WASHINGTON — A series of grave miscommunications in one of the most crowded and complex patches of sky in the US likely caused Wednesday night’s deadly midair crash between an American Airlines passenger plane and a US Army Black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan National Airport, The Post can reveal.
The crash, which killed all 64 people aboard the packed Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas — plus three people on the chopper — is the deadliest US air disaster since 2001.
Less than 20 seconds before the collision, an air traffic controller warned the chopper that it was getting too close to the CRJ-700 passenger jet, and the experienced helicopter pilot acknowledged.
However, experts believe the helicopter pilot may have maneuvered to avoid the wrong plane — a jet of the same model that was taking off farther away — and never saw the American Airlines flight until it was too late.
The Black Hawk helicopter was apparently flying too high — at about 400 feet — when it collided with the American Airlines jet, which was rapidly descending after it was cleared for landing, experts said.
However, because of the close quarters around Reagan National — there is just 50 feet separating the maximum allowable altitude for helicopters and the minimum altitude for planes that are landing in the spot — leaving almost no room for error.
Officials have not yet offered a possible cause for the crash, however, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Thursday that the tragedy was “absolutely” preventable.
The Post spoke to several aviation experts about a number of factors that may have contributed to the fatal collision.
Originally built to shuffle VIPs into the nation’s capital on private or government jets, Reagan is a smaller airport than Dulles or Baltimore/Washington International — the other two airports in the region.
With a runway nearly half as long as the standard 13,000-foot runways of other airports built to accommodate large commercial jets, landing is tricky for incoming planes, former DC-based American Airlines pilot John Wright said.
“When it was originally built [in 1941,] there weren’t jet airplanes, which need to take a lot more space than propeller-driven airplanes,” he said.
The shorter runway makes the descent difficult, creating the need for pilots to be intensely focused, Wright said.
“The first few times you fly there, you usually are with [a fellow pilot] who’s really experienced. He’s kind of talking through it, too,” he told The Post.
Follow the NYP’s coverage of the deadly DC plane collision
“Where you land on [runways] that are 13,000 feet long, you’ve got plenty of room to play with. But at [Reagan] it’s only 7,000 feet.”
There are two flight paths in the area — one for helicopters and another for airplanes — that converge near the Reagan airport, according to an official flight map.
Air traffic controller audio captured operators warning the military helicopter that it was getting close to American Airlines Flight 5342 and directing it to pass behind the passenger plane, which would have had the right of way for the trickier landing.
“It’s such a challenging airport to land a jet airplane, as your focus is really on your airspeed, your altitude, your rate of descent,” he said, adding that “the last thing you’re looking for is to see if somebody’s crossing in your path.”
Still, he insisted, “it’s totally possible to operate safely at Reagan International — I did it for 50 years, of course.”
Another complicating factor could be the too-general nature of the air traffic controller’s language to the Black Hawk. In video of the collision taken from the Kennedy Center, a second jet is seen in the sky taking off at the same time as the DC-bound flight was attempting to land.
Instead of providing specific information of where the Wichita airplane was, the controller only asked the military pilot if he saw the “CRJ” — the type of airplane — in the sky, without indicating where it was.
“The language is usually more along the lines of … ‘Black Hawk, hey, do you see the aircraft at your 11 o’clock, five miles out, moving north?’ or something along those lines,” retired Blackhawk pilot Lt. Col. Darin Gaub told The Post.
He added: “That may be something that’s going to have to get looked at, because in my experience, those kinds of calls and warnings are made very specifically to clock direction, distance and altitudes and in route of travel.”
But former Air Force pilot and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Calif.) claimed in a video posted to X on Thursday that “air traffic control did its job” by merely alerting the helicopter of the CRJ’s approach.
“If you listen to the audio, the [commercial jet] was coming in on approach [when air traffic control] called out to [the army helicopter, ‘look for the [jet] on approach — that’s air traffic control’s job,” Kinzinger explained. “[The helicopter] evidently saw the wrong target — this is the theory — and said, ‘I see the [airplane.]’”
Visibility was likely also a factor, though it was a clear night at the time of the crash. Gaub said there are typically two soldiers on board a Black Hawk who help spot area aircraft for helicopter pilots — but Thursday’s flight had just one.
“There are normally two crew chiefs in back, both looking sideways 90 degrees off from the front two pilots, and each one of them is a set of eyes that can see a whole lot more, in some cases, than the pilots can,” he told Fox News on Thursday.
“If you’re down to [crew members] — which is normal, by the way, for a training mission — that one side has less eyes looking out and looking for other aircraft or obstacles than you would have with four.”
Another issue that may have been a factor in the helicopter crew’s visibility was their possible use of night-vision goggles, Gaub said.
“[Night vision] takes your normal field of vision from what you see normally to down to about a 40-degree [angle,] and that affects each pilot in the front.
He noted that commercial aircraft’s lights may have “blended into the lights of the city, and it can make an aircraft difficult to pick out.
“I’ve had it happen to me before,” he told The Post. “I know exactly how it looks, and you can lose an entire 747 in the lights of a big city.”
The helicopter’s altitude may also have played a role in the collision, as helicopters are directed to fly no higher than 200 feet in their path — and the collision happened at roughly 300 feet.
“If the helicopter was flying at an altitude that was higher than what is prescribed and dictated by procedure through that airspace corridor … they could have been looking at an aircraft that was … potentially even below their own altitude,” Gaub told The Post.
Even if the helicopter had been at its 200-foot maximum altitude, aircraft aviation attorney and former pilot Jim Brauchle explained that there still would not have been much space between it and the commercial jet descending from its 500-foot ceiling.
“You’ve got intersecting routes that are apparently de-conflicted by, you know, only several hundred feet — which is not a lot of room for a margin of error.”
What’s more, Federal Aviation Administration rules allow pilots a standard 75-foot deviation from the prescribed altitudes, which could potentially drop that margin even lower, Brauchle said.
Regardless, Wright said the helicopter “should not have been crossing the flight path at any altitude at that time.”
“Somehow something broke down between the helicopter’s clearance to be there and the air traffic control tower,” the former pilot surmised.
“It kind of seems like a very preventable accident that shouldn’t have happened if normal procedures were followed.”
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