This week, during a series of sometimes heated hearings, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) questioned officials from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Army to figure out what led to the tragic collision between a Black Hawk helicopter and a passenger jet over Washington, D.C., resulting in 67 fatalities.
The main findings included a faulty altimeter gauge in the helicopter, along with warnings the FAA had received years earlier from controllers about helicopter-related risks.
At one point NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy scolded the FAA for not addressing safety concerns.
“Are you kidding me? Sixty-seven people are dead! How do you explain that? Our bureaucratic process?” she said. “Fix it. Do better.”
Among those who died in the January crash were a group of promising young figure skaters, their families, coaches, and four union steamfitters from the Washington area.
Here are the key points derived from the hearings on the crash, which have heightened travelers’ concerns amidst several other recent incidents and near-misses:
The helicopter’s altimeter was wrong
At the time of the collision, the helicopter was flying at 278 feet (85 meters), significantly above the 200-foot (61-meter) limit for that route. However, investigators indicated that the pilots may not have been aware of this since their barometric altimeter was incorrectly showing an altitude 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30 meters) lower than what the flight data recorder reported.
The NTSB subsequently found similar discrepancies in the altimeters of three other helicopters from the same unit.
A specialist from Sikorsky, the manufacturer of the Black Hawks, explained that the helicopter involved in the crash was an older model missing the air data computers that newer models use for more precise altitude readings.
Army Chief Warrant Officer Kylene Lewis told the board that an 80- to 100-foot (24- to 30-meter) discrepancy between the different altimeters on a helicopter would not be alarming, because at lower altitudes she would be relying more on the radar altimeter than the barometric altimeter. Plus Army pilots strive to stay within 100 feet (30 meters) of target altitude on flights, so they could still do that even with their altimeters that far off.
But Rick Dressler of medevac operator Metro Aviation told the NTSB that imprecision would not fly with his helicopters. When a helicopter route like the one the Black Hawk was flying that night includes an altitude limit, Dressler said, his pilots consider that a hard ceiling.
FAA and Army defend actions, shift blame
Both tried to deflect responsibility for the crash, but the testimony highlighted plenty of things that might have been done differently. The NTSB’s final report will be done next year, but there likely will not be one single cause identified for the crash.
“I think it was a week of reckoning for the FAA and the U.S. Army in this accident,” aviation safety consultant and former crash investigator Jeff Guzzetti said.
Army officials said the greater concern is that the FAA approved routes around Ronald Reagan International Airport with separation distances as small as 75 feet (23 meters) between helicopters and planes when planes are landing on a certain runway at Reagan.
“The fact that we have less than 500-foot separation is a concern for me,” said Scott Rosengren, chief engineer in the office that manages the Army’s utility helicopters.
Army Chief Warrant Officer David Van Vechten said he was surprised the air traffic controller let the helicopter proceed while the airliner was circling to land at Reagan’s secondary runway, which is used when traffic for the main runway stacks up and accounts for about 5% of flights.
Van Vechten said he was never allowed to fly under a landing plane as the Black Hawk did, but only a handful of the hundreds of times he flew that route involved planes landing on that runway. Other pilots in the unit told crash investigators it was routine to be directed to fly under landing planes, and they believed that was safe if they stuck to the approved route.
Frank McIntosh, the head of the FAA’s air traffic control organization, said he thinks controllers at Reagan “were really dependent upon the use of visual separation” to keep traffic moving through the busy airspace. The NTSB said controllers repeatedly said they would just “make it work.” They sometimes used “squeeze plays” to land planes with minimal separation.
On the night of the crash, 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. Testimony at the hearing raised serious questions about 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 controller acknowledged in an interview that the plane’s pilots were never warned when the helicopter was on a collision path, but controllers did not think telling the plane would have made a difference at that point. The plane was descending to land and tried to pull up at the last second after getting a warning in the cockpit, but it was too late.
FAA was warned about the dangers of helicopter traffic in D.C.
An FAA working group tried to get a warning added to helicopter charts back in 2022 urging pilots to use caution whenever the secondary runway was in use, but the agency refused. The working group said “helicopter operations are occurring in a proximity that has triggered safety events. These events have been trending in the wrong direction and increasing year over year.”
Separately, a different group at the airport discussed moving the helicopter route, but those discussions did not go anywhere. And a manager at a regional radar facility in the area urged the FAA in writing to reduce the number of planes taking off and landing at Reagan because of safety concerns.
The NTSB has also said the FAA failed to recognize a troubling history of 85 near misses around Reagan in the three years before the collision,
NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said “every sign was there that there was a safety risk and the tower was telling you that.” But after the accident, the FAA transferred managers out of the airport instead of acknowledging that they had been warned.
“What you did is you transferred people out instead of taking ownership over the fact that everybody in FAA in the tower was saying there was a problem,” Homendy said. “But you guys are pointing out, ‘Welp, our bureaucratic process. Somebody should have brought it up at some other symposium.’”
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Associated Press writer Leah Askarinam contributed.
