After Wednesday’s fatal crash which took down a commercial jet and a military helicopter on a training flight at Washington DC’s Reagan National airport, public officials and aviation experts are resurfacing concerns about how uniquely congested the airspace is around the country’s capital.
As of Thursday night, authorities have said all 64 people on the American Airlines flight were presumed dead as well as three more on the army helicopter, making the incident the deadliest US air tragedy since 2001.
On Thursday, during his confirmation hearing before the Senate armed services committee, Daniel Driscoll, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the army, questioned why military helicopters needed to conduct training exercises near such a busy commercial airport.
Driscoll told lawmakers that the incident seemed “preventable” and vowed to review army practices.
“There are appropriate times to take risk and inappropriate times to take risk,” he noted. “I think we need to look at where is an appropriate time to take training risk, and it may not be at an airport like Reagan.”
The US military has provided little information on its helicopter training activities near the capital and did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Martin Chalk, a former British Airways captain who retired in 2020, posited that military pilots might need to train in this particular area to prepare for transporting senior political and military figures to and from the area, which is close to the Pentagon as well as the White House, Capitol Hill and other buildings at the heart of the federal government.
“The military tend to have a bit of a law-unto-themselves approach,” he said, explaining that military pilots do not have to follow all civil aviation protocols.
He emphasized that it is not clear yet exactly what happened but he suggested that investigators could ask questions about the exchanges between the aircraft and the tower.
“There was communication between the air traffic control tower and the helicopter pilot about whether they can see the CRJ [the American Eagle Bombardier jet] – did the controller give too much authority to the helicopter crew, or did the helicopter crew mistake what they saw?” Chalk asked.
Lawmakers and citizens have previously raised concerns about the crowded skies over the greater Washington DC area, however.
Last year, Bill Johnson, a commercially certified pilot and a retired US army explosives expert, saw more than 20 UH-60 army helicopters fly over his house in one hour as he was working outside in his vegetable garden in Annandale, a residential community in Virginia’s Washington DC suburbs.
At first Johnson was bothered by the noise. But, as he kept noticing the thrum of military training flights overhead, he began to fear that the increasing congestion in the skies could result in disaster.
Johnson sent letters to military leaders at nearby Fort Belvoir, where the Black Hawk Sikorsky involved in Wednesday’s collision was based and flew from that night, and the Department of Defense. He sent a complaint to his congressperson and even to the Federal Aviation Administration warning them about the dangers of too many low-altitude army training helicopters soaring through the area.
“On 3/29/2024 at 1503 hours I observed two US army UH-60s nearly collide over 1-495 near Annandale,” he wrote in one complaint to the FAA from last March, noting they passed each other above the highway only “about 50-100 meters apart”.
That April, Johnson forwarded another complaint to the US Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, raising similar concerns.
“Given that these are everyday training flights over known congested areas,” he said, referring to a nearby antenna, how precisely “does the military guarantee the safety of persons and property on the ground?”
No one answered his question, he told the Guardian on Thursday.
“We lost more than 60 people, and two aircraft, and we shut down a major airport, and it was completely avoidable,” he said.
“There’s so many places they could have been doing training. Why did they have to do it at the end of the runways of DCA?” Johnson continued, referring to the airport code of Reagan National airport.
Federal lawmakers from Virginia and Maryland have also issued warnings about the excessive number of aircraft flying near each other over the country’s capital.
But last year year, a bipartisan body of congressional officials approved the addition of 10 additional commercial flights into DCA, over their objections.
“As we have said countless times before, DCA’s runway is already the busiest in the country,” Virginia US senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen and then senator Ben Cardin, all Democrats, said in a joint statement months before the law was passed. “Forcing the airport to cram additional flights in its already crowded schedule will further strain its resources at a time when air traffic controllers are overburdened and exhausted, working 10-hour days, six days a week.”
The group of lawmakers filed an amendment to the proposal to block the increased flights into Reagan, but the original bill passed that May despite their protests.
The bill, Texas senator Ted Cruz said at the time, “ultimately gives the FAA the stability it needs to fulfill its primary mission – advancing aviation safety – while also making travel more convenient and accessible”.
Weeks after the bill passed, the lawmakers’ fears were nearly proved. Air traffic controllers cancelled the takeoff of one American Airlines plane speeding down a runway just before another plane attempted to land on an intersecting airstrip.
In a statement after Wednesday’s fatal crash, Major Gen Trevor Bredenkamp, a commander in the army National Capital Region, said its investigation is ongoing and will be conducted in conjunction with the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board.
