US restricts helicopter flights near Washington airport after deadly crash

WASHINGTON: Federal authorities restricted helicopter flights near the US capital’s Reagan Washington National Airport indefinitely on Friday, two days after a midair collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter killed 67 people.

The Federal Aviation Administration took the action to reduce the risk of another collision as crews worked to pull the wreckage of America’s deadliest air disaster in two decades from the Potomac River.

An FAA official told Reuters the agency was barring most helicopters from parts of two routes near the airport and only allowing police and medical helicopters in the area between the airport and nearby bridges, pending a complete evaluation. It was not clear how long those restrictions would last.

The crash has cast a harsh spotlight on questions about air safety and a shortage of tower controllers at the heavily congested airport that serves the US capital.

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Airspace is crowded around the Washington area, home to three commercial airports, multiple military bases and some senior government officials who are ferried around by helicopter.

Over a three-year period ending in 2019, there were 88,000 helicopter flights within 30 miles (48 km) of Reagan National Airport, including about 33,000 military and 18,000 law enforcement flights, the Government Accountability Office said in a 2021 report.

The American Airlines plane was trying to land at Reagan National Airport when it collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter and crashed into the Potomac River on Wednesday evening. Fresh from recovering the plane’s so-called black boxes, divers aim to salvage both aircraft and find additional components on Friday, Washington’s fire department said.

Authorities have not pinpointed a reason for the collision.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it aims to recover the helicopter’s black box, which captures flight data and voices in the cockpit, on Friday.

The FAA is about 3,000 controllers behind staffing targets. The agency said in 2023 that it had 10,700 certified controllers, about the same as a year earlier.

One controller rather than two was handling local plane and helicopter traffic on Wednesday at the airport, a situation deemed “not normal” but considered adequate for lower volumes of traffic, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy vowed to reform the FAA.

“I am in the process of developing an initial plan to fix the @FAANews. I hope to put it out very shortly,” Duffy said on X on Thursday.

NTSB STUDYING VOICE RECORDER

The National Transportation Safety Board is studying the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from the CRJ700 airplane, which carried 60 passengers and four crew members, all of whom perished in the crash. The three members of the helicopter crew also died.

The military said the maximum altitude for the route the helicopter was taking is 200 feet (61 meters) but it may have been flying higher. The collision occurred at an altitude of around 300 feet, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24. The NTSB expects to recover the data recorder from the helicopter later on Friday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday ordered a 48-hour pause in flying for the Virginia-based Army unit involved, and said that could be extended. “We should have that pause until we get to the bottom of this,” he told Fox News.

President Donald Trump weighed in on Friday, saying that the helicopter involved in the crash was flying too high.

“The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200-foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, questioned the safety of military and commercial flights separated by as little as 350 feet (107 m) vertically and horizontally. She also urged the government to reconsider allowing so many helicopter flights next to such a busy airport.

Radio communications showed that air traffic controllers alerted the helicopter about the approaching jet and ordered it to change course.

American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said the pilot of the American Eagle Flight 5342 had about six years of flying experience. The Bombardier jet was operated by PSA Airlines, a regional subsidiary.

Seven US pilots told Reuters that the landing at Reagan airport is unique due to congested space along with an inability to communicate directly with military aircraft, which operate on different radio frequencies. The airport also has shorter runways.

Hegseth said the helicopter was flown by a “fairly experienced crew” of three soldiers who were wearing night-vision goggles on an annual training flight. Officials said they were grounding other flights from the Army unit involved in the crash and would reevaluate training exercises in the region.

The crash victims included people from Russia, China, Germany and the Philippines, as well as young figure skaters and people from Kansas, the state from which the passenger flight took off.