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The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board will review Tuesday the worst U.S. air crash since 2001, the Jan. 29 collision between a passenger plane and an Army helicopter near Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people. Investigators are expected to detail multiple contributing factors rather than a single cause.
The NTSB hearing will explore these numerous factors, with the committee aiming to propose significant changes to avoid similar incidents. The Federal Aviation Administration has tightened temporary restrictions to ensure planes and helicopters will no longer share the same airspace around Reagan National Airport.
However, victims’ families urged not to ignore the recommendations, which has been the case with many of the NTSB’s past recommendations. Tim Lilley, whose son Sam was a first officer on the American Airlines plane, expressed his hope: “I hope Congress and officials in the administration will make changes now rather than wait until another disaster occurs.”
“Instead of writing aviation regulation in our blood, we should start writing it in our data,” Lilley said. A pilot himself, he flew airplanes early in his career blackhawk Helicopters in Washington, DC. “Because all the data shows this accident is going to happen. This accident is completely preventable.”
Over the past year, the National Transportation Safety Board has highlighted a number of factors that contributed to the crash, including improperly designed helicopter routes over Reagan Airport and the fact that blackhawk The flight was 78 feet higher than it should have been, warnings the FAA ignored years ago, and army A key system that broadcasts the helicopter’s position more clearly has been shut down.
direct current plane crash It was the first in a series of high-profile crashes and close calls in 2025 that shocked the public, but last year’s total was actually the lowest since the pandemic began in 2020, with 1,405 crashes nationwide.
Experts say flying remains the safest way to travel because of all the overlapping precautions built into the system, but on January 29 last year, too many safety measures failed at once.
Here’s what we know about the accident:
Helicopter routes do not ensure adequate separation
Route along the way potomac river Helicopters and aircraft were allowed to stay within 75 feet (23 meters) of each other as the Black Hawk landed on the airport’s secondary runway that night, which typically handles less than 5 percent of Reagan Airport’s landing flights. This distance can only be guaranteed if the helicopter insists on flying along the river bank, but the official route does not have such a requirement.
Normally, air traffic controllers strive to keep aircraft at least 500 feet (152 meters) apart to ensure their safety, so the tight separation on Route 4 posed what NTSB Chairman Jennifer Homendy called “an intolerable risk to flight safety.”
Controllers at Reagan Airport are also accustomed to asking pilots to pay attention to other aircraft and maintain visual distance as they try to squeeze more planes onto what the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority says is the busiest runway in the nation. After the accident, the FAA stopped the practice.
A controller asked the helicopter pilot twice that night if he had seen the aircraft, and the pilots said they had and requested visual separation approval so they could keep their distance with their own eyes. But at investigative hearings last summer, board members questioned the crew’s ability to spot the plane. Wearing night vision goggles and whether the pilot is looking in the right place.
American Airlines flight from Wichita, kansascollided with the helicopter 278 feet (85 meters) above the river, but the Black Hawk was never supposed to fly more than 200 feet (61 meters) when passing the airport on its official route.
Before investigators revealed the altitude at which the helicopter was flying, Tim Lilly asked tough questions at the first meeting between National Transportation Safety Board officials and the families of the victims. His background as a pilot gave him a detailed understanding of these issues.
“We have a moral mission because we know so much about what happened. We don’t want to be advocates, but we can’t escape our responsibility,” Lilley said. Soon after the crash, he began meeting with top members of Congress, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Army officials to push for change.
The NTSB said the Black Hawk pilots may not have realized how high the helicopter was because they relied on barometric altimeter readings that were 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30 meters) lower than the altitude recorded by the flight data recorder.
Investigators tested altimeters on three other Black Hawk aircraft of the same model owned by the same Army unit and found similar discrepancies.
Past warnings and alarming data ignored
FAA controllers are warning that all helicopter traffic around Reagan Airport poses a risk at least through 2022.
The NTSB found that there were 85 near misses between planes and helicopters around the airport and more than 15,000 close incidents in the three years before the crash. Pilots report that collision alarms sound in the cockpit at least once a month.
The warning signs were there, and officials declined to add a warning to helicopter charts urging pilots to use caution when using the secondary runway at Reagan Airport, where the plane from Wichita, Kan., was trying to land when it struck the Black Hawk.
Rachel Feres said it was difficult to hear all the known concerns that were never addressed before the crash that killed her cousin, Peter Livingston, his wife, Donna, and their two young daughters, Everly and Alydia, both promising figure skaters.
“It quickly became clear that this accident should never have happened,” Feres said. “As someone who’s not very familiar with aviation and how our aviation system works, we just heard some things over and over again that I thought were really, really shocking and really surprising.”