Podcast: Potomac Crash—An Accident Decades In The Making?

Jens Flottau:

Hello and welcome to Check 6. Today, we have to talk about the January 29 fatal collision of American Airlines Flight 5342, a CRJ700 operated by American subsidiary PSA Airlines, and a US Army UH-60L Black Hawk helicopter. The helicopter was crossing the CRJ's flight path on final approach, literally moments before its planned touchdown on Runway 33 at DCA National Airport in Washington, D.C. 64 people on board of the CRJ and three on board of the Black Hawk died.

With me to discuss this today are Christine Boynton, Aviation Week's Senior Transport Editor, Sean Broderick, Aviation Week's Senior Safety and Transport Editor, and Brian Everstine, Senior Pentagon Editor. My name is Jens Flottau and I'm the Executive Editor for Commercial Aviation.

Sean, let's start with you and let's talk about what we know and what we don't know at this early stage of the NTSB investigation. It's been obviously a very high-profile event and we've heard people coming to very early conclusions, including President Trump.

Sean Broderick:

Well, yeah. So we're seven days in, or not even seven days, into the probe as this is being recorded, obviously there is a lot more information to gather and almost all of it to analyze. That is a typical pace of an NTSB investigation. This one is no different.

About all we know is that these two aircraft were operating relatively routine flights that night, and there was obviously a loss of separation. The NTSB has confirmed that the collision took place at about 325 feet plus or minus 25 feet. They have not independently validated how high the Black Hawk was flying, but it's a pretty safe conclusion that if the RJ was struck at that altitude that that's where the Black Hawk was too.

The ceiling on that route is 200 feet for the helicopter established, unless ATC gives permission otherwise. In this case, it doesn't seem like they did. A lot of people are going to point to that as the cause. Way too early. There's going to be many factors here, many of them familiar to listeners and to users and observers of the National Airspace System, air traffic controller staffing [could come into].

To me though, the most striking big-picture conclusion that I do not think it is too early to make is that these are relatively routine regular operations without any special protocol or procedures that account for the uniqueness of what these operations are. So they happen almost every day. The RJ was coming in, approaching National Airport to the north, originally approaching National Airport's Runway 1, which is its primary runway there in the center that most people land and take off on when they're coming in, at least if you're landing to the north.

It was asked to do a very common maneuver, which was switch to Runway 33, which is a little bit shorter runway, which can be used for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's capacity-related, sometimes it's weather-related, and it's not clear why in this case that the request was made, but it's not an unusual request, and the pilots of the CRJ crew had the option to decline the request. They did not. They accepted it. So their approach to 33 takes you off of your basically due north flight path. You fly a little bit to the west over the Potomac River's east bank, and then you cross back over the bank or fly to the east, cross over to the bank, you land to the northwest onto the runway.

That maneuver takes you across Helicopter Route 4, which again is sitting down there at 200 feet. There is no indication that the RJ was ever told that it was crossing a helicopter route, nor is there any indication that they are required to be told they were crossing a helicopter route. There is no indication that the RJ ever knew the helicopter was there, which again, doesn't seem to be a violation of any procedures.

When you talk to pilots that have flown many times in and out of DCA, they say, "Yeah, sometimes we hear about helicopters and sometimes we don't." A cursory review of publicly available voluntary submissions from pilots shows that these kinds of issues go back years. There just doesn't seem to be anything in place to put a little bit of extra attention on the situation. Conversely, the helicopter crew and the air traffic controllers seem to have followed procedure for the most part.

The NTSB hasn't validated or they haven't released any statements from any transmission from the Black Hawk cockpit. But information, again, unverified information that's been posted online, audio pulls from that night, seem to show that the Black Hawk was told that there was an RJ inbound that was going to circle to 33. They were five, perhaps five and a half nautical miles away when this radio transmission, north of the river coming flying down south, so the aircraft were converging. They asked for and were granted visual separation. Again, normal procedure for this airspace and these kinds of operations. But the very important point there is once the Black Hawk has asked for and been authorized to maintain visual separation, the burden for maintaining separation changes from the air traffic controllers to the Black Hawk.

