Documents reveal 2 close calls between jets, military helicopters 1 day before deadly midair collision at D.C. airport
Internal safety reports obtained by 60 Minutes reveal that one day before the January 2025 midair collision over Washington, D.C. that killed 67 people, there were two close calls between passenger jets and military helicopters.
On Jan. 28 around 4:30 p.m., a pair of Army helicopters approached Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, flying at a higher altitude than expected, sparking confusion inside the control tower.
At the same time, an American Airlines flight from Norfolk was descending. An alarm sounded in the airplane’s cockpit, instructing the jet pilot to climb quickly to a higher altitude and avoid a potential collision with the helicopters.
Less than four hours later, when another Army helicopter approached, a different commercial flight, this one from Connecticut with seats for about 80 people, was preparing to land. For at least the second time in one day, a collision alarm sounded. The flight was forced to abort its landing.
Both flights ultimately landed safely. But just a day later, on Jan. 29, an Army Black Hawk with the call sign PAT25 was flying a training mission that cut through Reagan National’s airspace. The midair collision between that Black Hawk and American Airlines Flight 5342 left no survivors.
“It worked until it didn’t”
Emily Hanoka was working in the control tower at Reagan airport the day of the crash. She was an air traffic controller for nearly a decade and told 60 Minutes that there were warning signs for years.
“There were obvious cracks in the system, there were obvious holes,” Hanoka said.
Air traffic controllers warned the Federal Aviation Administration repeatedly for more than a decade that the tempo of passenger jets, along with heavy traffic from military, police, and hospital helicopters, was a recipe for disaster.
“It was surprising walking into that work environment, how close aircraft were,” Hanoka said. “This is what has to happen in order to make this airspace work. And it did work. It worked until it didn’t.”
60 Minutes
There were 85 near-midair collisions between helicopters and commercial aircraft in the area between 2021 and 2024, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
Recommendations were made, but they never went far, Hanoka said. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, commonly known as DCA, is unique. It’s owned by the federal government, and the number of daily flights is determined by Congress. Lawmakers, who’ve cited interest in making travel easier and more affordable, have added at least 50 flights to the already congested airport since 2000. They approved another 10 in 2024.
DCA moves 25 million passengers a year, 10 million more than its intended capacity, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.
“Some hours are overloaded, to the point where it’s over the capacity that the airport can handle,” Hanoka said.
There are only three short runways at DCA, and none of them run parallel. Runway 1 is the busiest in the country, according to the MWAA, with more than 800 flights a day — roughly one a minute.
Hanoka said to make it work, air traffic controllers at times relied on what they called a “squeeze play.”
“A squeeze play is when everything is dependent on an aircraft rolling, an aircraft slowing, and you know it’s going to be a very close operation,” she said.
Hanoka said the complexity of the job drove potential new air traffic controllers away.
“They’ll look at the operation and say, ‘Absolutely not.’ And they’ll withdraw from training,” she said. “About half of the people that walked in the building to train would say, ‘Absolutely not.'”
A year after the crash, nearly one-third of the controller positions in the Reagan tower were unfilled, according to figures from the FAA.
Hanoka’s shift ended on Jan. 29 a few hours before the crash happened. She left her job a few months later. Multiple air traffic controllers who were in the tower at the time of the collision took medical leave.
A complex and congested airspace
Restricted airspace near DCA shields the White House, the Capitol and other government buildings. So planes and helicopters were funneled into the same narrow corridor over the Potomac River. This included helicopter training flights, like the one on Jan. 29, 2025.
60 Minutes
Tim Lilley, a pilot who flew helicopter routes in the area hundreds of times during his 20 years with the Army, said the training happens there for a reason.
“The military would say, ‘This is where our mission is. This is where we need to train.’ And to some degree, I agree with that,” he said. “But those training environments, they should be nowhere near commercial airliners.”
Lilley’s son, as the first officer on American Airlines Flight 5342, was one of the 67 killed in the crash.
“I never thought to warn him about the helicopters because I just didn’t realize how far the safety margins had slipped since I had flown those routes,” he said.
Lilley is now advocating for changes to make the skies safer.
What a pilot could see
The night of the crash, the Black Hawk crew was relying on what’s called visual separation — looking out the window to avoid nearby passenger jets, according to investigators.
The helicopter pilot needs to maintain constant surveillance, something that was “impossible” under the conditions on the night of the crash, Lilley said.
The Black Hawk crew was likely wearing night-vision goggles, which Lilley said actually limit what a pilot can see.
“When you have a lot of bright lights, like you do in, you know, in the Washington, D.C., area, everything gets washed out through the goggles,” he said.
An NTSB simulation shows how hard it would have been for the Black Hawk pilots to distinguish between the American Airlines jet they were supposed to be looking out for and ground lights.
National Transportation Safety Board
Night vision goggles also limit peripheral vision. According to Lilley, pilots handle that by constantly scanning, moving their heads from side to side.
“This was a system that failed the people on the aircraft, on the helicopter, in the air traffic control tower,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told 60 Minutes.
Changes and a federal investigation
Soon after the crash, the FAA made changes to make the skies over Reagan airport safer. The FAA restricted helicopter traffic near the airport and moved some routes farther from the airspace. They also overhauled the bureaucracy to focus more on safety and evaluated other airports across the country where commercial planes and helicopters fly in close quarters.
In a statement to 60 Minutes, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he’s helped secure more than $12 billion to “aggressively overhaul our air traffic control system.”
“The January 2025 midair collision is a sobering reminder of why the FAA exists,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement. “And it galvanized us to pursue our safety mission with renewed urgency and bold action.”
Still, the problems at Reagan National continue. 60 Minutes has learned that since the crash, at least four times aircraft and helicopters have gotten too close, triggering safety reports.
The NTSB spent a year investigating and in January released its final report on the accident, detailing a long list of institutional failures that led to the midair collision. The NTSB determined the collision was preventable.
Investigators called out “systemic failures,” including ignored warning signs about risks and a helicopter route designed so poorly that, in some parts of the sky, it allowed for just 75 feet of vertical separation between helicopters and passenger jets. The board issued 50 safety recommendations across the government to prevent another accident.
Homendy warned that the FAA and lawmakers are clearing the path for another disaster if they don’t act quickly.
“Why do we always have to wait,” Homendy said, “until people die to take action?”
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