NOTE: The above video is of the NTSB investigative hearing on the Jan. 29 mid-air collision.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (WAVY) — Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board will begin a three-day investigative hearing on the Jan. 29 mid-air collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army helicopter that killed 67 people. (To watch the NTSB hearing, click here. For more information on the hearing, click here.)
“I think it’s going to be a gut punch,” said Rachel Feres, whose family member was killed on Flight 5342 along with his wife and two daughters.
The NTSB released its preliminary investigative report March 7, unearthing key details regarding the moments leading up to the collision above the Potomac River. Aviation attorney Justin Green, a partner with the firm Kreindler and Kreindler, has filed 25 notices of claims against the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army on behalf of 31 decedents from the American Airlines flight.
Aviation-Investigatin-Report-AIR-25-01Download
He said the airspace around Ronald Reagan National Airport is “a highway for helicopters.”
“But the highway requires the helicopters to do two things,” Green said. “One is to stay low. A part of the highway this Black Hawk was on was maximum altitude of 200 feet. Number two, they have to stay away from the airplanes coming in and out.”
According to the preliminary NTSB report, the Army helicopter, which was operating under the callsign PAT25, failed to meet those requirements and was at an altitude of 278 feet at the time of the collision.
To better understand what led to the crash, it’s important to identify why each aircraft was flying its respective course. For Flight 5342, it’s simple; the regional commercial jetliner was on approach to land at DCA following its departure from Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport (ICT).
For PAT25, the Black Hawk was flying from Davison Army Airfield (DAA), Fort Belvoir, Virginia, “for the purpose of the pilot’s annual standardization evaluation with the use of night vision goggles (NVGs),” the NTSB report states.
“Night visions goggles are essentially devices that look like small binoculars and what they do is enhance ambient light,” said Green, who was a pilot in the United States Marine Corps before becoming an attorney. “I have hundreds of hours flying with night vision goggles. In layman’s terms it turns nighttime into the day, but it really doesn’t. Everything you see through there is kind of green, and it doesn’t have the same clarity that your eyes do.”
According to Green, with the naked eye, you can see almost 110 degrees on either side of your head, but with night vision goggles, you can only see about a 40-degree view. This requires pilots to physically turn their head to see, scan and hear other aircraft.
“The other thing about night vision goggles is that they work by amplifying ambient light,” Green said. “That’s an issue because in the city, all those lights are going to look very, very bright, and depending on what you’re looking at, can actually be blinding when you’re wearing night vision goggles.”
Green said flying with NVGs in a city environment would be much more difficult to pick out airplanes, specifically the anti-collision lights the airplanes have when flying low.
According to the NTSB preliminary report, the Black Hawk’s crew included an instructor pilot, a pilot and a crew chief. The report states that approximately two-and-a-half minutes before the collision, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) “revealed that the instructor pilot told the pilot that they were at 300 feet and needed to descend.”
Less than a minute later, the crew of PAT25 reported that they had “traffic in sight,” presumably Flight 5342, and requested approval from the Air Traffic Control tower to maintain “visual separation.” Shortly after the request was made, ATC approved visual separation.
“What that meant was the air traffic controller was going to let the Black Hawk fly through the airspace on this helicopter route, and that the Black Hawk would then visually make sure that it didn’t come near any of the airplanes coming into and leaving DCA,” Green said.
The NTSB report states that, “at this time, the distance between the two aircraft was about 6.5 nautical miles.”
About 20 seconds before the collision, the DCA air traffic controller asked PAT25 via radio if it had Flight 5342 in sight. This occurred at about the same time that the crew of Flight 5342 received a traffic advisory from the aircraft’s TCAS stating, “traffic, traffic.”
According to the report, a “TCAS” is a device equipped on the aircraft that “provides collision avoidance protection for a broad spectrum of aircraft types.”
At 8:47:42 p.m., or 16 seconds before the collision, the air traffic controller instructed PAT25 to pass behind Flight 5342. Two seconds later, PAT25 indicated that the traffic was in sight and again requested visual separation, which was approved by the DCA tower.
At 8:47:58, Flight 5342 made a last-minute pitch up to avoid PAT25, but a mid-air collision occurred.
“This is going to be something that I think will be a focus of the investigation,” Green said. “The Black Hawk helicopter clearly did not ever identify Flight 5342 and continued its flight and flew directly into it.”
Green said the accident occurred for several reasons, but some questions still need to be answered to determine the root cause of the failure.
“Why did the Black Hawk pilots not identify Flight 5342? Why did Flight 5342 pilots never see the Black Hawk helicopter flying directly towards them? Why did the air traffic controller, number one,” Green said, “give this clearance to a helicopter flying through the airspace with so much traffic, given the long history of near mid-air collisions at that airport, and why was the helicopter at the wrong altitude?”
Included in the NTSB preliminary report was a review of the 944,179 commercial operations at DCA between October 2021 and December 2024.
The report says, “during that time, there were 15,214 occurrences between commercial airplanes and helicopters in which there was a lateral separation distance of less than 1 nm (nautical mile) and vertical separation of less than 400 feet. There were 85 recorded events that involved a lateral separation less than 1,500 feet and vertical separation less than 200 feet.”
Shortly following the accident, the FAA issued a “notice to airmen,” restricting helicopter traffic from operating over the Potomac River near DCA until March 31, 2025.
The near-miss data paints an ugly picture, portraying these close calls as accidents waiting to happen. Even if PAT25 was flying at the maximum altitude of 200 feet, the NTSB report states that “it would have about 75 feet of vertical separation from an airplane approaching runway 33.”
According to the NTSB preliminary report, PAT25 was traveling along Route 1 of the Baltimore-Washington Helicopter Route Chart, which is shown below.
The report states that once helicopters pass Memorial Bridge, “the maximum allowable altitude on Route 1 is 200 feet above mean sea level.” But how does an Army helicopter determine its altitude to begin with?
“The helicopter has two different instruments that show its altitude,” Green said. “One is the barometric altimeter that gives the pilots their altitude above sea level, so that is the primary instrument that pilots use to determine altitude.”
Green said the barometric altimeter is calibrated before takeoff for a mission, and it is even set while the pilots are in-flight. He said it provides accurate readings.
“The second altimeter on a Black Hawk is called a radar altimeter, and that gives the altitude above the ground,” Green said. “It essentially sends out a radar signal and, based on the time it takes to kind of come back, it determines how far down the ground is.”
If neither the barometric nor the radar altimeter is in working order, Green said the crew has their vision to gauge altitude. But the NTSB report includes cockpit voice recorder data indicating that the instructor pilot and pilot were observing different altitudes.
“At 2:043:48, PAT25 was about 1.1 nm (nautical miles) west of the Key Bridge. According to the helicopter’s CVR, the pilot indicated that they were at 300 feet. The IP indicated they were at 400 feet. Neither pilot made a comment discussing an altitude discrepancy.”
“If that happened, they should have had a conversation,” Green said. “That’s a problem that they did not have that conversation. After the accident, the FAA and the NTSB have been unable to get good data on what the actual pressure altitude was from the altimeter system.”
But what seems definitive is that PAT25 was flying well above the 200 foot maximum threshold, putting the Black Hawk on a collision course with Flight 5342.
To watch the NTSB hearing, click here. For more information on the hearing, click here.