51
votes
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport closed after a military helicopter collides with a landing regional jet
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- Title
- Small aircraft crashes near Washington DC airport
- Published
- Jan 30 2025
- Word count
- 96 words
This is certainly a tragedy — it is a testament to how safe air travel is that something like this hasn’t happened in over 15 years in the USA.
I’d hesitate to politicize this, but given Trump’s speculations online already, I will just note that he recently axed a key aviation safety board, and while this accident (involving a military craft) happened his defense secretary was on Fox News complaining about DEI.
ATC in the US has been somewhat dicey already before, if observations on LiveATC are anything to go by. A concerning number of bad calls and near misses. I remember lots of commentary along the links of "just a matter of time till we run out of luck". So it's possibly a preexisting condition, and not caused by Trump.
Then again, ATC are federal employees, right? I suppose the current climate isn't exactly conducive to good job performance.
ATC has had issues in the US for a while. Consistently underfunded and understaffed, most of their technology hasn't been updated since the 80s and they're extremely overworked and stressed at the best of times. They tried to make it better at one point... then Reagan fired them all.
This has to do with the TSA/DHS so not really relevant to avoiding collisions/air traffic control which falls under the FAA/DOT
In that case, worth noting that the FAA currently has no head because the Trump admin requested he quit.
Gizmodo is reporting (in their scathing but somewhat amusing article) that he named a new one in his press conference about this incident.
(last line of the article)
It seems to have been an American Airlines flight colliding with an Army Blackhawk helicopter.
Content warning: Explosion seen at a distance
Kennedy Center webcam caught the collision over the river
edit: this tweet identifies it as a DC police helicopter, but further evidence later in the thread identifies the helicopter as an Army Blackhawk.
edit 2: replaced the link with the streamable mirror as the original tweet was deleted.
NSFL - Streamable mirror for the crash in case anyone prefers it
Thanks for this, X links consistently fail to load for me since the takeover. Even if I wanted to give them clicks (I don’t) the content’s never accessible to me anyway. Sometimes I get an authwall, usually it’s just a “something went wrong” page, maybe because of my privacy stack but I don’t care enough to turn anything off to make it work.
As for the video, if anyone else is curious but hesitating to click, it doesn’t show much. The camera is far away from the collision and it’s dark. Two distant lights in the sky meet and fall down. I don’t think there’s any detail about what happened to be gleaned by watching.
This article identifies the rotary wing aircraft as a Sikorsky H-60 helicopter. Doesn't provide much other info.
Some follow up:
The Army will not release the name of one of the crew. She's a woman, may have been a pilot being tested due to being the less experienced pilot, and the claims by President Trump that the pilots are to blame due to DEI would make her family and memory the likely target of online hate.
Online transphobic assholes have been claiming that this crew member is Jo Ellis, a trans woman in the VA National Guard. She had to post a video proving she was alive to try to stop it.
Twitter's AI was repeating the lie as well. Jo wrote an op-ed several days ago about her service, and I'm going to assume this is what made them lie about her.
Saw an interesting comment over on Reddit from a USCG helo pilot who has flown in and is familiar with that airspace - https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1idba8i/plane_crash_at_dca/m9yfvz6/ (I know I know, Reddit, but fednews is kind of a big deal right now)
The part that really caught my eye is that apparently, the incoming aircraft had been routed on to a relatively unusual approach. They would usually land on runway 01 (the longest central runway), but were switched to runway 33 on approach - a shorter runway but long enough to handle a regional jet. For those who don't watch CGPGrey - add a 0 to the end and the number roughly corresponds to the compass direction you use to approach the runway. These runways are close enough in orientation that the jet could be easily redirected with minimal disruption at the time it happened, about 10 minutes before anticipated landing, but far enough apart that the helo pilot could easily get confused between traffic approaching 01 and 33. They very well might have had sight of what they thought was their target aircraft, as they reported they were in visual to the tower (who very shortly before the accident apparently observed the closeness of the approach and instructed the helo to maintain visual and pass behind the jet), but actually had sight of one that was closer to landing to 01.
A map of DCA Reagan runways to get a visual idea - 01 is the long north/south runway, 33 is the one that starts about halfway up the length of 01 on the right. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Washington_national_airport.jpg
The Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling is directly across the river from DCA (Reagan). The Blackhawk helicopter was an army Sirkowsky UH-60 out of Fort Belvoir, a little to the south in Virginia. If I had to guess, the helicopter was going between bases and entered the flight path due to error or malfunction, but no confirmation.
Three flight crew on the helicopter, 60 passengers and four crew on the plane. I hope there are survivors but it seems unlikely from initial reports. NYT has someone watching from the waters edge and has not observed anyone pulled out.
