On Wednesday night, what appears to have been a disastrous combination of safety vulnerabilities resulted in a midair collision over the Potomac River that tragically took the lives of more than 60 souls near Washington, D.C. Inspectors are still trying to figure out what exactly caused the crash of an American Airlines flight and an Army Black Hawk helicopter on a routine training mission, but accidents are rarely ever due to a single cause.
During my time as an FAA safety inspector, I was based at the FAA headquarters just a couple of miles from Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) for five years. During that time I observed hundreds of flights from within the cockpit, sitting in the flight observer’s jump seat. These flights were mostly at night. And I dreaded nearly all of them. Every flight in and out of the DCA airport creates an incredibly high workload for the flight crews. I’d go so far as to argue it’s more stressful than any other airport.
Every flight in and out of the DCA airport creates an incredibly high workload for the flight crews.
DCA is not only one of the busiest airports in the nation but also the most complex. The airport is unique in many ways, and hosts many different types of operations within a tight airspace.
According to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, DCA has the busiest runway in America. And the airspace is both complicated and crowded as an increasingly high volume of passenger planes share the air, and communications frequencies, with military aircraft, VIP flights, White House transportation and drones flying clandestine operations.
This delicate balancing act has only gotten more fraught in recent years. The Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act of 2024 added 10 additional daily flights to the airport, sparking a strong reaction from Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine, Ben Cardin, Chris Van Hollen and Mark Warner — all of whom represent constituents in Virginia or Maryland.
“We are deeply disappointed by the Senate Commerce Committee’s move to overburden DCA,” the senators said in February 2024. “With this profoundly reckless decision, the Committee is gambling with the safety of everyone who uses this airport.”
Again, we don’t yet know what caused this accident. But there are three safety vulnerabilities that initially stand out to me. Military craft generally use a different communications frequency than commercial aircraft, making it harder for their respective pilots to talk to each other and hear the chatter between area aircraft and traffic control. The second vulnerability is pilots’ reliance on their Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS). These systems do not easily detect threats from behind. So, if the Army helicopter was approaching from the side or rear of the plane as it was turning, the TCAS may not have alerted the airplane’s pilots.
Another safety vulnerability when commercial airplanes operate near military helicopters is that military aircraft, including helicopters, are usually exempt from the FAA’s Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) requirements. ADS-B systems allow pilots to automatically transmit their position, altitude and velocity at regular intervals to other aircraft, which is used to maintain separation. If the helicopter did not have such a system enabled, the commercial aircraft may not have been notified of its presence.
As investigators piece together the tragic chain of events that caused this accident, the National Transportation Safety Board will prepare a report with contributing factors and recommend changes to the way flights operate in and out of Reagan National Airport. Then the FAA will attempt to make changes that support those recommendations. The goal of every accident investigation, and every person involved in the investigation, has and always will be to make the skies safer. The FAA can’t bring back the 67 people presumed dead in Virginia, but it can help ensure a similar crash doesn’t happen again. And it must.
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