FAA restricting non-essential helicopter operations around Reagan National after deadly crash

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday announced it would permanently restrict  “non-essential” helicopter operations around Washington, D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), after a deadly midair collision between an Army helicopter and a commercial jet in January.

The new rules, which would seek to eliminate helicopter and fixed-wing mixed traffic in the skies near Reagan National, align with National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommendations made earlier this week. The board discovered thousands of close calls between helicopters and planes near the airport in the past three years, culminating with a Jan. 29 crash between a Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines plane that killed 67 people.

The FAA said it will permanently close Route 4 to helicopters, a four-mile stretch of airspace between Hains Point and the Wilson Bridge along the Potomac River. It also is evaluating alternative helicopter routes, as recommended by the NTSB.

Should a helicopter need to fly through the airspace on an urgent mission, such as lifesaving medical, law enforcement operations or presidential transport, the FAA will keep those helicopters specific distances away from airplanes, according to an administration statement. 

The FAA will also prohibit the use of runways 15/33 and 4/22 at DCA when helicopters are conducting urgent missions nearby, and will limit the use of visual separation to certain Coast Guard, Marine and Park Police helicopter operations near the restricted airspace.

The new rules follow NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy’s stark comments on Tuesday when she called the existing separation distances between helicopter traffic and aircraft landing at certain DCA runways “an intolerable risk to aviation safety.” 

“It does make me angry, but it also makes me feel incredibly devastated for families that are grieving because they lost loved ones,” she told reporters. “It shouldn’t take a tragedy like this to occur. Unfortunately, one did, and so we are calling on action, but there clearly were indicators where safety trending could have occurred.”

An initial investigation into the accident, which killed all three pilots on the Black Hawk and 64 people on the commercial flight, found the helicopter was flying 78 feet above the 200-foot limit for that location when it crashed into Flight 5342 just before 9 p.m. The helicopter was on a training mission while the American Airlines flight was en route to DCA from Wichita, Kan. 

Homendy said the incident came after years of thousands of close calls around the airport, located in Arlington, Va., where military helicopters regularly conduct exercises, local law enforcement patrol the area, and government officials are flown in and out of Washington.

“At best, we’re in a situation where we’re threading the needle allowing helicopters to fly down the same airspace as landing aircraft,” Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters Tuesday. “And why this information wasn’t studied and known before January 29 is an important question.”

The FAA also announced it is studying other airports in cities that have high volumes of mixed traffic, including Boston, New York, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles, and will have "corrective action plans for any risks that are identified."