Some helicopter flights at Washington’s Reagan National Airport should be banned amid an “intolerable risk” of collisions with planes, crash investigators have said.
It comes after 67 people were killed in a mid-air collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight as the plane was coming into land at the airport.
The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has said helicopter operations near planes at the airport pose an “intolerable risk” to aviation safety.
As the NTSB issued its preliminary report into January’s deadly crash, chair Jennifer Homendy said the board was calling for action to prevent a similar catastrophe from reoccurring.
She said the current separation distance between planes and helicopters at the airport was “insufficient”.
At the moment, helicopters and planes can be as close as 75ft apart from each other during landing, Ms Homendy said.
Investigators have found 15,214 cases of planes getting alerts about helicopters being in close proximity between October 2021 and December 2024, she added.
Ms Homendy said the NTSB was releasing a recommendation report containing two urgent safety recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) concerning the helicopter routes near the airport.
She said about the crash: “It does make me angry but it also makes me feel incredibly devastated for families that are grieving because they lost loved ones.”
The NTSB chair added: “It shouldn’t take a tragedy to require immediate action”.
Asked if there had been an oversight, she said “it’s stronger than an oversight” as there was data between 2021 and 2024 the FAA “could’ve used anytime” to determine that “we have a trend here and a problem here and looked at that route”.
“That didn’t occur which is why we are taking action today but unfortunately people lost lives and loved ones are grieving.”
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