NTSB hearing reveals air traffic controllers should have warned passenger plane about helicopter before collision, but didn’t

Washington, DC (CNN) — The National Transportation Safety Board questioned witnesses Thursday about air traffic control training, a key part of the investigation into January’s deadly midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. It was the second of three days of investigative hearings into what happened in the accident that killed 67 people.

That night, the air traffic control tower warned the US Army Black Hawk helicopter about the approaching American Airlines regional jet, operated by PSA Airlines, but didn’t tell the passenger plane’s pilots, an Federal Aviation Administration official confirmed in the hearing.

Standard procedures, NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy noted, require controllers to warn pilots about nearby traffic.

“Were any traffic advisories or safety alerts issued?” she asked.

“No safety alerts,” Nick Fuller, the FAA’s acting deputy chief operating officer of operations, said.

“Should the local controller have let the PSA crew know that there was a helicopter there?” Homendy asked again.

“Yes,” Fuller acknowledged.

That night, the Black Hawk pilot told air traffic controllers they could see the regional jet, and would avoid it - but moments later they collided.

“It’s still remarkably hard to identify aircraft when you are flying,” testified Rich Dressler of Metro Aviation, which operates medical helicopters in Washington. “We use traffic alerts and traffic monitoring systems in our helicopters, all the DC operators, the civilian and law enforcement side.”

But on January 29, the Black Hawk didn’t have its ADS-B tracking transmissions turned on, which was a common practice. Dressler said helicopter pilots who flew in the Washington area all recognized each other, and he was wary of that military unit.

“Is there any unit that when you hear it makes you feel uncomfortable?” asked Brian Soper, NTSB investigator.

“Sadly, yes,” Dressler responded. “And as I said yesterday, I don’t like saying this. I’ll say it again on the record. I’m a former Army aviator, and I’m a retired Air Force officer … and I don’t like saying that 12th aviation battalion gives us all pause in the community. And I’m speaking from my group there; we are all very uncomfortable when those two units are operating.”

‘We just make it work’

Multiple air traffic controllers and pilots at Reagan National Airport told the NTSB in on-site interviews they struggled with the constant stream of planes, according to Brian Soper, NTSB investigator.

“This is ‘we just make it work,’ because we don’t have another choice,” he said. “There are airplanes coming in and everything was related to the capacity, the demand or the amount of traffic.”

He asked the FAA representative in the hearing what that phrase meant to him.

“As far as a controller perspective and my own personal perspective, making it work is utilizing all available tools to you to compensate for the compacted volume,” said Clark Allen, air traffic control specialist with the FAA.

Before the accident, he said, “making it work” was routine.

“It can be taxing on a person, you know, constantly (having) to give, give, give or push, push, push in order to efficiently move traffic,” Clark said.

Board member Todd Inman pressed for answers as to why controllers at Reagan National Airport were pressured and if that compromised safety.

“We don’t feel that pressure,” Fuller, the FAA’s acting deputy chief operating officer of operations, responded. “Our whole mission, and everything we base it around is safety first, and all I get is ‘let us know who we have to have the conversation with, if you’re not getting what you need.’ So, I don’t know what happened beforehand, but I can tell you right now I don’t feel that pressure at all.”

Bryan Lehman, a front line manager at the FAA’s air traffic control center handling traffic approaching and departing Washington, testified he does feels the pressure to keep planes moving.

“I feel like our ratio of safety to efficiency has gone slightly too far towards efficiency,” he said.

Reagan National Airport is one of the busiest in the country and the number of aircraft departing and arriving is often at capacity.

Njuen Mandi Chendi, traffic management officer at the FAA, attributed the pressure that he said controllers feel to too many flights being scheduled.

“Whenever we get the chance to apply a ground delay program for DCA the operation goes well, no issues,” she said.

On Wednesday, the day began with an overview of the incident, including an 11-minute detailed timeline of the moments before the helicopter and regional jet collided midair. NTSB members later questioned witnesses for the Army and Federal Aviation Administration.

The NTSB also released thousands of pages of information gathered during the investigation, including cockpit voice recorder transcripts that detail the final moments before the collision. The transcripts showed one second before the collision, the helicopter’s instructor had told the pilot to change course.

The helicopter route at the time of the collision allowed the Black Hawk to fly as close as 75 feet below planes descending to land on runway 33 at Reagan National Airport, according to the NTSB.

In 10 hours of questioning Wednesday, the NTSB Chair Homendy grew frustrated with some of the answers given by representatives of the FAA and Army. After the hearing concluded for the day, she told reporters she has “concerns” there is a “safety culture” problem in both Army aviation and the air traffic organization of the FAA.

The hearing also uncovered that Army helicopters would regularly fly below aircraft that were descending to land at Reagan National Airport and they sometimes used civilian heliports without authorization.

“I don’t have concerns about the leadership, but I think they have issues below the leadership, with respect to flying underneath aircraft,” Homendy told reporters Wednesday night. “At no point should there ever be helicopters flying underneath civilian aircraft that are departing and landing on any runway, any runway in the national airspace. I’m concerned that if it’s happening here, that it’s happening somewhere else.”

Sixty-seven people died in the accident over the Potomac River, including 60 passengers and four crew members on the plane and three soldiers on the helicopter.

The NTSB will meet again on Friday. A determination of what caused the crash will come in January.

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