Times Investigation Into the Deadly Crash at National Airport: 5 Takeaways

It is clear that something went terribly wrong the night of Jan. 29, when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines regional jet over the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing everyone on board the aircraft.

But one error did not cause the worst domestic crash in the United States in nearly a quarter-century. Modern aviation is designed to have redundancies and safeguards that prevent a misstep, or even several missteps, from being catastrophic. On Jan. 29, that system collapsed, a New York Times investigation found.

Up to now, attention has focused on the Black Hawk’s altitude, which was too high and placed it directly in the jet’s landing path. But The Times uncovered new details showing that the failures were far more complex than previously understood.

Here are five takeaways from the investigation:

The Black Hawk crew failed to effectively execute a common but sometimes dangerous aviation practice.

The practice, known as flying under see and avoid rules, works exactly as it sounds. A pilot is meant to see neighboring air traffic, often without assistance from the air traffic controller, and avoid it by hovering in place until the traffic passes or by flying around it in prescribed ways.

One benefit of the see-and-avoid system is that it can lighten the controller’s workload during busy periods. But see and avoid has proved problematic, even deadly, in recent decades. It has also been implicated in at least 40 fatal collisions since 2010, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

On the night of the crash, the Black Hawk crew did not execute see and avoid effectively. The pilots either did not detect the specific passenger jet the controller had flagged, or could not pivot to a safer position. The result is that they flew directly into the path of American Airlines Flight 5342 as it tried to land at National Airport.