So they flew down the river. As the controller's looking at its scope and seeing the RJ doing its approach and the Black Hawk moving closer, proceeding down Route 4, the aircraft came together. The controller tried to intervene or did intervene, again asked the Black Hawk if he saw the aircraft, the Black Hawk said yes, and less than 20 seconds later, there was a collision.

So unless we find something very shocking in the investigation going forward, it seems as though the Black Hawk never did have the RJ in sight, or if it did, it lost it. And the RJ never saw the Black Hawk. And again, the striking thing to me is that there was nothing here outside of ordinary operations you would see anywhere else to ensure that both of the flight decks had situational awareness, and nothing to warn the RJ that what it was doing was putting it across a helicopter path.

I've looked through, I've asked pilots about special bulletins about DCA. Jeppesen has about an eight-page one that talks about the flight restriction area around the White House and vice president's residence, it has a lot of information in general about how crowded DCA is and how you need to review special procedures, but nowhere does it talk specifically about helicopter traffic, it talks about military traffic, doesn't talk about helicopters, and nowhere is there any requirement or even any option within these documents to review, that calls out the helicopter routes.

So to me, it's surprising that this kind of operation goes on in the NAS, but it has gone on in the NAS for, I don't know, going on 50 years or however long the helicopter routes have been there without an incident like this or without even an incident even close to this. So it's going to be very interesting to see how the FAA moves forward, and they have shut down helicopter traffic around the airport on these routes now. They did it less than 48 hours after the accident. It's going to be very interesting to see how they move forward.

50 years of operation would suggest that these operations weren't unsafe, but the lack of any sort of special, even rote exchange between the controllers and the affected pilots when this kind of scenario is possible, to me, is just eye-opening. That's my conclusion based on where we are after a week.

Jens Flottau:

Let's bring in Brian here. Brian, you're the expert on the defense side. So Sean has touched on all these helicopter routes. Just run us through what they are and who's flying on all these helicopters and how many flights are we talking about?

Brian Everstine:

I mean, if you've spent any time in D.C., especially down by the river, you look up, you're going to see some helicopters. They're very, very regularly operating, and it's inside the military and out. All the services. I mean, you have the famous Marine HMX-1 who does presidential support. They have 60s, they have the new S/H-92, they have old C3s. There's a series of aircraft they fly. We have the Air Force with their very old UH-1 Hueys, and then we have this Army unit, the 12th Aviation Battalion, with their Black Hawks, and this is in addition to the Park Police and pretty much everyone else there.

So they're, as I said, pretty much hourly doing regular training for their regular continuity of government mission, which is just essentially moving around high-level government officials, but also a lot of just ferrying senior executive service generals to and from the Pentagon. So it's a taxi service in day-to-day operations in addition to being ready for continuity of government. And it'll be interesting to see how this must change after this incident. For example, the day after Trump's nominee to be the secretary of the Army was asked about this incident. While he didn't have all the details, he said that if confirmed, he would take a look at the need to train this battalion in this area close to an airport like Reagan, so I'd expect that this sort of thing will change.

Jens Flottau:

Christine, one of the items that's been talked about here is staffing shortages at the FAA, controller shortages, but what specifically is the situation in DCA? Is there a shortage and could this have been a factor here?

Christine Boynton:

So following the accident, FAA did come out with numbers of staffing at this particular facility, and they have confirmed that the staffing target specifically for DCA's tower for certified professional controllers is 28, and that there are currently 25 CPCs and as well as 3 CPCs in training. And for those in training, FAA also noted that they were actually previously fully certified at other facilities. So that's where that tower stands.

But in terms of staffing levels more broadly, there was an audit done by the Office of Inspector General in Summer 2023, and that assessed 26 US facilities they deemed critical to see where those staffing levels stood, and this came after pauses and training during COVID and retirements. According to that audit, 20 of those 26 facilities were staffed below FAA targets of 85%. Washington Center ARTCC was on that list and just below that threshold, but that's the regional facility for a large swath of airspace, and National Tower was not called out specifically within that report.

But you know, as far as this tower, in the case of this accident, DCA's control tower cab had five controllers working at the time of the crash, and NTSB has said that one was a local controller handling both fixed-wing and helicopter traffic the night of the incident. At the time, a second local controller was assigned to departures and arrivals. A ground controller was managing surface vehicles not on a runway. And a fourth controller was designated to assist the local controllers. The fifth staffer was a supervisor. So that's where we were the night of the crash.

