed to be some, been some issues with asymmetry in the altitudes that the pilot and the copilot were reading out to one another that were never fully resolved.
And also, the pilot was was suggested to make a left turn, which would have taken them, probably to safety in the final seconds of the flight, and did not do it. We still don’t know exactly why, so there were a couple of different issues there.
We also know that not everybody was working with the up to date technology that might have kept everyone safe.
For instance, the Black Hawk was flying without an important technology called ‘ADS-B Out,’ which provides relatively real time information to the rest of the flying world about an exact location in the air. The reason for that has to do with Army protocol and the secrecy for the type of mission that they were training for.
But in this case, it fed into an information gap that might have allowed the controller in the air traffic control tower of DCA to give them better advice, using more up to date information.
There are also some other issues regarding the controller.
He did his job … but he did not provide urgent and very specific directions for the helicopter or the plane to try to get out of harm’s way. So those are some of the things that we uncovered.
Sarah Jacobs: All right now, Kate, what do you think this could mean for either the investigation going forward or action items that have begun to be discussed, or come out of the investigation?
Kate Kelly: The NTSB is working on its own final report, and Chair (Jennifer) Homendy has said they’re going to try to get that done within a year of the accident. So that would be early 2026, so we’ll know much more than about exactly what went wrong in more detail.
I know that the Senate subcommittee that handles travel has been very concerned about this, and they have focused on that technology I just mentioned to you — the ‘ADS-B Out.’ I think it’s possible we’ll see more movement on a requirement for all these parties to have ‘ADS-B Out’ installed.
The FAA has already been compelled to insist upon its use for the helicopter flights that are there. The FAA has already taken some action.
They have dramatically reduced the number of helicopter flights that use that airspace. They have closed route four, which is the helicopter route where this accident essentially occurred, and set up an alternative route, and they’ve taken some other measures to try to keep people safe.
But the reality is, this is a very congested airport. It’s one of the nation’s busiest and most complex from a commercial passenger flight perspective. There are still some helicopter flights that go up and down, and that has not changed.
The other sort of structural issue, Sarah, is that there’s a shortage of air traffic controllers nationwide. This has been a problem through numerous administrations.
It is not a partisan problem, and the current administration is facing it, too, so they’re doing some things to try to increase air traffic control, recruitment and retention, but it’s important for listeners to understand what a complicated job this is.
And you may not get a spot in the DCA tower until you’ve been working for 10 years in the field, and even when you get there, it’s eight to 10 months of on the job training.
So this is not something where they can quickly fill those spots with new people.
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