While Congress pushed ahead last year with adding 10 new daily flights to Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport, many looked past concerns about dangers in the congested skies over the nation's capital.
Squeezing in more flights would only increase the risks, said Virginia’s two senators, who called a near miss between two planes on a runway last April a “flashing red warning light.”
What wasn’t publicly known at the time — and didn’t surface until this week during the investigation into the January midair collision between an airliner and military helicopter that killed 67 people — was that close calls at the airport were far more frequent than travelers and aviation experts knew.
Now, safety experts and family members who lost loved ones in the Jan. 29 crash are asking why no one acted in the face of what appeared to be a looming disaster.
The National Transportation Safety Board said airplane pilots were alerted to take evasive action to avoid hitting helicopters at least once a month from 2011 through 2024, citing data compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration, and that there were 85 near misses when aircraft were within a few hundred feet (meters) of each other during recent years.
“How does that happen in this day and age and somebody doesn’t do something about it?” asked Doug Lane, whose wife, Christine Conrad Lane, and their 16-year-old son, Spencer, died in the crash.
Pilots have long worried about the congested and complex airspace around the airport near the heart of the capital, where flights must maneuver around military aircraft and restricted areas. It was no secret there had been previous close calls, but the numbers found by the NTSB were alarming.
“Why someone was not paying attention to those numbers and those events are questions yet to be answered,” said James Hall, a former NTSB chair during the Clinton administration.
“What not to do is to ignore that many incidents,” he said.
FAA officials have not yet addressed whether they knew there were so many encounters between planes and helicopters at Reagan National. Messages seeking comment were not immediately returned Thursday.
Current NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who oversees the FAA, both said they were angry that the number of close calls were not recognized earlier by the FAA.
“If someone was paying attention, someone was on the job, they would have seen this,” Duffy said. He also announced he will move forward with banning some helicopter flights around the airport, a move that was temporarily made after the crash.
Safety advocate Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general of the U.S. Transportation Department, said that while there was plenty of blame to go around for the midair collision, the FAA was shockingly complacent.
“They literally wait for a disaster,” she said. ”I can’t even fathom how the families of those lost in this crash can even deal with this. I mean this would be so maddening to hear.”
The crowded airspace around Washington drew attention last year when Congress debated an aviation safety bill that allowed 10 more flights a day at Reagan National, despite strong objections from Virginia’s Democratic senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.
Kaine, during a speech on the Senate floor, didn't mention specific concerns about encounters between airliners and helicopters or cite any statistics, but he did say the congestion was “a problem waiting to happen.”
While Congress did OK the extra flights, they had not started as of the deadly January collision.
The FAA limits arrival and departure slots at three of the nation’s busiest airports, where demand exceeds the airport’s capacity: Reagan National and New York City's LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International airports.
But Congress has a history of directing the FAA to add slots at Reagan, even though Washington’s other international airport, Dulles, has capacity to handle them. Reagan is closer to the capital and most federal departments and therefore more convenient, particularly for lawmakers.
Mike McCormick, coordinator of the Air Traffic Management program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the congestion at Reagan National clearly contributed to the midair collision because the American Airlines jetliner, which was on a newly added route from Wichita, Kansas, was diverted to a different runway closer to the helicopter flights.
“In this instance, the sole reason for doing it was because they were too busy,” McCormick said. “This is something that controller has probably done thousands of times.”
The flight from Wichita to Washington began operating in early 2024, with the backing of Kansas lawmakers who said it was a “vital” to link the nation’s capital with the city, which has a long history as an aircraft manufacturing hub.
U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, a Kansas Democrat who serves on an aviation subcommittee, said the cause of the accident and the congestion at Reagan National are for now, “two different conversations.”
“I understand, the desire for us all to be able to connect these dots,” she said. “Right now that is not a connection that has been made by the NTSB.”
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Associated Press reporters Michael Casey in Boston; Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas; and Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
