Commercial and military pilots have long shared a busy airspace over Washington, D.C. While human error appears to be a factor in Wednesday's crash, questions regarding rules and regulations for military and civil aviation have been mounting.
The plane that collided with a Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River Wednesday night had been coming in from Kansas to land at Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Va., an airport where the number of flights have soared in the past decade.
Last year, Congress passed a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill that increased the number of flights at National Airport by 10.
At the time, concerns were raised by lawmakers including from Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of Virginia, who warned that National Airport was already the busiest in the country and the bill was “gambling with the safety of everyone who uses this airport.”
“I’ve been very worried about this for a long time, and I continue to be worried about it,” Kaine told reporters Thursday. “I’ve been very, very concerned about this, very complex airspace, commercial, military, the way security demands of being in the nation’s capital puts some significant restrictions on that."
Congress has generally restricted nonstop flights from National Airport outside of a 1,250-mile perimeter, leading longer flights to airports like Washington Dulles International Airport or Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall. But over the years, Congress has continued chipping away at the limit to allow more flights outside the perimeter.
The crash is the deadliest in the U.S. in 24 years, after a November 2001 American Airlines crash in New York killed 260 people.
Several failures appear to have contributed to this week’s crash, but much of the attention has turned to the Black Hawk helicopter, which President Trump faulted for flying too high and not maneuvering out of the plane’s way as it was returning to National Airport.
The Army has since identified two of the three crew killed, including Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Ga., — believed to be deceased pending positive identification — and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Md., whose remains have not yet been recovered.
The name of the third soldier, whose body had also not yet been recovered, was not released at the request of the family.
The crash is being investigated by the military, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the FAA, and it will likely take months for a full picture to emerge. The NTSB said it can have a preliminary report within 30 days.
Read the full report at TheHill.com.