Edit: the helicopter was headed south over the Potomac, so not going between bases. Possibly returning to base. The plane was approaching with, angling west. They collided over the river between DCA and the base.
Title typo fixed by u/nukeman ty
More speculation than fact right now but the airport is closed for departures and arrivals. Word is, a "small aircraft" has collided with a airplane descending to land at the Arlington, VA airport. Ive heard several people mention it was a military helicopter but not sure that been confirmed as of 10p ET or so
FOX has a live stream reporting. Please post others if they are available
Just after 10pm ET, Fox is reporting that it was Flight 5342, from Wichita to DC (ICT to DCA)
Around 10:20p ET FOX reports the AP confirms an Army helicopter collided with the commercial aircraft
If you are worried about the commercial flight, American Airlines is encouraging you to call 800-679-8215
Fixed the typo in the title for ya!
That’s pretty concerning no matter what kind of helicopter. It’s damn hard for something like that to be an accident
I'm trying not to make assumptions based on the video. It looks like the helicopter flies straight into the plane. But angles and lights at night and at distance and in the air are complicated. But I would think a Blackhawk would have had far more maneuverability than a landing jet.
Just fuck though I hope the search and rescue is successful
Yeah there's a couple of things I'm curious about but don't have enough knowledge to really judge.
I suspect thinking about it more that it's just as unlikely for it to be on purpose, if just because of how insanely hard it would actually be to hit an in the air plane with any sort of reliability.
However on the other hand, this isn't like one of those horrible runway accidents where the tower fucked up, or at least I don't think? I'm assuming that helicopter airspace is just in a totally different area for all sorts of practical reasons?
I'm not an expert at all. The plane was landing so that's usually airspace that's like... You know it's the path? So options are major tower fuckup, major pilot(s) fuckup, intentional act?
None of it is good and all of this is dangerous for first responders and cold water at night (at best) is a bad place to be for survivors.
AP news says the tower asked if the helicopter if it could see the plane and said to go behind the plane. They got no response from the helicopter.
https://apnews.com/live/dc-plane-crash-reagan-updates#00000194-b55b-d66a-a1bd-f5dbcefc0000
The helicopter responded using a UHF frequency which is normal for military aircraft while civilian aircraft use VHF. Tower controllers typically “simulcast” on both UHF and VHF so when only the VHF frequency gets recorded or transcribed you tend to see what appears to be a one-sided conversation with military aircraft.
To clarify, the helicopter had already confirmed they had eyes on the plane and would maintain visual separation. The plausible speculation I've seen is that the plane was landing on an uncommon runway (33) and the helicopter was watching the wrong lights. That said, the angle between the chopper and the plane is a pretty good one for the pilots to not notice that it was getting closer.
If both birds are moving at mostly constant velocities, then a collision implies that there was zero relative movement of the light source. That can easily be lost visually. Also possible that it was the wrong bird to begin with, and the plane was simply in a blind spot (frame in between the cockpit windows perhaps?)
Keep in mind that in night flying, you mostly just see the navigation lights, not the hull itself, so distance cues are mostly N/A.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. I was actually sitting in a plane on a runway while I typed that so I was in a bit of a hurry to post the comment lol but yeah in college I took a human factors in aviation class and did what you could call our capstone project as basically an undergrad-level equivalent of an NTSB report where we covered a crash where somebody hit a tow plane pulling a glider due to zero relative angular movement.
"Luckily" they severed the tow cable so the birthday boy riding in the glider was only traumatized for life instead of dying in a fiery crash...
Not just more maneuverability (in general and especially while landing at a low speed, takeoff and landing are the most precarious moments for a jet), but the final approach lanes are well known and consistent.
It really wasn't a good area for the helicopter pilots to be going at the best of times.The helicopter was flying along a standard helicopter flight corridor. It was (more or less) where it was supposed to be.Obviously, one of the two craft wasn't quite where it was supposed to be.Edit: the helicopter was more than a half mile off-course and more than 100 ft too high when it was supposed to be below 200 ft.
No, not quite. The helicopter deviated to the west of helicopter Route 4 (on the east side of the Potomac) and it was above the 200' limit for helicopter Route 4, by 150' at the time of impact. Regardless, the helicopter was granted visual separation by ATC after positively visually identifying the CRJ, so it was the helicopter pilot's responsibility to maintain visual separation. They didn't.
Analysis of the flights and other recent flights in the area...it's a clusterfuck.
Criss-Crossing Routes in D.C. Airspace Leave Little Room for Error (gifted link)
Updated title for accuracy. Revert or update further if needed.
Unfortunately I think this one will have a lot of updates. Thank you
Appreciate the organization from yourself and mycketforvirrad. I'm not super familiar with all of the available tags and options