The National Transportation Safety Bureau (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy has suggested at her latest briefing that the Black Hawk helicopter crew may have missed a key instruction from air traffic controllers (ATC) before the crash with an American Eagle flight.
On February 14, 2025, Homendy said that 17 seconds before impact a message from ATC directing the Black Hawk crew to pass behind the PSA Airlines operated Bombardier CRJ700 was audible on both aircraft’s Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR).
However, CVR data from the helicopter indicated that the portion of the transmission that stated “pass behind the” may not have been received by the Black Hawk crew.
“That transmission was interrupted. It was stepped on,” said Homendy in reference to the Black Hawk crew keying the microphone for 0.8 seconds while trying to communicate with ATC.
A transmission telling the Black Hawk crew that the American Eagle flight was maneuvering to a different runway may also have been partially missed, according to the Associated Press.
Homendy also said the Black Hawk was conducting a ‘check ride’ at the time of the crash. The check ride is an exam that a pilot must pass to undertake certain flight duties.
The Black Hawk pilot was participating in a combined annual and night visual goggles check ride before impact, leading to the NTSB to believe that the crew were “likely wearing” the device.
“Additionally, had they been removed the crew was required to have a discussion about going ‘unaided’. There is no evidence on the CVR of such a discussion,” the NTSB said.
The US Army has previously described the Black Hawk crew as highly experienced.
Altitude discrepancies
Another aspect of the Black Hawk flight that Homendy discussed were discrepancies with the helicopter’s altitude discussed by crew members.
Around four minutes before the crash the Black Hawk pilot indicated they were flying at 300 feet while the instructor pilot said they were at 400 feet.
The NTSB said neither pilot discussed the discrepancy, and investigators are still trying to determine why there was conflicting data reported.
“We are looking at the possibility there may be bad data,” said Homendy.
The NTSB said it was confident that the radio altitude of the Black Hawk at the time of collision was 278 feet – higher than the 200 feet limit for that area.
“I want to caution that this does not mean this is what the Black Hawk crew were seeing on the barometric altimeters in the cockpit,” said Homendy.
Due to the conflicting data the NTSB said that it is not currently releasing altitude for the Black Hawk’s route.
In relation to the American Eagle aircraft, Homendy said that the last radio altitude recorded was at 313 feet.
One second before the crash the aircraft began to increase its pitch reaching about nine degrees up.
There were 60 passengers and four aircraft crew on board the American Eagle flight and three US Army soldiers on the Black Hawk helicopter when they crashed on January 29, 2025. There were no survivors.
13 comments
It appears the crash occurred between 278 and 313 feet, the last altitudes recorded by the Black Hawk and the CRJ. According to the navigation charts, the Black Hawk should have been at 200 feet. The earlier recording stating the two pilots were seeing two different altitudes indicates they knew there was an issue with altitude data and chose to remain at the higher altitude. The NTSB stated the Black Hawk was navigating using barometric altitude data. What I don’t understand is why the chopper pilots were using barometric altitude when the more accurate radar altitude was available. Can anybody explain.
Both were flying in good weather conditions. Both should fly with baro altimeters. They were not flying low visibility app. to use radio altimeter for altitude reference. Radio altimeter gives height indications, baro altimeter gives altitude indications.
A few causal factors:
1. Bad idea to locate an Army post that operates rotary wing assets right beside a busy airport. Common sense should have prevailed but yet it didn’t, however many decades ago.
2. While most of my career has been in wide-bodies, and hence never having operated in or out of DCA myself, I’ve had several pilot colleagues relay to me that runway changes inside the FAF are common there – if true then that’s a terrible idea!
3. CVFP’s in general are a bad idea. Now more than ever, we have tons of foreign pilots on the flight decks of various US carriers. CVFP’s are seldom seen outside the US and hence an overall lack of proficiency in flying them among non-US trained/native pilots. The Asiana crash at SFO clearly demonstrated this. Yes, I’m aware that they FLCH’ed it into the ground. But had they been on the ILS instead then things would have been a lot more normal for them and most likely, a normal landing.