Jens Flottau:

Sean, you just wrote a Daily Memo for Aviation Daily the other day in which you listed several near misses over an extended period of time. So should we have seen action to limit helicopter traffic or introduce better procedures to keep it separate from commercial traffic?

Sean Broderick:

Well, given... Look, second-guessing the FAA is, it's always, I consider, a very perilous ground because there's a lot of analysis that goes on behind the scenes, not all of it correct. In this case, it certainly seems as though when you are directing or you have the possibility for any kind of traffic, let alone unusual traffic like a helicopter, to cross your approach path on a regular basis, and there's no special procedures in place to at least ensure that all of the pilots involved have situational awareness, and no additional procedures to ensure that the controllers and the pilots are on the same page, it certainly seems like something that could have been identified as a potential risk.

The FAA, when they did their safety call to action a couple of years ago, they talked about looking for precursors to incident. Forget preventing fatal accidents because they were doing a great job of that. They were looking for ways to prevent close runway, precursors to runway incursions. They were looking for data, they wanted to get data faster.

They have had these reports that, if we're able to access publicly the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System reports, you know they have a bunch more in their other programs and the data that they have, if we can look at this and go back 20 years and say, "There are pilots that have been talking about this," and you look at the type of operation you're talking about, it certainly seems as though that this was a situation waiting for improvement.

Again, the 50 years or whatever of operation on these helicopter routes without an incident like this, even anything close to this, shows that it's possible to have this kind of mixed operation, but to not have anything different, something like I equate it, because I have no better comparison, to a wake turbulence call when an narrow body is following a wide body, research led to special procedures, a special ATC call-out just to give attention for that, to not have something like that that at least tells an inbound pilot that their route has changed or they are crossing a helicopter route, and then to not be required to tell that pilot when there is a helicopter on that route seems incredulous to me.

Now, perhaps those things are out there and they simply haven't come out. I have looked for them, I have read rules, I have asked pilots. There doesn't seem to be anything like that that was missed here. And to me, that is a miss by the FAA.

Jens Flottau:

So Brian, let's look at the defense side of this. The state of the Army aviation hasn't been a great in the past few years.

Brian Everstine:

Yeah, it's been a really rough past couple years for the Army. I mean, I think back to about a little over two years ago, or almost two years ago, there were a series of crashes within about a month or so that killed 12 soldiers, I believe. There were a couple of midair collisions of Black Hawks. There was a spectacular video of a Black Hawk going down outside of Huntsville, some Apache collisions. And in the wake of that, the Army ordered a complete stand-down. It was pretty remarkable, actually. The stand-down order came right at the closing ceremony of the AAAA Conference. It's the biggest conference of the year for the Army aviation community. And as part of that, they said they did a deep investigation to look at the common themes of root causes through all of those mishaps, and the findings of that were kind of interesting.

They laid it out in a conference last fall that over the past couple of decades of operations across the Middle East, Army aviators got real used to flying high, flying in permissive environments, relatively easy flying. And as they spin up to do some of the more intense training that they're looking to do for potential future conflicts, flying low, flying at night, flying in more intense scenarios, that their skills had atrophied. And so there was, after following the extended stand-down, they pushed to a stand-up and increase that rate of training, and that was the sort of flying that we saw on this mishap. Flying dark, flying low, potentially flying with NVGs. We don't know for sure if they were wearing NVGs, but Defense Secretary Hicks said they had them with them.

So it's a shift in thinking of how they need to approach training, and it's showed some of the flaws in some of the capacity there.

Jens Flottau:

Yeah. So some temporary restrictions have now been put in place for DCA and for helicopter traffic in particular, but let's look ahead. It seems that improvements need to be made, more safety needs to be put in place, but what are we looking at? I mean, and how could a future set up, impact DCA operations?

Sean Broderick:

Well, yeah, I was going to say the current restrictions, just to get them on the record, the first thing they did was to ban non-essential helicopter traffic from flying in an area in and around DCA. And then they have more recently said that no inter... And so essential traffic, including movement of the president, first responders, and any active air defense traffic would be allowed in. But now, that traffic will not be allowed to intermix with civil traffic, which means, it seems to mean anyway, potential significant disruption at DCA.

