Attention has turned to the flight altitude of the Army Black Hawk helicopter that collided with an American Airlines jet near Ronald Reagan National Airport on the night of Jan. 29.
The accident—the deadliest U.S. plane crash since November 2001—occurred at about 9 p.m. ET. All 64 people aboard the jet, along with the three military officers in the helicopter, perished. Based on flight data that has yet to be independently verified, the helicopter was operating at roughly 300 feet above the ground at the time of the collision.
During a Jan. 30 White House briefing, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed that elevation played a role in the incident.
“There was some sort of an elevation issue that we have immediately begun investigating at the [Department of Defense] and army level,” Hegseth said.
The president said the “helicopter obviously was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I’m saying there are things that you could question, like the height of the helicopter, the height of the plane being at the same level,” Trump said.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the federal agency investigating the crash, has not yet completed its investigation. NTSB member J. Todd Inman said the agency could not confirm the helicopter’s exact altitude at the time of the crash.
“We can’t validate or basically corroborate any of that until we get more of the electronic data and the data that’s on the plane,” Inman told reporters at a news briefing. The NTSB has not yet recovered the plane’s black boxes, which are flight recorders used by investigators to determine the cause of aviation incidents.
All military helicopters must adhere to a maximum allowed altitude, referred to as above ground level, when flying in specific airspace.
Jonathan Koziol, chief of staff for Army aviation, told The Associated Press that the Black Hawk’s maximum altitude for flying a corridor called Route 4, near Woodrow Wilson Bridge on the Potomac River, is 200 feet above the ground.
He said investigators must analyze the flight data before making conclusions about the helicopter’s altitude at the time of the collision.
The Pentagon referred questions about the helicopter’s maximum allowed altitude to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
During a follow-up briefing on the afternoon of Jan. 30, Trump asked why Air Traffic Control (ATC) allowed the two aircraft to operate within the same altitude.
Elevation, Night Vision Issues
On the morning of Jan. 30, Hegseth confirmed in a video briefing that the helicopter was conducting an “annual proficiency training flight” before the collision.Reagan National Airport not only sits at the edge of Washington, a dense city with copious street lights, but also possesses one of the busiest airspaces in the world. The runways are frequently congested, leading to a near collision between two jets in early 2024.
Juan Browne, a pilot for a major U.S. airline, told The Epoch Times that helicopters operating near commercial airports are meant to pass underneath airline traffic. However, if they were wearing night vision goggles, as Hegseth indicated on Jan. 30, that could have obscured the pilots’ view of the plane during its descent.
“Landing light from the [airplane] would be blinding, completely washing out the [night vision goggles] of the helicopter,” Browne said. “All that backlighting of the city makes it very hard to pull out the profile of the [jet].”
If the pilots were using night vision goggles at the time of the crash, “it would be a tremendous contributing factor,” Scott Seeberger, another pilot for a major U.S. airline and a former military pilot, told The Epoch Times.
Aircraft Avoidance Alerts
The two aircraft likely would have also possessed traffic collision avoidance systems, which alert pilots of incoming air traffic and tell them to “either climb or stand to avoid each other,” but it won’t advise turning left or right to avoid a collision, Browne said. The problem, he said, is that such systems do not issue those advisories below 1,000 feet above the ground.At that altitude, “you are much too close to the ground to be issued a descending resolution advisory because you’re just going to run right into the water or the ground,” he said. “The only warning you would get at the last moment [is that] there is traffic, traffic on your screen.”
While all commercial aircraft have traffic collision avoidance systems installed, military aircraft often disable the system or turn it to standby, according to Seeberger, who also runs a human factors safety consulting firm called Max-Altitude. He confirmed that traffic collision avoidance systems are disabled below 1,000 feet.
According to the helicopter ATC audio released on the night of Jan. 29, the controller told the helicopter pilots to “pass behind” the airplane after asking them if they had it in sight. Seconds later, the two aircraft collided.
There are also looming questions as to whether the helicopter’s radar altimeter, which tells pilots their precise altitude above terrain below, was malfunctioning if the Black Hawk was higher than its maximum allowed elevation for that route.
“It’s hard to believe the barometric altimeter setting would be that off for them to be up in 400 feet when they were supposed to be at [200 feet],” Seeberger said. “That’s certainly something investigators will have to look at.”
Seeberger said the incident resulted from a “big airspace management issue,” as the helicopter was seemingly at an incorrect altitude. He said it should have been nowhere near the jet, well east of the Potomac River, and at a lower elevation.
The NTSB investigators will have to determine if the helicopter pilots were following the correct flight procedures, Seeberger said.
While the Department of Defense likely would have directed the helicopter’s training exercise on Jan. 29, “certainly the FAA was aware [that] this particular mission was flying,” he said.
Since the Black Hawk is a military aircraft, it likely did not have a flight recorder, Seeberger said, which makes it difficult for investigators to determine whether the pilots were following protocol.
“Maybe one of the pilots was task saturated as they were coming down that segment of the Potomac, because something else was happening on flight deck,” he said. “The investigators will have to try to piece together whatever information they have to really create an accurate picture [of] what transpired.”
