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The United States’ worst aviation tragedy in more than two decades followed years of alarms about the nation’s hallowed air-safety system — and a series of close calls before luck finally ran out over the Potomac.
The Covid pandemic worsened a nationwide shortage of air traffic controllers, only for demand for air travel to soar once passengers returned. Politically motivated government funding showdowns made it harder to train new workers and replace outmoded safety equipment. And the agency at the center of it all, the Federal Aviation Administration, spent extended stretches without a permanent leader — while investigators expressed warnings about a spike in near-collisions at airports.
It will likely take a year or more for authorities to announce a formal conclusion about the cause of Wednesday night’s crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, in which an Army Blackhawk helicopter conducting routine training collided with a passenger jet coming from Wichita, Kansas. But one veteran of the aviation system said the probe would most likely include an examination of factors that have repeatedly come up in previous close calls: fatigue, distraction and potential miscommunication.
The country had seen a steep spike in near-collisions involving commercial airplanes at airports, with five incidents in 2022 and 11 incidents in 2023 in which at least one passenger-carrying airplane came close to colliding with another plane or ground vehicle, according to the FAA’s database that tracks these events.
Though 2024 had seen just one airport close call that aviation regulators classified as serious, the FAA was still investigating some incidents before the year’s end. Two passenger jets also had a near-collision scare at Reagan National last year, though the FAA classified the event as less dire.
“We know we have a critical shortage of air traffic controllers, and many of them are forced to work overtime, they’ll often work fatigued — that’s mostly the fault of Congress,” said former Rep. Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat who chaired the House Transportation Committee for four years until 2023.
“I don’t know that air traffic control was a problem in this instance,” DeFazio added. But he noted that the National Transportation Safety Board, the independent federal agency leading the probe into Wednesday’s crash, “has been warning about this persistently.”
NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy had been among those sounding the loudest warnings, telling reporters in late 2023 that the air traffic system needed relief, which could come in the form of increased funding for controllers or improved technology.
“We are sounding the alarm bells, and we need action,” Homendy said at the time. She added: “I don’t want to hear about summits — goddamn, do something.”
On Thursday, Homendy was on the scene at Reagan National, saying a “whole of government” effort is underway to find the evidence that will spell out what happened. “We’re here to assure the American people that we are going to leave no stone unturned in this investigation,” she said.
The airline industry has called the air traffic control system “broken,” while an independent panel of aviation experts blamed “recurring gridlock” in Congress for making it harder for the FAA to do its job. The FAA has also faced repeated questions since 2018 about whether it’s applying rigorous enough scrutiny to plane manufacturers such as Boeing, following a pair of deadly accidents in Asia and Africa during Trump’s first term and a non-fatal blowout of a plane’s door panel over Oregon last year. (No Boeing aircraft were involved in Wednesday’s collision.)
The FAA has turned its attention to its workforce shortage in recent months — the agency, with about 45,000 employees, is understaffed by about 3,000 controllers nationwide — with ongoing efforts to increase the pipeline of air traffic controllers with collegiate partnerships and maximum training at its academy in Oklahoma. But officials have conceded that workforce won’t start seeing net gains for some time.
Questions about the actions of air traffic controllers and the helicopter crew surfaced quickly after Wednesday’s accident, which officials said occurred during clear-weather conditions. In a feed of air traffic controller radio communications from just before the crash, controllers could be heard asking the helicopter crew if they saw the inbound jet.
Staffing at Reagan National’s control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic” at the time of the crash, The New York Times reported Thursday, quoting from what it described as a preliminary internal FAA report about the crash. But an official familiar with tower operations told POLITICO that the number of air traffic controllers at the tower was adequate, although a supervisor had decided to have one controller monitor both airline flights and helicopter traffic.
Normally, those tasks are divided among two controllers until after 9:30 p.m., said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the crash during the investigation. Wednesday’s collision happened around 9 p.m.
Authorities said Thursday that they expect no survivors from the two aircraft, which carried 60 passengers and four crew members on board the American Airlines flight and three soldiers aboard the helicopter.
The Bombardier CRJ700, operated by PSA Airlines, and the Sikorsky H-60 helicopter crashed while the jet was on approach to the runway, the FAA said in a statement Wednesday. The regional carrier was operating on behalf of American Airlines.
The helicopter was on a training mission, which Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a former Army helicopter pilot, stressed is routine. “It just means that they were out there practicing their craft, doing their jobs like they do every day,” she said. After receiving a call from the FAA and NTSB, Duckworth said that the helicopter crew was “using their eyes to look to deconflict with other aircraft.”
“Obviously, you’re relying on air traffic control,” she said, confirming that air traffic control had told the crew to look out for the American plane that was approaching the airport.
