The Minor Events That May Have Sparked a Major Tragedy
As I ate breakfast last week, I scrolled through my newsfeed and read with dismay about the tragedy at Reagan National Airport outside of Washington D.C. in which an American Airlines jet collided with an Army helicopter. With more than 60 believed to be dead, the accident had a particularly painful sting.
For 25 years, I worked in civilian aerospace at Rolls Royce and Airbus. Then, I taught college students to dispassionately analyze the probability of a fatal failure. For the last 10 years, I have been developing unmanned rotorcraft, regularly sharing airspace with military helicopters.
The full details of what happened may not be known for months. Yet it seems likely to have involved a tragic convergence of minor events. The airport was at or above capacity, requiring the Air Traffic Control ('ATC')—itself already overstretched—to redirect the passenger jet to a different runway at short notice. The ATC was aware that a military helicopter in the area presented a complication and advised the pilot to avoid it, who then attempted to 'eyeball' the plane away from the risk. In the dark, without confusion but with complication, the pilots' luck ran out.
Aircraft design, automation, enhanced ATC, and global safety initiatives have actually drastically reduced accident rates over the years. A 2024 study from MIT found that from 1968 to 1977, the chance of a fatal accident on a commercial flight was about one in 350,000. But now, that chance has dropped to one in 13.7 million. More shockingly, if we had modern traffic levels but 1970s safety rates, we would see a fatal accident every few days. However, all of these reassuring statistics do nothing to calm the jolt of anxiety I experience every time my flight hits turbulence. And they will certainly do nothing to console the families of the victims of the tragedy in DC. So instead, we attempt to understand what exactly went wrong.
As the emerging details of the accident seem to illustrate, air traffic controllers tried to warn the Army helicopter about the nearby Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ). But in my experience, the military helicopter world can be less ordered and its traffic control processes can be less mechanized. The result is that military helicopter pilots are then expected to react skilfully to the more ad hoc world in which they operate. It is possible that when the two quite different aviation worlds of conventional civil aircraft and military helicopters mixed, the structured collaboration that facilitates safety broke down.
For instance, after the CRJ was redirected, the helicopter pilot acknowledged seeing the commercial plane and accepted the task of steering clearly. Perhaps with more automated tracking and communication, we can ensure that this kind of incident never happens again.
Around the world, thousands of aircraft communicate successfully under the watchful eye of security, control, and regulation organizations. This regulated communication may seem at odds with the Western world's instinct for deregulation. Trump has unfortunately already turned the crash into a political battle, saying that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion hires in ATC were to blame. These comments came days after he gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee.
Perhaps Trump should leave the air safety and communication to the professionals. Everyday, commercial aircrafts provide safe transport for travelers around the world by effectively communicating. The horrible D.C. crash should remind us that we must clearly communicate so that we can all co-exist.
Contact us at letters@time.com.
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