A commercial airliner collided with an Army Black Hawk while landing near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), killing 67 people and exposing deep stresses in the nation’s aviation system. The controller on duty during the sequence had been handling an earlier emergency and later said, “I messed up.” A controller who worked the tower earlier that day, speaking publicly for the first time, described long-standing safety concerns that she says helped set the scene for the disaster.
The crash, last year’s collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army helicopter over the Potomac, was the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in nearly 25 years. Families of the victims — including seven widows whose husbands were longtime co-workers returning from a hunting trip — rushed to the river as divers searched the icy water. By morning officials declared the mission a recovery operation.
Emily Hanoka, an air traffic controller who ended her shift hours before the collision, said frontline staff had warned the Federal Aviation Administration for more than a decade about the hazards of mixing frequent passenger jets with military and other helicopters in DCA’s crowded airspace. “You had frontline controllers ringing that bell for years and years, saying this is not safe,” she said. “This cannot continue.”
The National Transportation Safety Board found that near misses had been common: between 2021 and 2024, 85 near midair collisions between helicopters and commercial aircraft near DCA were reported to the FAA. Documents show that the day before the crash, two passenger jets had to make sudden moves to avoid Army helicopters.
DCA’s unusual setting contributes to the problem. The airport is federally owned, hemmed in by restricted airspace around the White House and Capitol, and partly governed by congressional flight caps. Since 2000 lawmakers have approved at least 50 additional daily flights and added another 10 in 2024. DCA now handles about 25 million passengers a year — roughly 10 million more than the airport’s intended capacity.
The layout of the airfield magnifies risk. DCA has three short runways that intersect, so arrivals and departures are tightly interdependent. Hanoka described a common pattern she called a “squeeze play,” where aircraft operate within seconds of each other and precise timing is essential: one plane accelerating as another slows. “It worked until it didn’t,” she said. New controllers often decline training in that environment; Hanoka said roughly half who try the facility later withdraw.
Staffing shortages persist. A year after the crash, nearly one-third of tower controller positions at DCA remained unfilled. Controllers formed local safety councils and submitted repeated recommendations, but many proposed changes stalled.
The NTSB’s 388-page investigation cited no single cause. Instead investigators pointed to “systemic failures,” ignored warnings, and a helicopter routing design that in spots allowed as little as 75 feet of vertical separation between helicopters and passenger jets. The board issued about 50 safety recommendations aimed at preventing similar accidents.
Military operations in the same airspace were a factor. Tim Lilley, a former Black Hawk pilot who lost his son, Sam, the first officer on Flight 5342, said the helicopter crew that night relied on “visual separation” — pilots seeing and tracking other aircraft by sight. That method requires constant visual surveillance, which is degraded under the conditions at DCA, particularly when crews use night-vision goggles that narrow the field of view and can wash out details against city lights. Simulations showed how difficult it was for the Black Hawk crew to distinguish a jet from ground lighting until it was too late.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said the system failed people in the air, on the helicopter, and in the tower. In response, the FAA moved some helicopter routes away from DCA and ended the use of visual separation at DCA; it later expanded that ban to other busy airports nationwide. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told 60 Minutes he has helped secure more than $12 billion to overhaul the air traffic control system.
Despite those actions, problems have continued: since the crash there have been at least four additional incidents in which aircraft and helicopters came dangerously close, prompting safety reports. Some bereaved family members are now lobbying Congress for improved aircraft surveillance technology that might have prevented the collision. Homendy warned that without prompt legislative and regulatory changes the system remains at risk. “Why do we always have to wait until people die to take action?” she asked.
Produced by Andrew Bast. Associate producer, Jessica Kegu. Broadcast associate, Erin DuCharme. Edited by Thomas Xenakis.