4. TCAS needs to continue to give vertical RA guidance until either ineffective or until below the TCAS vertical RA floor, at which time it needs to begin giving horizontal RA guidance, in combination with terrain avoidance data. Basic ER, EM, and RM horizontal vectoring can just as easily adapted for aviation use.
All due respect to your experience, Ft Belvoir is 15 miles S of DCA, and they are not the only base whose airspace intersects DCA’s. Quantico, a further 10 mi S, is the home base for HMX 1, including Marine 1; to the SE is Andrews, and to the NW is Pax River. In addition are all the police and EMS helos operating through and around all those intersecting air spaces. NYC is nearly as bad.
In the civilian world 500 and 100 hours aren’t enough experience to get any kind of real job, I don’t call this experienced. It’s enough time to learn to manipulate the vehicle and its equipment but not enough for good decision making. Though they were in a directed situation, it was not one to be in. Training with NVG at night in a busy airport area? Someone in a higher up (maybe a number of people) need examination here.
Sir, their primary unit mission is evacuating high level gov’t officials from DC in the event of an attack. How, precisely would you expect them to learn how to do this in DC traffic, without practicing it IN DC traffic?
Helicopters are not required to be RVSM compliant and therefore the altimeter error could be +/- 75 ft depending on a number of variables. RVSM airspace begins at FL290, an altitude which no helicopter can currently reach. Radio Altimeter audio call-outs or crew readouts for helicopters operating at such low altitudes to begin with would be crew overload in an already extremely dynamic environment. Missions are almost always flown in (day/night) VFR and typically in a ‘see and avoid’. In cases of flying over water, RAD/ALT becomes even less reliable due to scatter as the return signal to the receiving antenna(s). Even larger, commercial aircraft (A320 family or B737 family) have issues at times just sitting on a wet or icy ramp where RAD/ALT indications show the aircraft at several hundred feet or discrepancies in RAD/ALT between system 1 and 2 due to antenna placement (aft fuselage) where one return shows ‘0’ and the second might show ‘200’ which causes cockpit warnings.
I was surprised at the lack of concern demonstrated by both check pilot and PIC that BOTH altimeters indicated their aircraft had commited a sustantial excursion though what the helicopter charts described as a hatd ceiling. Did either the check pilot or PIC pre-brief the route?
Altimeters have been an issue as long as they have existed. It was a common complaint among pilots flying out of KIDL when I was growing up (it only became KJFK when I was an HS senior); my Dad was 1 of them.
All this talk about altimeters is smoke and mirrors. The helicopter was night/VFR and on a ‘not above 200’ AGL (RADALT) segment of a well-practiced route. The helicopter climbed above its allowed (RADAR) altitude and impacted the (IFR) airliner. Most probably because the helo pilot looked left and up and inadvertently made the same control input. Target fixation then followed through disorientation. This would have been exacerbated because of the lack of binocular vision due to the NVGs. The same thing happened to a fighter pilot during Gulf 1 who tried to execute a NVG formation join on another fighter, misjudged his overtake and took 12” off his tail fin and damaged the other jet.
IMO. The causes and contributing causes of this accident is going to be very complex. I hope all this will lead to actionable changes at KDCA.
VFR at night in an environment with ground lighting, stars, aircraft, helicopters, emergency vehicles, beacons, water reflection, cockpit transparency reflections, NVG, reduced eye capability, and it does not take a very big brain trust to see that there is essentially very little if any possibly of successful See & Avoid capabilities in this scenario.
This is why it’s called an accident, however allowing this type of condition to exist for so many years, and knowing the extremely heavy operations in such close quarters is setting up the “perfect storm”, especially when changing runways, reduced manpower in the
I am not sure that “pass behind the” mattered at all, since there is no indication that helo crew ever saw the CRJ,
though they said they did. To do so they would have had to look left almost at right angles, which they apparently did not do because of the key detail from ATC they do seem to have missed, namely that the CRJ was at Wilson Bridge
“circling for RWY33”. Had they heard this (they did acknowledge it!) they would have been looking left, along the flight path that planes use to land on on RWY33. Assuming of course that they were aware of the airspace! Most remarkably,
NTSB claim that “circling” was not able to be heard on the helo’s voice record. Sounds awfully like a cop out to me.