The National Transportation Safety Board wants to severely restrict helicopter traffic near Ronald Reagan National Airport, officials said Tuesday, in the wake of a catastrophic midair collision that killed 67 people.
The Jan. 29 collision tragedy near the nation’s capital was the deadliest such U.S. air crash in more than 20 years, and NTSB Chairperson Jennifer Homendy called on the Federal Aviation Administration to enact immediate restrictions.
The NTSB asked the FAA to prohibit helicopters from flying near the airport, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, when Runway 15/33 is in use.
The existing allowable distances between planes and helicopters “are insufficient and pose an intolerable risk to aviation safety by increasing the chances of a midair collision at DCA,” Homendy told reporters, using the airport’s code.
“Let me repeat: that they pose an intolerable risk to aviation safety. Weâre therefore recommending today that the FAA permanently prohibit operations on helicopters … between Hains Point and the Wilson Bridge,” she said.
From October 2021 to December 2024, there were 944,179 flights in and out of Reagan Airport with 15,214 “close proximity events between commercial airplanes and helicopters in which there was a lateral separation distance of less than one nautical mile and vertical separation of less than 400 feet,” Homendy said.
There were 85 times when helicopters and planes were less than 1,500 feet apart laterally with “vertical separation of less than 200 feet,” she added.
The FAA enforced helicopter restrictions around the airport along the lines of the NTSB recommendations following the Jan. 29 catastrophe â and those limitations will stay in place, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said after the NTSB issued its report.
He agreed with the NTSB’s conclusions that helicopters and airplanes shouldnât have been allowed to operate so closely together at the airport.
âSo at best, weâre in a situation where weâre threading a needle allowing helicopters to fly down the same airspace as landing aircraft,â Duffy said. âAnd why this information wasnât studied and known before Jan. 29 is an important question.â
Tim Lilley, a pilot and the father of Sam Lilley, the first officer on the doomed American Airlines flight, said the dangerous air traffic of planes and helicopters around Reagan Airport has been known for decades.
âI flew those routes 25 years ago. I knew that they were poorly designed back then,â Tim Lilley told NBC News on Tuesday.
âTheyâre exactly the same today as they were back then, 25 years ago,â he said. âAnd I kind of feel a little remorse in not taking that subject on back then.â
The number of helicopter-airplane near-collisions around Reagan Airport should have been flagged earlier but somehow got lost in the data, Duffy said.
âSo what the FAA has deployed is AI tools to make sure we can sift through the data and find hot spots in our airspace at our airports,â he said.
âSo if thereâs another DCA situation out there, our AI tools will help us identify those and take corrective actions pre-emptively, as opposed to retroactively,â he said.
American Flight 5342, carrying 60 passengers and four crew members, was minutes away from completing its journey from Wichita, Kansas, to Reagan Airport.
That’s when it collided with a UH-60 Black Hawk, which was on a training exercise out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The skies were clear that Wednesday night just 3 miles south of the White House.
Everyone on both the regional jet and helicopter was killed.
The victims included six people affiliated with the Skating Club of Boston, who had been in Wichita for the previous weekend’s 2025 U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
The party had stayed behind in Wichita for a development camp targeting up-and-coming U.S. competitors.
Teenage figure skaters Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, their mothers, Jin Han and Christine Lane, and coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were also killed.
The disaster was among several high-profile aviation incidents in North America.
Seven people were killed Feb. 1 when an air ambulance crashed in northeast Philadelphia.
Bering Air Flight 445Â crashed on its way to Nome, Alaska, on Feb. 6, killing all 10 people on board.
Eighteen people were injured, but none killed, on Feb. 17 when Delta Air Lines Flight 4819, from Minneapolis, flipped upside down on the runway at Toronto Pearson International Airport.
A private jet and Southwest Flight 2504 nearly collided at Chicago’s Midway International Airport on Feb. 25.
Despite the recent spate of scary airline incidents, transportation officials insist that domestic flying is as safe as it has ever been, with fatal crashes rare.