Mid-Air Collision at Reagan International Airport Tragically Kills 67

What Happened?

An American Airlines commercial jet on final approach to land at Washington D.C.’s Reagan International Airport collided with a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter, killing everyone on both aircraft. 

After a brief attempt to locate survivors, rescuers quickly shifted to a recovery operation in the icy waters of the Potomac River, where much of the wreckage for the two aircraft fell. 

The tragic mid-air collision is the worst air disaster in the United States since 2009. The National Transportation and Safey Board has launched an investigation to determine the cause of the crash.

Why it Matters

Commercial air travel in the United States had enjoyed a 16-year period of safe operations without a major catastrophe until the one at Reagan. 

While it’s too early to determine the cause of this crash, investigators have reportedly recovered the black boxes from both aircraft, which should provide key information about what those aircraft were doing up to the moment of collision.

Airspace above commercial airports is controlled by federal law and regulations, meaning all air traffic must ask for and receive permission before entering. 

Whether or not that happened in this incident remains unknown, but preliminary reports suggest both aircraft did receive such permission. The American Airlines flight was on final landing approach, and the Blackhawk helicopter was reportedly in communication with air traffic control at Reagan. Both of which suggest they were in contact with the control tower at Reagan. 

For a collision like this to happen so close to a major airport, several safety protocols had to have been violated. For one, there was no vertical separation between the helicopter and the airliner, since both were co-altitude when they collided. 

Aircraft are supposed to always maintain one thousand feet of vertical separation. Second, the flight paths appear to have not been deconflicted, meaning that even though the headings of the two craft crossed paths they continued along conflicting headings. 

Third, collision avoidance technology on both craft should have given the pilots a warning, though it remains to be seen if both aircraft had working anti-collision systems at the time of the crash. 

Because this collision happened at night, it’s unlikely either pilots could have seen the other, and the aircraft were reliant solely on instruments and instructions from Reagan National controllers. 

Instrument malfunction or miscommunication from the tower are possible causes of the collision, though no hard data yet exists to prove either. Pilot error is also a possible cause if they received but did not follow proper instructions from Reagan airport.

How it Affects You

According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ‘Every day, FAA's Air Traffic Organization (ATO) provides service to more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace.’ 

The vast number of safe takeoffs and landings conducted every day year round means air travel is still a safe form of transportation, but the potential for new lessons to be learned from the Reagan airport crash is high.