FAA Logged 15,214 Close Calls Near DCA Before 67 Died

Between October 2021 and December 2024, the FAA's own radar data recorded 15,214 occasions when a commercial airplane and a helicopter near Reagan National Airport (DCA) failed to maintain a mile of lateral separation and 400 feet of vertical separation⧉ -- an average of 390 a month, out of 944,179 total operations.▸ Eighty-five of those encounters closed to within 1,500 feet laterally and 200 feet vertically, the data's most severe tier: roughly one every two weeks. On January 29, 2025, a US Army UH-60L Black Hawk helicopter and PSA Airlines flight 5342 collided in exactly that airspace, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft -- the nation's deadliest aviation accident since November 2001.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) -- the federal agency that investigates transportation accidents and issues safety recommendations no agency is legally required to adopt⧉ -- approved its final report on January 27, 2026, and named the FAA's own inaction as a cause of the crash.▸ The collision happened on Route 4, a helicopter corridor that runs along the Potomac River directly beneath the approach path to DCA's runway 33. At the corridor's 200-foot maximum authorized altitude, a helicopter over the river's eastern shoreline would have had only about 75 feet of vertical separation from an airplane on approach⧉ -- a gap that shrinks further the farther the helicopter strays from the shoreline. Runways 15 and 33, the runways in conflict with Route 4, handle only 5% of DCA's departures and 4% of its arrivals⧉, so closing the corridor when they're active would rarely have touched ordinary traffic.

Six weeks after the crash, on March 11, 2025, the NTSB issued two urgent recommendations⧉: prohibit helicopters on Route 4 whenever runways 15 and 33 are in use, and designate an alternate route for the segment.▸ The FAA did not act on that geometry voluntarily -- only after the accident did it restrict the corridor at all, issuing a Notice to Airmen on February 19, 2025 that closed the airspace from the surface to 17,999 feet⧉ through the end of March.

This wasn't a blind spot.▸ Between 2011 and 2024, FAA data on encounters between helicopters and commercial aircraft near DCA showed at least one TCAS resolution advisory triggered per month due to proximity to a helicopter⧉ -- a resolution advisory is TCAS's highest-level alert, the one that tells a pilot to climb or descend immediately to avoid a collision. In over half of those instances, the helicopter may have been flying above its route's altitude limit; two-thirds happened at night. From 2021 through 2024 alone, flight-data records showed 5,328 lower-level traffic advisories and 78 resolution advisories tied to helicopter proximity near DCA⧉.

"Despite available safety data showing repeated close encounters between helicopters and airplanes near the airport, the FAA did not conduct sufficient safety analysis or take timely corrective action," the NTSB found.▸ NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy put it more bluntly at the board meeting approving the report: "Sadly, the conditions for this tragedy were in place long before the night of Jan. 29."

The technology that could have changed the outcome has a name and a history.▸ ADS-B In is cockpit equipment that shows pilots the position of nearby aircraft in real time, layered on top of TCAS's alerts; the NTSB found that had flight 5342 been equipped with it, the crew could have received a first alert about the helicopter 59 seconds before the collision. In a February 2008 letter, NTSB told the FAA that failing to require full ADS-B capability "would be unfortunate and would result in missing or unnecessarily delaying an opportunity to remedy a serious and notorious safety issue"⧉ -- 17 years before the Potomac collision.

The FAA didn't require it.▸ Congress's 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act repealed an earlier mandate that the agency even pursue an ADS-B In rule⧉, and after two more fatal helicopter midair collisions -- Ketchikan, Alaska and Kekaha, Hawaii, both in 2019 -- prompted NTSB to renew the push in 2021, the FAA told NTSB in a June 26, 2023 letter that its existing ADS-B requirements already adequately addressed aviation safety and it would not pursue additional requirements⧉. That refusal came 19 months before the Potomac collision -- and 15 years after NTSB's first written warning that delay itself was the danger.

NTSB's probable cause statement names the mechanism directly: "the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) placement of a helicopter route in close proximity to a runway approach path; their failure to regularly review and evaluate helicopter routes and available data, and their failure to act on recommendations to mitigate the risk of a midair collision"⧉ near DCA.▸ A contributing factor named separately: "the FAA's failure across multiple organizations to implement previous NTSB recommendations, including Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast In, and to follow and fully integrate its established safety management system"⧉ -- the FAA's own internal process for finding and fixing exactly this kind of risk before it kills anyone.

The final report makes 50 new recommendations -- 33 to the FAA, 8 to the US Army, 5 to the Department of War Policy Board on Federal Aviation, 2 to the Department of Transportation, and one each to the DOT Inspector General and the RTCA -- alongside 74 new findings⧉.▸ None of them carries a legal deadline: [NTSB's own description of the process is that it "monitor[s] the progress of action to implement each recommendation until it is closed, which usually takes several years"](https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/safety-recommendations.aspx). Homendy said as much herself at the same meeting: "But our recommendations are voluntary. Unless they're acted on, they're simply words on a page⧉."

It is not the Board's first time saying so.▸ In the two decades before the DCA crash, NTSB investigated 163 aviation accidents and 47 incidents involving a midair collision, near midair collision, or loss of separation -- combined, they killed 281 people and injured 112 others, and NTSB raised concern about the limits of pilot-applied "see-and-avoid" separation in 45% of those cases⧉. What should have happened, by NTSB's own account going back to 2008, was equipping aircraft with ADS-B In before a route this tight needed it. What happens next is what always happens next: the FAA and the Army now have 50 more open items to answer, on the same voluntary, no-deadline track that let the first ADS-B In warning sit unanswered for 17 years.