In the years leading up to the tragic midair collision over the Potomac River on January 29, 2025, air traffic controllers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport had been raising alarms about potential safety hazards. The catastrophic incident, which resulted in the deaths of 67 individuals when a military training helicopter collided with a commercial jet, underscored the seriousness of these longstanding concerns.
Emily Hanoka, a former air traffic controller at Reagan National, spoke candidly about these issues in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” aired on Sunday. “The warning signs were all there,” she noted, emphasizing that controllers had repeatedly formed local safety councils to address the risks. Despite numerous safety reports and data-backed recommendations compiled by diligent controllers, these concerns consistently failed to gain traction with decision-makers.
Hanoka elaborated on the intense pressure to maintain the flow of air traffic at an airport that manages approximately 800 flights daily. This pressure, she explained, often led to the implementation of tightly timed operations on a runway system already strained by capacity limits.
“Some hours are overloaded to the point where it exceeds what the airport can handle,” shared Hanoka, who had finished her shift just before the tragic crash occurred that night.
Illustrating the severity of the situation, Hanoka described the relentless demand for efficiency: “There was definitely a pressure. If you do not move planes, you will gridlock the airport.”
“There was definitely a pressure. If you do not move planes, you will gridlock the airport.”
Notably, it was not the air traffic of the commercial airlines, but a military training aircraft flying at the incorrect altitude through “helicopter alley” that crashed into the unsuspecting airliner.
A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into the side of an American Eagle regional jet approaching Reagan National just before landing, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. Federal investigators later issued urgent safety recommendations focused on separating helicopter and fixed-wing traffic near the airport.
Since the disaster, regulators have moved to tighten procedures.
There were multiple near-misses just a day before the disaster, according to CBS, and 85 near-collisions reported between 2021 and 2024 during the Biden administration.
“There were obvious cracks in the system, there were obvious holes,” Hanoka said. “You had frontline controllers ringing that bell for years and years, saying this is not safe. This cannot continue. Please change this. And that didn’t happen.”
Rescue and salvage crews pull up a plane engine as cranes work near the wreckage of an American Airlines jet in the Potomac river from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, on Monday, Feb. 3, in Arlington, Va. (Jose Luis Magana)
The airport’s 25 million airline passengers a year is reportedly 10 million more than its intended capacity.
To handle the load, Hanoka described “squeeze play” maneuvers unique to that crammed airspace and three runways where two aircraft are on one runway within seconds of each other.
“A squeeze play is when everything is dependent on an aircraft rolling, an aircraft slowing, and you know it’s gonna be a very close operation,” she said. “And that is a really common operation.”
Air traffic controllers coming from other locales give the airport’s stress work a hard pass, she said.
“So you’ll get new controllers come in, so they’ve transferred from other facilities and they’ll look at the operation and say, ‘Absolutely not,’” she continued. “And they’ll withdraw from training. And that, when I was there, was about 50%.
“About half of the people that walked in the building to train would say, ‘Absolutely not.’”
The father of the crash victim pilot, Tim Lilley (inset), said the Jan. 29 mid-air collision near Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., was “so preventable.” (FOX Business/AP/Ben Curtis)
“It was surprising walking into that work environment, how close aircraft were,” Hanoka said.
Reporting last week said the FAA suspended the use of visual separation between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in that airspace and shifted controllers toward radar-based separation, while restrictions were also imposed on certain helicopter operations near Reagan National.
The safety concerns Hanoka described align with broader findings from investigators. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed systemic FAA failures and found the crash was preventable, with concerns including overreliance on visual separation and longstanding risks in the airspace around Reagan National.
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