Written by 
- An American Airlines flight collided with a Black Hawk helicopter in Washington DC.
- The nation’s capital is home to some of the most congested and highly governed airspace.
- Reagan National Airport has the US’ busiest runway, with over 800 flights a day.
An American Airlines flight and a military helicopter collided late Wednesday in one of the most congested and tightly controlled airspaces in the country.
Washington, DC’s Reagan National Airport is home to the country’s busiest runway, with over 800 takeoffs and landings a day, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. It’s the closest of three area airports to the city, located about three miles south of the White House.
Military helicopters also frequently fly low over the nearby Potomac River, transiting between nearby military bases and the Pentagon, about a mile north of the airport.
Flying into and out of the airport, with short runways and such heavily restricted airspace nearby, is “like threading a needle,” one pilot previously told Business Insider.
“It’s a beehive of activity,” Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines captain and spokesperson for its pilot union, told The Washington Post. “It’s extremely compact, and it’s a high volume of traffic.”
Search efforts for the 64 people on board American Eagle Flight 5342 continued through the night. At a press conference Thursday morning, Washington, DC’s fire chief said that no survivors are expected.
The Bombardier CRJ700 was operated by PSA Airlines, a regional subsidiary of American Airlines. It collided with a military UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter carrying three people.
Along with New York’s LaGuardia Airport, Reagan is one of two in the country subject to a perimeter rule. At Reagan, this limits routes to a distance of 1,250 miles — although Congress has increasingly approved more slots to operate beyond this, making the airport busier.
Unions and regulators have raised concerns about the country’s air traffic system after several near-misses in recent years.
“We’ve had so many close calls with runway incursions and commercial flights almost colliding, and when something repeats over and over again, we call that a trend,” Anthony Brickhouse, a US-based aviation safety expert, told Business Insider.
“We’ve been trending in this direction for two or three years now, and unfortunately, tonight, it happened,” he added.
The National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration, and the Pentagon have announced investigations.
Pete Syme/Business Insider
The incident brings an end to a remarkable period of aviation safety in the US.
It is the first fatal crash on US soil since 2013. Three people died in July that year when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed short of the runway in San Francisco.
Wednesday’s crash was also the first involving a US airline on US soil since February 2009, when a Colgan Air Bombardier Q400 crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York.
Fifty people died after the aircraft entered a stall and the pilots failed to respond appropriately.
The Federal Aviation Administration consequently revised its pilot-fatigue rules and required that all airline pilots hold an airline pilot transport license — the highest level of certificate.
Since 2013, only two incidents involving flights on US soil have led to fatalities. One Southwest Airlines passenger died from her injuries in 2018 after she was partially ejected through a broken window.
And in 2019, a man died when PenAir Flight 3296 overshot the runway while landing in Alaska.