USAnalysis

Washington DC plane crash: Blame for mid-air collision appears to lie with helicopter crew

Jetliner’s flight crew were carrying out textbook approach to airport across the Potomac River

Part of the wreckage is seen as rescue boats search the waters of the Potomac River after Wednesday night's mid-air collision between a passenger jet and a US Army helicopter. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Part of the wreckage is seen as rescue boats search the waters of the Potomac River after Wednesday night's mid-air collision between a passenger jet and a US Army helicopter. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Gerry Byrne
Thu Jan 30 2025 - 13:48

There appears little doubt that most of the blame for Wednesday night’s fatal mid-air collision in Washington lies with the three-person crew of a US Army Blackhawk helicopter. It collided with an American Airlines CRJ jet on final approach to a runway at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

All 64 passengers and crew died aboard the American Airlines jet. An additional three people died in the US Army helicopter.

Analyses so far show that the jetliner’s flight crew were carrying out a textbook approach across the Potomac River to the Washington airport. This was despite being told by air traffic controllers, with little prior warning, of a change in runway for which the aircraft had to put in a last-minute manoeuvre.

The collision occurred despite an urgent warning by air traffic controllers to the helicopter that it was on a collision course with the American Airlines jet, a Canadian built CRJ-700 regional aircraft. The helicopter was advised to pass behind it.

READ MORE

The pilots confirmed they could see the jet. Yet their helicopter almost immediately collided with it, leading many analysts to believe the helicopter crew was actually looking at another plane, also on approach to the airport, and slightly ahead of the doomed passenger aircraft.

Most visitors to Washington can testify to the almost constant presence of military helicopters in the sky. The Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Armed Forces, is less than 3km from the airport and there are several other air force, military and naval bases on the city outskirts.

Serious questions must be asked about the presence of a helicopter meandering in the flight path of landing aircraft. An airliner is at its most vulnerable while landing and this is when most accidents occur. An aircraft approaching a landing is moving very slowly in a configuration that makes it less manoeuvrable.In addition, both pilots have a very high workload and are focused on the landing ahead of them, not things happening off to the side, especially at night.

There were additional factors that complicated this incident. Both the helicopter and the CRJ airliner were fitted with sophisticated anti-collision systems, known as automatic dependent surveillance broadcast (ADS-B). This should have made the pilots in each of the two aircraft aware of each other’s presence. Reports suggest the helicopter had its ADS-B system switched off. This suggests that not only was it electronically invisible to the pilots of the American Airlines jet, the helicopter pilots themselves were not electronically aware of the presence of the jet.

An additional factor was that the helicopters crew’s radio broadcasts were on a different frequency to those of the American Airlines plane, so its pilots were not aware of the urgent voice traffic between air traffic controllers and the Blackhawk helicopter.

This accident comes just two weeks after the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is in charge of US aviation safety, was in effect fired by Elon Musk. Although Musk is in charge of DOGE, a new body formed by President Donald Trump to reduce staffing in US federal agencies, he also had a personal beef with the FAA leader, who had placed restrictions on rocket launches by Musk’s company, SpaceX, following a series of hazardous mid-air explosions at Musk’s Texan spaceport.

The Washington disaster has disturbing similarities to what was previously the worst ever US mid-air collision involving a commercial airliner. In 1978, despite being warned by air traffic controllers on several occasions of the presence of a small private Cessna aircraft near its flight path as it approached San Diego, and acknowledging they had seen it, the pilots of a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 still managed to collide with it, killing 144 people in the air and on the ground.

Gerry Byrne is an aviation journalist