While landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday shortly before 9 p.m., American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter and crashed into the icy Potomac River. The jet carried 64 passengers and crew, while the helicopter carried three soldiers. Authorities currently believe there were no survivors. The collision marks the first fatal crash of a U.S. carrier since 2009, when a Colgan Air regional jet crashed while landing in Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 aboard.
The American Airlines jet had departed from Wichita, Kansas, and was on a normal approach to Reagan’s runway 33, flying 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. 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. During a press conference on Thursday morning, officials said that they did not know why the helicopter had flown into the path of the jet, which was carrying American and Russian figure skaters.
Appearing at a press conference Thursday morning, the newly confirmed secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, insisted that both aircraft had been following standard routes. “This was not unusual,” Duffy said. “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 show that helicopters are supposed to remain below 200 feet and hug the eastern shore of the Potomac. The last data point reported by the plane’s automatic position-reporting system showed it at an altitude of 275 feet and a quarter-mile from the eastern bank, suggesting that it was the Black Hawk that had been 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.”
Midair collisions involving airliners, while a major potential hazard of civil aviation, are extremely rare. There 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, with no collisions involving airliners in decades. But it has begun showing its cracks lately. In 2023, the New York Times reported that numerous examples of near misses had occurred at airports throughout the U.S.
Aviation safety is an unglamorous, even plodding business that requires meticulous attention to establishing and following regular procedure. Every single part on each 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 nonevent — 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 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 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 said at a press conference on 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, FAA 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 eliminated 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 the government does nothing to benefit the people of the U.S. 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. The crash puts us unambiguously in the “find out” stage of the process.
