- Three days of National Transportation Safety Board hearings revealed failures by both the FAA and the Army.
- FAA staff members had previously raised concerns about the safety of the helicopter route.
- The altimeter on the Black Hawk helicopter was inaccurate by about 100 feet.
Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board held three days of hearings, looking into what led to the fatal midair crash above the Potomac River between a plane and a military helicopter in January. During the hearings, the board interrogated witnesses from the FAA and the Army about what went wrong, with 10,000 pages of documents involved.
The crash occurred as an American Airlines regional jet was landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., and an Army Black Hawk helicopter was conducting a training flight.
There were multiple revelations from the hearings on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, revealing failures by both the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army. These include a faulty altimeter, previous warnings about the helicopter route and overwhelmed air traffic controllers.
“Are you kidding me? Sixty-seven people are dead! How do you explain that? Our bureaucratic process?” said NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy, per The Associated Press. “Fix it. Do better.”
The air traffic controller was ‘overwhelmed’
The air traffic controller who was directing the two aircraft involved in the crash had managed 21 aircraft in the 10 minutes before the collision, per The Washington Post. He also was working two positions at once and was responsible for both jet and helicopter traffic.
When interviewed by investigators, he said he “was starting to become a little overwhelmed” and considered asking for help, before traffic eased to a manageable level.
Another pilot on a flight that arrived shortly before the crash told investigators that the controller seemed “exceptionally busy” and was “not instilling a lot of confidence,” according to The Washington Post.
The controller had approved the helicopter crew’s request to continue down the Potomac River using visual separation. He also informed them that the passenger jet was coming in for landing.
“A senior Army pilot questioned why the controller did not tell the helicopter to wait near Hains Point, saying in an interview with investigators that that was standard practice in his experience. The controller said the decision was made on a case-by-case basis,” per The Washington Post.
During his testimony on Thursday, FAA official Nick Fuller said the controller made an error and he should have warned the pilot of the jet that the helicopter was approaching and that the “targets were likely to merge,” per The Washington Post.
During his interview with the NTSB, that controller said that by the time he realized there would be a conflict, giving a warning would most likely have been pointless.
“I don’t think it would have made a difference, honestly,” the controller said, according to The Washington Post.
The FAA had been warned about the helicopter route
Before the crash, FAA staff had raised concerns about the proximity of the Army helicopter route to commercial flights landing at the airport, per NPR.
The concerns were raised because “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,” per the AP.
Clark Allen, the former DCA tower operations manager, said that in 2022, a working group at the airport had considered moving what was known as Route 4 or even eliminating part of it.
“Both of those options we were told we were unable to do due to continuity of government operations or security,” Allen said, according to NPR.
According to the AP, the NTSB also said the FAA failed to recognize a history of 85 near misses around the Reagan airport within the last three years.
During the hearings, Homendy got after the FAA for not acting on the concerns of the employees.
“Every sign was there that there was a safety risk and the tower was telling you that,” Homendy said.
“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,” the chairwoman added, per the AP. “But you guys are pointing out, ‘Welp, our bureaucratic process. Somebody should have brought it up at some other symposium.’”
In March, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy permanently restricted nonessential helicopter routes around the airport and eliminated mixed traffic between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, such as commercial jets, per NPR.
The helicopter’s locator system was not working
At the time of the crash, a system that could have provided real-time location data on the Black Hawk helicopter to nearby aircraft was not working. The Washington Post reported that even if it had been, the American Airlines jet did not have the ability to receive the data.
This system is the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADSB, and it has two components, ADSB-out, which broadcasts out an aircraft’s real-time location, and ADSB-in, which is used to take in real-time location feeds from other aircraft nearby.
Investigators from the NTSB found that the ADSB-out on the helicopter was not working because of a time-setting error. But, the Army was known to turn ADSB-out off because the unit flew sensitive routes, per The Washington Post.
The Black Hawk broadcasting ADSB-out wouldn’t have made a difference, since the jet did not have ADSB-in. While the FAA requires aircraft to have an ADSB-out system, they’re not required to have ADSB-in.
Did night vision goggles play a part in the crash?
The helicopter crew was wearing night vision goggles the night of the collision. According to The Washington Post, pilots who have flown the same route at night said wearing night vision was the standard practice when flying in darkness. This was also their preference because they can see hazards more clearly.
Night vision can also present challenges because it limits the user’s field of vision as if they are looking through toilet paper rolls. Investigators were told that pilots combat this by constantly moving their head in a scanning motion.
Light magnification from the night vision goggles can also be overpowering in a bright area such as the Washington, D.C., area, making it hard to distinguish lights from one another.
The helicopter’s altimeter was not accurate
On Wednesday, the hearing opened with a video animation that showed where the helicopter and passenger jet were leading up to the collision.
The animation showed that the helicopter flew above the 200 feet altitude limit for the helicopter route along the Potomac River before it collided with the plane, per the AP.
According to the AP, investigators shared that the helicopter was actually 80 feet to 100 feet higher than the barometric altimeter, which the pilots relied upon, showed.
“I am concerned there is a possibility that what the crew saw was very different than what the true altitude was,” Homendy said, according to ABC News.
The NTSB conducted three tests on other helicopters from the same unit flying over the same area and found similar discrepancies in the altimeters.