The collision was the first fatal airliner crash in the U.S. since a South Korean jet struck a sea wall at San Francisco International Airport in 2013, killing three teenagers, and the first deadly crash involving a domestic airline since a 2009 crash outside Buffalo, New York, that killed 50 people and inspired congressionally mandated safety reforms. It was the deadliest U.S. air crash since a November 2001 crash in Belle Harbor, New York, that killed 260 people, just two months after 9/11.
The relative calm in the U.S. airspace during the past two decades has marked the safest period in American aviation since the dawn of flight. Both the FAA and the NTSB briefed lawmakers throughout the day Thursday as elected leaders hunted for answers about that era’s seemingly abrupt end.
“This should’ve never happened, and we wanna understand what happened,” said Senate Commerce Committee member Ted Budd (R-N.C.).
Even before answers began emerging, President Donald Trump alleged without evidence that Biden administration diversity policies had helped cause the crash, specifically singling out former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg, who had pressed for answers about the causes of aviation near-collisions when he was secretary, responded on X that Trump’s remarks were “despicable.”
Duckworth, the outgoing chair of the Senate aviation subcommittee, also blasted Trump for jumping on the diversity narrative — and suggested that efforts by Trump and his efficiency czar Elon Musk to shrink the federal workforce were worsening the strain among FAA employees. She noted that agency workers were among those who received emails this week from the White House Office of Personnel Management asking them to consider quitting their jobs.
Those letters made their way to “some air traffic controllers that are responsible for airspace in the Northeast region,” Duckworth said, “basically trying to scare them into quitting at a time when we have a shortage of air traffic controllers. So I don’t think the Trump administration is in a strong position right now to start blaming others.”
A former FAA official disputed any suggestion that the agency’s so-called diversity, equity and inclusion programs allowed unqualified people to serve as air traffic controllers, despite Trump’s claim that the Biden administration had encouraged the hiring of people with “severe intellectual disabilities” and “psychiatric problems.”
The NTSB probably won’t announce its conclusions about the causes of the accident for at least a year, after investigating communications between the air traffic control tower, the pilots of each aircraft, the intended flight path, and a host of other factors.
Both pilots and air traffic controllers have to go through rigorous training, which often takes years. The ex-official said candidates for the job “undergo some of the most rigorous testing — mentally and physically — before they are even hired. Very few applicants even make it to training because the process is so difficult.” The person was granted anonymity to discuss the still-ongoing investigation.
But persistent staffing shortages have forced air traffic controllers to work overtime, and the FAA in some cases has had to move controllers around to fill gaps in some of the nation’s busiest airspace.
The FAA has also not seen a steady continuity of leadership.
Former Administrator Mike Whitaker stepped down just before Trump’s inauguration, after little more than a year into his five-year term atop the aviation agency. Before Whitaker took the job in October 2023, a series of acting chiefs had filled the role for 18 months, a vacancy that stretched out while GOP lawmakers questioned the qualifications of former President Joe Biden’s first pick for the job, Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington.
After Wednesday’s catastrophe, Republicans on Capitol Hill suggested that more information was needed before they could take action.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) stressed that he hadn’t been informed of any cause of the crash. But he added that he expects the Senate Commerce Committee’s aviation panel to lead an effort to follow up on what the NTSB finds and “pursue whatever legislative changes may be necessary to further protect the traveling public.”
Democrats also had no specifics to offer in the immediate aftermath of the collision.
During a hearing Thursday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) urged lawmakers to “redouble” their efforts to ensure the FAA, NTSB and Transportation Department have the tools, funding and resources needed to prevent another tragedy.
Asked if he wants to scale back the number of flights at the airport, a topic of debate last year, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who previously raised concerns about safety of the increasingly crowded skies over Reagan National, said lawmakers would “follow the NTSB and their conclusions.” Kaine and other D.C.-area lawmakers had objected to expanding the number of flights in and out of the airport, contending it could worsen safety by increasing congestion on runways despite the DOT and FAA saying they would work to ensure this wouldn’t happen.
Billy Nolen, who held a “summit” about near-collisions as the FAA’s acting administrator two years ago, told POLITICO that the United States’ air travel safety record is “highly resilient,” considering the sheer number of flights day-to-day around the country, coupled with other drones, space rockets and other craft now sharing the skies.
Since the 2009 crash near Buffalo, “13 to 14 billion people have traveled … without a fatal commercial airline accident in the United States,” Nolen said. “I mean think about that number.”
Eventually, Nolen said, the FAA and the rest of the administration will have “to pick up the pieces and say, ‘OK, let’s commit to just using every resource at our disposal to make what is the largest, most complex aviation ecosystem in the world, bar none, be the very best it can be.’”
Sam Ogozalek and Chris Marquette contributed to this report.
