Investigators scramble To find out why a military helicopter and a passenger aircraft late Wednesday, the first major US air accident in 16 years, plunged into the Potomac River in Washington, DC.
From the small known, human error has probably played a role and raised questions about a chronic lack of air traffic controllers and pilots. At a press conference Thursday morning, President Donald Trump sometimes blamed diversity programs in the federal aviation administration and the pilots of the helicopter for the accident, although he admitted that there were no ties between the FAA rental policies and the accident outside “common sense . ‘The authorities can also look at the coordination between military and civil aviation.
US officials say an army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter with three soldiers plowed in the tail of a Bombardier CRJ-700-Jet from Wichita, Kansas, as the aircraft less than a kilometer from the landing on the Ronald Reagan National Airport was. The video of the incident seems to be the flaming remains of both aircraft a few hundred feet in the shallow, icy river.
The passenger ray, operating on behalf of American Airlines by local carrier PSA Airlines, had 64 people on board, and police boats have already received 27 bodies. Officials said Thursday morning that they expected no survivors to be. The last aircraft tragedy this deadly in the United States was the Colgan Air Crash in New York in 2009.
In a video released on Thursday morning, defense secretary Pete Hegseth said the helicopter was associated with the 12th aviation battalion, based less than 20 miles of DC’s National Airport. The secretary said that the ‘fairly experienced’ crew did a required annual aftercare and that they were equipped with a night-vision glasses. The identity of those on board is known, and their next of kin are informed.
In a grainy video from the nearby Kennedy Center, a smaller light, presumably the helicopter, can be seen that catches the brighter light of the plane, both fly low to the ground. The two clash into a massive explosion and divide into different burning fragments.
A few minutes before the arrival of the American Airlines flight, Air Traffic Control asked if it could end up on Runway 33, a shorter runway. The pilots said yes and apparently changed runways during their approach. Some wondered if this change in the flight path could have caught the Black Hawk off guard.
But retired Air Force Brigadier General John Teichert told Newsnation Television that it should not have caused an accident. “I think that although they told to call runways, it is not this aggressive maneuver in a regional jet that would have them repositioned and would be a surprise for the Black Hawk,” he said.
Eighty percent of the aviation accidents worldwide can be attributed to human error, and this is an excellent candidate in this case, and Marco Chan, a former pilot who is now at the head of pilot programs at Buckinghamshire New University, told Wired . “Maybe safety protocols, human factors are playing,” he says. In recent years, the FAA has struggled to replace outgoing air traffic controllers, even if the number of air passengers and flights has dropped to the pandemic. The FAA said last fall that it has exceeded its internal air traffic controller for the year.