Summary
An American Airlines regional jet carrying 64 people collided midair with a Sikorsky H-60 military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday night.
The PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 was on approach from Wichita when the crash occurred around 9 p.m. ET. At least one aircraft ended up in the Potomac River, prompting a major emergency response.
The FAA closed the airport, and the NTSB is leading the investigation.
This sucks. First fatal airliner crash in the US in a while.
More than a decade
This happens right after trump disbands the aviation safety advisory committee. This feels familiar…
Honestly this crash has been coming for a while. We’ve had so many near-misses in the US on or near runways lately. ATC is understaffed and overstressed. It was just a matter of time.
(Though from what I can tell ATC did their job here, this seems like it was a mistake by the training crew on the Blackhawk. But we’ll have to wait for the final report to know for sure.)
This is terrible tragedy. It’s been few hours since the accident and no words on survivors so it’s looking grim. NTSB has lot of work to do to figure out what happened so it won’t happen again.
Edit: Just watching the press conference at 1am and they won’t talk about survivors or fatalities. It’s a bad sign.
2nd Edit: blancolirio video Juan Browne does excellent analysis on aircraft incidents.
3rd Edit: 2nd blancolirio video This update is tough to watch.
The Potomac is not a gentle river. Even if people survived to get into the water it would be very difficult to survive. And the water is freezing too.
Didn’t Musk fire the head of the FAA like 10 days ago?
ATC audio: https://archive.liveatc.net/kdca/KDCA1-Twr-Jan-30-2025-0130Z.mp3
Video from impact: https://bsky.app/profile/bnonews.com/post/3lgwgwsje3k2e
Do you have the timestamp for the ATC audio? I’m having trouble hearing what was being said
17.48 you can hear the audible gasp from ATC (or someone on the air) at the moment if impact.
Why was a Blackhawk helicopter just hanging around DC?
As I understand it’s a pretty common route for military helicopters. Lots of bigwigs in DC who get transported by the military from place to place. This was a training flight, so no VIPs being transported by the Blackhawk. Just three crew members.
The job of the helicopters on that route is to avoid aircraft visually, which isn’t easy at night. They were told by ATC to maintain visual of the CRJ and pass behind it, and the helicopter said they had visual, but must have been mistaken.
