WASHINGTON — The tragic plane crash on January 29, marking the deadliest aviation disaster on American soil since 2001, has drawn significant attention as the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) prepares to address the incident. As the NTSB convenes its hearing this Tuesday, a singular cause for the collision between an airliner and an Army helicopter near Washington, D.C., which claimed 67 lives, seems unlikely to emerge.
Instead, investigators are set to present a comprehensive analysis of the contributing factors, offering recommendations aimed at averting similar catastrophes in the future. In anticipation of this, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has already solidified the temporary airspace restrictions imposed after the crash, ensuring that planes and helicopters no longer share the same airspace around Reagan National Airport.
For the families of the victims, these forthcoming suggestions carry a weight of hope and urgency. Tim Lilley, whose son Sam served as the first officer on the ill-fated American Airlines flight, urges that the recommendations not fall on deaf ears, as has happened with many past NTSB advisories. Lilley stresses the importance of proactive legislative action by Congress and the administration to prevent future tragedies.
“Instead of writing aviation regulation in blood, let’s start writing it in data,” Lilley implores, drawing from his own experience as a pilot who once flew Black Hawk helicopters in the Washington area. “The data clearly indicated that such an accident was imminent and entirely preventable.”
Throughout the past year, the NTSB has spotlighted several factors that precipitated the disaster, including a poorly conceived helicopter route near Reagan Airport, the Black Hawk’s altitude deviation of 78 feet (23.7 meters) above the prescribed limit, ignored FAA warnings, and the Army’s disabling of a crucial system that would have better communicated the helicopter’s position.
This devastating crash was the first in a series of high-profile aviation mishaps and near-misses throughout 2025 that shook public confidence. Nonetheless, the overall number of crashes in the previous year was the lowest since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, totaling 1,405 nationwide.
Experts say flying remains the safest way to travel because of all the overlapping layers of precautions built into the system, but too many of those safety measures failed at the same time last Jan. 29.
Here is some of what we have learned about the crash:
The helicopter route didn’t ensure enough separation
The route along the Potomac River the Black Hawk was following that night allowed for helicopters and planes to come within 75 feet (23 meters) of each other when a plane was landing on the airport’s secondary runway that typically handles less than 5% of the flights landing at Reagan. And that distance was only ensured when the helicopter stuck to flying along the bank of the river, but the official route didn’t require that.
Normally, air traffic controllers work to keep aircraft at least 500 feet (152 meters) apart to keep them safe, so the scant separation on Route 4 posed what NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy called “an intolerable risk to flight safety.”
The controllers at Reagan also had been in the habit of asking pilots to watch out for other aircraft themselves and maintain visual separation as they tried to squeeze in more planes to land on what the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority has called the busiest runway in the country. The FAA halted that practice after the crash.
That night a controller twice asked the helicopter pilots whether they had the jet in sight, and the pilots said they did and asked for visual separation approval so they could use their own eyes to maintain distance. But at the investigative hearings last summer, board members questioned how well the crew could spot the plane while wearing night vision goggles and whether the pilots were even looking in the right spot.
The Black Hawk was flying too high
The American Airlines plane flying from Wichita, Kansas, collided with the helicopter 278 feet (85 meters) above the river, but the Black Hawk was never supposed to fly above 200 feet (61 meters) as it passed by the airport, according to the official route.
Before investigators revealed how high the helicopter was flying, Tim Lilley was asking tough questions about it at some of the first meetings NTSB officials had with the families. His background as a pilot gave him detailed knowledge of the issues.
“We had a moral mandate because we had such an in-depth insight into what happened. We didn’t want to become advocates, but we could not shirk the responsibility,” said Lilley, who started meeting with top lawmakers in Congress, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Army officials not long after the crash to push for changes.
The NTSB has said the Black Hawk pilots may not have realized how high the helicopter was because the barometric altimeter they were relying on was reading 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30 meters) lower than the altitude registered by the flight data recorder.
Investigators tested out the altimeters of three other Black Hawks of the same model from the same Army unit and found similar discrepancies.
Past warnings and alarming data were ignored
FAA controllers were warning about the risks all the helicopter traffic around Reagan airport created at least since 2022.
And the NTSB found there had been 85 near misses between planes and helicopters around the airport in the three years before the crash along with more than 15,000 close proximity events. Pilots reported collision alarms going off in their cockpits at least once a month.
Officials refused to add a warning to helicopter charts urging pilots to use caution when they used the secondary runway at Reagan the jet was trying to use before the collision.
Rachel Feres said it was hard to hear about all the known concerns that were never addressed before the crash that killed her cousin Peter Livingston and his wife Donna and two young daughters, Everly and Alydia, who were both promising figure skaters.
“It became very quickly clear that this crash should never have happened,” Feres said. “And as someone who is not particularly familiar with aviation and how our aviation system works, we were just hearing things over and over again that I think really, really shocked people, really surprised people.”
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