Crash data suggests helicopter flew too high, plane tried to climb in last second

Washington: The passenger plane that collided with a military helicopter while landing in the US capital was about 325 feet (99 metres) above the ground at the time of impact, crash investigators have revealed, lending credence to President Donald Trump’s earlier declaration that the helicopter was flying too high.

However, preliminary radar data has led investigators to believe the helicopter may have shown an altitude of 200 feet to controllers in the tower – its prescribed maximum height when flying in the approved corridor near Washington’s busy central airport.

An American Airlines aircraft takes off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.Credit: Bloomberg

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it did not yet have an altitude readout from the US Army Black Hawk helicopter, and it would not yet say definitely how high the aircraft were when they collided. But board member Todd Inman said the 325-feet figure for the American Airlines plane, give or take 25 feet, was “a data point we feel very comfortable with”.

Inman said there was an “internal debate” among investigators about whether to release the information before the helicopter’s altitude or the radar data were confirmed. “We have not finalised that,” he said.

The figures lend support to a theory the military helicopter was higher than it should have been, as Trump has publicly stated. “The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot,” he posted on his TruthSocial account Friday. “It was far above the 200-foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???”

Inman would not comment directly on that when asked by reporters on Saturday. The possible discrepancy between the helicopter’s altitude and what controllers saw on radar would be investigated, he said.

National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said the American Airlines flight was at an altitude of about 325 feet at the point of impact.Credit: AP

Investigators ran through a timeline of the minutes leading up to the collision, confirming air traffic control alerted the helicopter pilots to the incoming American Airlines plane a full two minutes before impact.

Twenty seconds before impact, tower controllers asked the helicopter whether it had the jet in sight. Three seconds after that, the tower instructed the chopper to “pass behind” the passenger plane.

Another 16 seconds passed. One second before impact, pilots of the American Airlines plane had a “verbal reaction”, and the plane increased its pitch – indicating they pulled back on the controls, trying to climb.

The NTSB also confirmed five people were in the air traffic control at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport at the time of the collision: a local controller managing both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters; a controller directing traffic on the ground; an assistant controller, a supervisor and a supervisor in training.

There were no survivors from the midair collision, which occurred on Wednesday night (Washington time). Sixty plane passengers, four airline crew and three helicopter pilots were killed in what was the deadliest US aviation accident since November 2001, when a jet crashed shortly after take-off from New York.

The army helicopter was using a special corridor for military, government and emergency helicopters along the Potomac River through central Washington. The corridor has a height limit of 200 feet.

However, the intersection of commercial flights and helicopters in the congested airspace around Reagan Airport has raised concerns for years. Miles O’Brien, a pilot and aviation analyst for CNN, said that on a good day, only 300 feet separated the top of the helicopter corridor from the glideslope, or prescribed descent path, for planes.

“It was an accident waiting to happen,” he said. “There’s precious little margin for error.”

The NTSB is also investigating the crash of a medical jet in Philadelphia on Friday evening that killed all six people on board and one person on the ground. Another 19 people were injured.

All six people on board were Mexican citizens; the plane was transporting a girl and her mother home following life-saving medical treatment.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.