The Federal Aviation Administration failed to heed numerous appeals in recent years to mitigate risks at Ronald Reagan National Airport, forcing pilots and air traffic controllers to make the best of hazardous options, according to testimony at a hearing Thursday on the January midair collision over the Potomac River.
Officials assigned to air traffic control facilities in the area around Washington, D.C., said that senior F.A.A. managers squelched or disregarded formal efforts to reduce the rate of departures and arrivals at the airport, to make changes to a route that put helicopters in proximity to planes landing on one of its runways, and to get support staff assigned to the airport tower to ease the workload of controllers trying to manage a frequently chaotic airspace.
The testimony came in the second of three days of hearings before the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that investigates aviation accidents. The sometimes contentious hearings aimed to probe the circumstances leading to the collision between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial jet, killing 67 people, on Jan. 29 — the worst airplane crash in nearly a quarter of a century in the United States. A report on the agency’s findings of the causes is not expected to be released until early next year.
It cannot be known if the changes urged by employees with the F.A.A., if put into action, would have prevented the collision, but the unheeded warnings indicate that there were multiple opportunities for the agency to address conditions that may have contributed to the crash.
“If a facility is coming to you with this type of information — I didn’t do it lightly — and it needs to be addressed, and we didn’t address it,” said Bryan Lehman, the F.A.A. official in charge of the Potomac TRACON, which directs traffic headed to or from the Washington, D.C., area.
Mr. Lehman told the board that in 2023, he wrote a formal memo asking the F.A.A. to reduce the rate of arrivals at National Airport, having noticed that at peak times, controllers were struggling to keep up with traffic that frequently exceeded capacity.
He sent the memo to his district supervisor — a courtesy, he explained, since by the F.A.A.’s rules, he had the right to take his complaints higher. Ten days later, his manager “told us that we were not going to go in that direction,” Mr. Lehman said, recalling that she added it was “not a good time” to make the request, citing Congress’s work on an F.A.A. bill.
Part of that legislation opened up five more pairs of flights in and out of National Airport, something certain members of Congress wanted because it gave them easier access to their home states. And though the airport still could have restricted the flow of traffic, there was pressure from the agency and the airlines to keep things moving.
To add capacity, F.A.A. managers directed controllers to increase their use of a supplementary, shorter runway — No. 33 — that many pilots were less comfortable landing on.
They reached out to the airlines, which “then made a review, and realized they could actually utilize Runway 33, they just needed to go through training,” Njuen Mandi Chendi, an air traffic management officer at the F.A.A., said during Thursday’s hearing.
The decision gave air traffic controllers the option of asking incoming planes to land on Runway 33, which required them to approach the airport from the east, over the Potomac River.
That was what controllers asked American Airlines Flight 5342 to do on the night of Jan. 29, exposing the airplane to a second, critical safety risk that controllers had tried to address around 2022.
A working group focused on helicopter transit around the airport proposed rerouting a helicopter course, known as Route 4, farther away from the runways. That would lessen the risk of a collision with planes trying to land on Runway 33 and make it easier for controllers to keep enough vertical distance between aircraft to avoid a crash.
But they were told by a manager that the request would be “too political,” according to an N.T.S.B. report. So the working group asked for less, formally proposing that the F.A.A. mark certain parts of Route 4 as “hot spots” on flight maps. That didn’t happen either.
The lack of action on Route 4 left air traffic controllers with only a few, imperfect options.
They could ask helicopters on Route 4 to hover over Hains Point, the tip of an island in the Potomac, or near a Navy research site with radar domes that pilots affectionately referred to as “golf balls,” until planes landed on the runway. They could instruct helicopter pilots to try to pass behind jets as they landed, which could be dangerous for the helicopters. Or, they simply leave it to the helicopter pilots to maintain “visual separation,” meaning they were to spot other aircraft and avoid a crash.
The local air traffic controller on duty Jan. 29 let the Black Hawk crew use visual separation, leaving the pilots to largely manage their own transit through the area, relying on devices that appear to have been giving them incorrect altitude readings.
Those unreliable readings may have made the pilots think they were flying below the F.A.A.’s 200 foot limit for helicopters in that area, a ceiling put in place to avoid crashes with descending aircraft. But at the time of the crash, the helicopter was 278 feet up in the air.
Critically, the controller on duty that night also neglected to tell the airplane pilots that a helicopter was heading in their direction as they made their descent. It was a break with protocol that should never have happened, F.A.A. and Army officials testified on Thursday, and a decision that the controller himself did not appear to be able to explain in the transcript of an interview with N.T.S.B. investigators.
The local controller had been juggling two jobs that night, responsible for both airplane and helicopter traffic, though the jobs were ordinarily supposed to be handled separately at that hour.
People who worked in the D.C. tower said the controllers’ jobs had been getting more stressful, and that their pleas for support personnel to at least alleviate the administrative workload they took on amid staffing shortages had been ignored.
Nick Fuller, the F.A.A.’s acting deputy chief operating officer of operations, testified that the agency had allotted 35 support positions to the D.C. region, to be distributed to facilities that needed them. But people who worked at the airport tower testified the help never came.
“There were a couple of staff specialists that were assigned at Potomac,” said James Jarvis, a safety compliance contractor who worked on the tower at National Airport until July 2023. “Those staff specialists were never relocated to any other facility that I’m aware of, on any type of regular basis.”
Since the accident, the F.A.A. has shut down helicopter Route 4 and done a better job of putting support staff in the D.C. tower, witnesses testified.
But officials testified that the F.A.A. leaders still need to do more to ensure that the concerns of managers involved in day-to-day operations were being heard.
“The folks on the ground that are in the facilities every day, that are conducting the operations every day, are the key to the success,” said Clark Allen, a controller who worked as an operations manager at the Reagan National tower. “And we could find a better way to support them.”
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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