The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has banned virtually all helicopter flights around Reagan National Airport and parts of the surrounding Potomac River. This comes in the tragic collision of a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines CRJ700 airliner above the river on Tuesday night. Recovery of the victims and wreckage of the two aircraft is poised to enter a new phase this weekend as the investigation into the circumstances of the incident continues. Readers can first get up to speed on what is already known about the incident in TWZ‘s past reporting here.
Under the new FAA restrictions, sections of two designated helicopter flight corridors that run up and down the Potomac, known as Routes 1 and 4, are now shut down between the Memorial and Wilson Bridges. The UH-60 involved in the collision had been traveling along Route 4 at the time. Portions of the surrounding airspace, including over Reagan National, are also closed to helicopter traffic. A map of the complete restricted area is seen below.
“The restriction exempts helicopters entering this airspace for lifesaving medical support, active law enforcement, active air defense, or presidential transport helicopter missions that must operate in this restricted area,” according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Transportation. “Any helicopter operations outside these exemptions will be prohibited. These restrictions will remain in place until the NTSB completes its preliminary investigation of the air carrier incident at which point it will be reviewed based on NTSB’s report.”
“Today’s decision will immediately help secure the airspace near Reagan Airport, ensuring the safety of airplane and helicopter traffic,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy also said in a statement. “This is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s ongoing commitment to safeguarding our nation’s skies and upholding the highest standards of air travel safety.”
“FAA investigators are supporting the NTSB-led investigation of Wednesday night’s midair collision near Reagan Washington National Airport,” per a brief separate statement posted on the FAA’s website today accompanying proactive responses to a list of frequently asked questions. “The NTSB is leading the investigation and will provide all updates. We cannot comment on any aspect of open investigations. [emphasis in the original] The FAA will quickly take any actions necessary based on evidence from the investigation. ”
At a briefing tonight, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also provided new details about the ongoing recovery efforts and investigation.
The U.S. Navy’s office of the Supervisor of Salvage and Diving (SUPSALV) is currently leading efforts to recover the wreckage and has large crane barges on the way now to assist. The U.S. Coast Guard and other federal, state, and local authorities have also been on scene. The lifting of known large sections of the two aircraft is expected to start this weekend.
“The supervisor of salvage is also conducting a debris mapping right now. This will help in our post-accident analysis… It will also help us with understanding some of the air worthiness and crash worthiness and human factors,” NTSB member J. Todd Inman explained. “We have right now two distinct debris fields… The good news is based upon the initial mapping, while there are some small aspects of that debris field, there are large chunks that will be easily recoverable, and it will aid in the investigation when we bring it into the secured facility.”
That same secure facility already has complete representative aircraft similar to the CRJ700 that went down so that investigators can compare the wreckage to it as part of the investigation, according to Inman. Canadian authorities separately announced earlier that they are supporting the investigation because the CRJ700 is a design that originated in that country.
NTSB’s Inman also noted that the fight data and cockpit voice recorders from the American Airlines flight have already been recovered. The flight data recorder was in good condition, but the cockpit voice recorder had water intrusion, which Inman said is uncommon in such cases. NTSB experts have been preparing to attempt downloads of the data from both devices.
NTBS has already begun conducting interviews with air traffic controllers and others, as well as collecting other relevant information.
In terms of the victims, the Unified Command leading the recovery efforts said earlier today that 41 sets of remains had been recovered so far, with 28 positively identified. There were 64 crew and passengers on American Airlines Flight 5342 and three members of the U.S. Army onboard the UH-60.
The U.S. Army separately identified two of three members of the Black Hawk’s crew as Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Maryland, one of the pilots, and Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Georgia, a crew chief. The service withheld the name of the second pilot, a woman, at the request of her family. At least as of earlier today, Eaves and the female aviator were listed as duty status-whereabouts unknown (DUSTWUN), meaning they have not been formally assessed to be missing or deceased. The UH-60 and its crew, all assigned to the specialized 12th Aviation Battalion based at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, were on a routine nighttime proficiency training flight related to the unit’s contingency of government mission, which you can read more about here.
Speaking today, NTSB’s Inman declared that the collision “should not have happened” and that “we have in aviation what’s called a Swiss cheese approach, wherein if something fails, a backup should catch it, [we have] multiple layers of redundancy.” However, he did not elaborate on the circumstances of the incident as it may be known to investigators now and refused to speculate about potential causes or factors.
Other U.S. officials, including President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, have publicly highlighted questions about the altitude at which the UH-60 was flying at the time.
“We’re looking at altitude … someone was at the wrong altitude,” Hegseth said during an interview on Fox earlier today, adding that the black boxes from the Black Hawk had not yet been recovered. “There could be depth perception problems. Again, that’s speculation. Our investigation will tell us more.”
“The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit,” Trump also wrote in a post on Truth Social “That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???”
Prior to the incident, FAA rules required helicopters flying in that part of Route 4 to stay at or below 200 feet mean sea level altitude (MSL). Videos shot from the ground, such as the more recently emerged ones seen below, have pointed to a near head-on impact between the Black Hawk and the CRJ700, though the exact altitudes of the two aircraft at the time remain unknown.
“I’m just going to preempt it. Off-the-shelf software programs are not always as accurate as the data we specifically get from ADS-B [the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast network], [and] from the black boxes,” NTSB’s Inman said. “All of that are factors that come into our investigation.”
“We will go back and look at any air traffic controller that was involved in this. We’ll go back and look at their past probably 72 hours, even two or three weeks. We’ll look at their training, their hiring, everything. What they probably ate that day. But it is not one point that tells us everything,” Inman added when asked about reportedly abnormal air traffic control staffing at the time of the collision. “It’s layered into a lot of other information that’s very critical.”
“Obviously, we’ll be looking at not only staffing that day, [but] progressively staffing. How many people, what job functions they were doing? Were they being combined? Were they not? What was the weather outside? What was the number of landings?” he continued. “I recall back during COVID, one runway [at Reagan National] was being used. Runway One. That was the only one. [Runway] 33, as traffic came back, started being opened up. So we would look at changes in traffic patterns, construction at the airport, all of that. It all paints a very big picture.”
The collision this week has already thrust long-standing concerns about airspace congestion around Reagan National Airport, and its history of near-collisions, back into the public eye. Just in the days leading up to the incident, at least two other airliners had to abort their approaches due to helicopters getting too close.
Reagan National Airport’s location along the Potomac presents unique complexities for aircraft arriving and taking off, in general. The airspace around Washington, D.C., and the greater National Capital Region (NRC), which is some of the most densely defended and heavily monitored in the country, not to mention extremely busy, creates additional challenges. The aforementioned helicopter routes that are now partially shut down are just some of the especially regimented rules and regulations that govern air traffic around the nation’s capital. Current and former military helicopter pilots talked about these issues in detail in interviews with TWZ yesterday, which you can find here.
With recovery efforts and other data collection still underway, NTSB’s Inman cautioned today that there is still much investigative work to be done before final firm conclusions about what happened this week over the Potomac can be reached.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com