While Congress pushed ahead last year with adding 10 new daily flights to Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport, many looked past concerns about dangers in the congested skies over the nation’s capital.
Squeezing in more flights would only increase the risks, said Virginia’s two senators, who called a near miss between two planes on a runway last April a “flashing red warning light.”
What wasn’t publicly known at the time — and didn’t surface until this week during the investigation into the January midair collision between an airliner and military helicopter that killed 67 people — was that close calls at the airport were far more frequent than travelers and aviation experts knew.
Now, safety experts and family members who lost loved ones in the Jan. 29 crash are asking why no one acted in the face of what appeared to be a looming disaster.
The National Transportation Safety Board said airplane pilots were alerted to take evasive action to avoid hitting helicopters at least once a month from 2011 through 2024, citing data compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration, and that there were 85 near misses when aircraft were within a few hundred feet (meters) of each other during recent years.
“How does that happen in this day and age and somebody doesn’t do something about it?” asked Doug Lane, whose wife, Christine Conrad Lane, and their 16-year-old son, Spencer, died in the crash.
Pilots have long worried about the congested and complex airspace around the airport near the heart of the capital, where flights must maneuver around military aircraft and restricted areas. It was no secret there had been previous close calls, but the numbers found by the NTSB were alarming.
“Why someone was not paying attention to those numbers and those events are questions yet to be answered,” said James Hall, a former NTSB chair during the Clinton administration.
“What not to do is to ignore that many incidents,” he said.
FAA officials have not yet addressed whether they knew there were so many encounters between planes and helicopters at Reagan National. Messages seeking comment were not immediately returned Thursday.
Current NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who oversees the FAA, both said they were angry that the number of close calls were not recognized earlier by the FAA.
“If someone was paying attention, someone was on the job, they would have seen this,” Duffy said. He also announced he will move forwar