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
Where did you read there were fatalities?
Even without confirmation, there’s basically zero chance that a jet on final approach striking a helicopter, with at least one of the aircraft in the Potomac… Could possibly result in no fatalities.
Almost surely everyone on the helicopter, at least.
I was listening to a stream of the radio. There was definitely talk of confirming that the boat house was the best place to drop off bodies.
Thanks. Original article and leading AP report didn’t have the anonymous sources.
I was curious whether there have been mid-air collisions in history without fatalities as I thought that chances for that are basically zero. But apparently, it happened at least six times in the history of aviation.
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.
Agreed that press conference and the far away footage not good. River is very cold and icy as well
That area is not very windy but 32-34F which is pretty cold. Not good.
Cliffs notes:
Plane coming in to land
Tower requests runway change
Helicopter flying a dedicated path near the airport
Heli path has max altitude of 200ft
Tower asks for visual confirmation from heli of plane (fairly late)
Heli confirms, requests visual separation (meaning heli will handle separation of aircraft visually)
(Note: Multiple of same plane coming in to land)
Heli reaches 300ft alt a few seconds before plane arrival
Plane coming in to land also approaching 300ft
ContactYTer suspects heli pilots confirmed visual of the wrong plane due to multiple Bluestreak planes coming in for landing.
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
Wow, that’s just awful, after seeing the vid I can’t imagine there are any survivors. RIP to all.
Shiiiiiit. I was looking out my window around quarter to nine and saw a weird bright orange spot off towards DC. Didn’t think anything of it in the moment; I’m right under a flight path, not too far from a military airfield, all sorts of weird lights flying over all the time. But looking at that footage that’s exactly what it looked like. Christ.
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.
Holy shit that is awful
I’m so sorry to the families of everyone involved, that is a huge tragedy.
Why was a Blackhawk helicopter just hanging around DC?
DC has tons of helicopters flying over all the time, many don’t show on tracking systems since they’re military so there’s a crowdsourced one at map.copterspotter.com.
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.