I don't think that that is sustainable. Again, the fact that they were able to operate for years before this tragedy without an incident suggests that the operations are possible. You just have put in some protocols to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Again, I keep going back to that quote from a source is that, "Look, you can do this and we've shown we can do this." Just you got to make sure that everybody is on the same page, not unlike ground operations at some very busy airports in this country or elsewhere.

That's from a general standpoint. I mean, the Army, I mean, Brian may weigh in on what the Army or what the military can do to change their high-speed taxi operation to cut down on some of the traffic, but I mean, I think it's doable. I think this is a procedural change and then fix all the other things that we've talked about, including FAA staffing and controller staffing and things like that. Don't overwork your controllers. That's a bigger-picture issue.

Brian Everstine:

Well, I think my initial reaction is a lot of these taxi routes, these generals, these senior leaders just hitching a ride on a Healy or a Black Hawk to work, I think that's going to be cut back quite a bit. And then, I mean, the training has to happen. You have these units in the Capitol for a reason. They're going to have to know these routes and be able to operate, but I would expect the timing of this to change.

I mean, we see this relatively regularly. We get these announcements from NORAD NORTHCOM that they have these series of exercises called Falcon Virgo. They start at midnight, go till 3:00, 4:00 AM. They bring in Coast Guard helicopters, et cetera, to do some more Capitol region training. My guess, I would think some of this regular training for the crews might shift to those sort of hours to avoid any conflicts with D.C., but these are all just my initial guesses.

Jens Flottau:

We've seen crashes like this are always a very, very difficult time for the airline. How do you perceive, how do you think American's handled this?

Christine Boynton:

Sure. I mean, I would describe American's response as swift and thorough. The first update came the night of the crash. That included a webpage set up to provide regular updates and a video from CEO Robert Isom. I described that first video as pretty raw. I think you could really see the emotion on his face. And that came right before he left for D.C.

So the next day, early the next morning, he was part of a briefing at DCA with local officials and our new transportation secretary. He's been sharing any details he's able, both internally within American's staff and also externally. They've also mobilized a specially trained employee volunteer team called CARE. And those employees were sent to both Wichita and Washington to support the families of the passengers and crew. By this Monday, more than 200 of those team members have been deployed to those locations, and they try to provide resources and support, again, to the families of those passengers and crew who were on the flights.

And of course, today marks one week since the crash, and in one of these internal memos where Isom is regularly updating American employees, he has invited team members across the operation to join in on a moment of silence today. He's spoken to President Trump directly and he stated that the president has made clear that aviation safety is a priority for his administration. As of this week, Chief Operating Officer David Seymour and other members of the operations leadership team are still in D.C. doing what they can to support the response as well as the CARE Team members. And Isom has particularly praised the administration's action to restrict helicopter activity around DCA.

So I would just say American's response, like I said, has been swift. It's been thorough, they're continuing to provide updates, they've been on the ground in D.C. and Wichita, and they've been doing what they can do to support those affected.

Jens Flottau:

So needless to say, it's crucial to have an independent accident investigation. Do we have any indications that NTSB cannot perform its duties as usual?

Sean Broderick:

I don't think so, no. I think the board has done a good job responding to the current environment. That is to say, very high pressure to get as much information out as possible. The board is doing that, but they are only releasing information, they're releasing facts. They're sticking to facts, and they are releasing facts with sometimes little or no context, and that's what they're supposed to do. The context, usually with some analysis, comes much later.

They are not withholding. I mean, it doesn't seem as if they're withholding information. They are releasing bits of information, such as the CRJ's altitude at the point of impact, without confirming the other information independently that normally would go together. They are doing that and they're explaining they're doing that for in the interest of transparency. So I think at this point, no concerns that the NTSB is going to be restrained from doing its usual thorough job. No concerns so far.

Jens Flottau:

Well, I'm afraid that's all we've got time for today. Special thanks to our podcast producer in London, Guy Ferneyhough, and of course to Christine, Sean, and Brian. Don't miss the next episode by subscribing to Check 6 in your podcast app of choice. Bye for now and have a good day.