Wednesday’s midair collision of a civilian airliner and military helicopter at Reagan National Airport left no survivors and called into question whether the airport’s strained resources can handle all the demands put on it.
There’s no question that airline safety has steadily improved worldwide. But in places, rising air traffic, new threats, and an aging infrastructure have made safety systems more complex and vulnerable.
With the nation’s busiest runway, Reagan Airport in Washington qualifies as one of those complex airspaces. Because of its proximity to the White House, the Pentagon, and the rest of official Washington, it’s also perhaps the world’s most controlled, where civilian and military aircraft and helicopters all operate.
Why We Wrote This
Rising safety is the historical trend in aviation. But is that changing in the U.S.? Wednesday’s crash comes amid what some see as growing stresses on air-safety systems.
On Wednesday night an airliner operated by American Airlines regional carrier PSA, bound from Wichita, Kansas, on final approach to Reagan, collided with an Army helicopter that was on a training exercise. None of the 64 passengers and crew on the American flight or the three crewmembers aboard the helicopter are believed to have survived. Among the victims were 14 U.S. figure skaters and two Russian skaters, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, 1994 world champions.
Early news reports suggest that air traffic controllers had asked the helicopter pilot to maintain separation from the airliner shortly before the crash.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash. In a press conference Thursday, NTSB officials refused to speculate on the cause of the crash, but that did not stop others from doing so.
In remarks from the White House, President Donald Trump said the helicopter “was obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He also blamed the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. In a document released last week, the Trump White House alleged that the DEI emphasis put diversity over competence at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which oversees air traffic control.
Local and federal officials on the scene struck a different tone at a separate press conference at Reagan National Airport Thursday. They praised the quick response and coordination among rescue personnel across city and state lines and the cooperation of state and federal authorities.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File
As the nation’s capital city, Washington has busy skies. Military helicopters fly toward the U.S. Capitol during an exercise on Nov. 2, 2022.
“In the most partisan place also, I’m really thankful that Democrats and Republicans, people from all over, have come together to try to make sure that people are served,” said U.S. Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia.
The long-term improvement in airline safety is clear. For every 1 million commercial flights, 12 times fewer fatalities occur than in the 1970s. Before Wednesday, the last major fatal airline crash in the United States occurred 16 years ago when a Colgan Air flight affiliated with Continental Airlines went down near Buffalo.
Nevertheless, flight safety progress stalled last year. In August, a passenger flight in Brazil crashed about 50 miles from Sao Paulo. In December, an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan. Days later, a Jeju Air flight crash-landed in South Korea.
These incidents, accounting for 318 lives lost, made 2024 the deadliest for commercial aviation in six years.
“It’s a worrying trend,” says Ed Pierson, executive director of The Foundation for Aviation Safety, Washington-based nonprofit closely monitoring the aviation industry. “People will say statistically that it’s safe to fly, but the fact is that it can always get safer.”
One reason for the concern is that a relatively new threat has emerged: missiles near areas of conflict.
A preliminary investigation into December’s crash in Kazakhstan determined that a Russian surface-to-air missile brought the plane down during efforts to repel a Ukrainian drone attack. That represents the third such attack in a decade, accounting for more than 500 fatalities in all, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Another challenge closer to home is a shortage of air-traffic controllers in the U.S. and Canada. Even before the pandemic, when officials initially laid off staff and suspended training for new controllers, the U.S. air traffic system was running short of workers. A year ago, the FAA had 10% fewer controllers than in 2012.
At the same time, controllers have had to deal with growing complexity as air traffic grows. That’s especially true at older airports, such as Reagan. Originally designed to handle 15 million passengers a year, it now routinely handles more than 23 million passengers.
It “is a complex airspace, and it is an airspace where there is really no margin for error,” says Hassan Shahidi, head of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit based in Alexandria, Virginia, pushing to boost airline safety.
Despite these concerns, Congress last year passed and then-President Biden signed a bill to add more direct flights at Reagan airport, despite safety experts and even some senators pointing to near-misses and other warning signs of potential dangers. The direct flights to and from Wichita, including the one that crashed this week, began a year ago this month, before that legislation was signed.
The added traffic stretches the safety system even more. “The entire system is very dependent on the humans in the system accommodating for the gaps in the design,” says Capt. Shem Malmquist, an active pilot and member of the Flight Safety Foundation, who has been deeply involved in aircraft accident investigations. “We should be designing the system so it’s not dependent on humans to keep things from going wrong.”
According to the FAA, human error is the leading cause of airline crashes. But that error is often a sign of deeper system flaws, airline pilots say.
“You can’t wake up every morning and say, ‘Well, today, I’m going to be vigilant every minute of the day,’” says Philip Greenspun, an FAA-certified helicopter instructor and former Delta Airlines pilot.
Caitlin Babcock reported from Washington, and Laurent Belsie from Waltham, Massachusetts.
