The U.S. Army for years put inexperienced pilots in aging helicopters and flew them over the nation’s capital.
And even though the airspace above Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington is one of the most complex in the country, Army aviators operated there in a way that suggested they were unfamiliar with some of its dangers, The New York Times found.
That combination of risks had worried others flying the same skies, a situation of such concern that a safety summit was held nearly four years ago among local military and law enforcement pilots.
Now, those ongoing problems are being re-examined after an Army helicopter crew from the 12th Aviation Battalion in Northern Virginia flew a dated model Black Hawk helicopter into a commercial jet at a perilous juncture in the Washington airspace on Jan 29. The collision killed everyone on board both aircraft — a total of 67 people.
It was the deadliest Army accident ever to occur on U.S. soil. And it occurred against a backdrop of safety concerns about Army aviation, which has seen catastrophic episodes rise in recent years.
Multiple factors contributed to the tragedy in January: A poorly designed set of air routes that allowed for helicopters to fly just under passenger jets as they landed. An air traffic controller who was juggling a double workload for the shift. Nighttime conditions that marred visibility.
Still, on Wednesday, the government accepted legal liability for the collision on behalf of the Army.
“The United States admits that the accident could have been avoided,” stated a court filing by Justice Department lawyers, who are representing the government in a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the widow of one of the people who was killed on the American Airlines flight hit by the Black Hawk.
The helicopter pilots, the filing said, “failed to maintain vigilance” in seeking out the plane, causing the accident. The Army crew’s struggles with seeing and avoiding the plane were explored in a New York Times article in April.
But the Army’s role in the accident extends well beyond whatever actions that crew took or did not take, a new investigation by The Times has found.
The equipment and training provided to aviators at the 12th Aviation Battalion at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, where the soldiers involved in the accident were stationed, was inadequate, according to interviews and documents. And some of the battalion’s flying habits prompted local pilots to fret for years that an Army Black Hawk might crash into them.
The battalion “was a widespread concern,” recalled Rick Dressler, a former Army combat aviator who flew medical evacuation helicopters through Washington airspace in recent years. He testified at a hearing this summer convened by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the accident.
“There was a significant, significant issue with both training and attitude toward operations within the D.C. airspace,” he said.
The Army declined to respond to requests for comment for this article, citing the litigation. “Once the N.T.S.B. completes its work and legal proceedings are complete, the Army looks forward to sharing updates about the changes implemented, lessons learned and actions taken to honor the victims,” Maj. Montrell Russell, an Army spokesman, said in a statement.
To get a fuller picture of the Army’s role in Washington’s airspace, The Times reviewed email correspondence — obtained through open-records requests — between F.A.A. officials and Washington-area law enforcement pilots. Those messages, along with interviews and documents from the N.T.S.B, provide a window into the dynamics among those who navigate helicopters through the capital area skies.
Some local pilots warned for years about the close calls between civilian aircraft and Army flights. And while their concerns would rise or ebb at times, they never dissolved.
On Feb. 5, 2022, a helicopter pilot for a local police force wrote an email message to the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with aviation safety, saying that while he respected the Army’s mission and training in the region, those needs should not take precedence over safety.
The pilot, Aaron Smith, who flew for the Prince George’s County, Md., police after a long Army career, wrote that a few nights earlier, one of his pilots had a near miss with an oncoming Army Black Hawk just south of Washington. They nearly collided even though air traffic control at National Airport seemed to have asked the Army pilots to stay back to let the police chopper pass.
“Because of my military position, my unit knows the military’s mission in the region and respects it,” Mr. Smith wrote. “We need the same back before there is a tragedy.”
The F.A.A. declined to comment on the email.
Tim Lilley, whose son was the first officer of the American Airlines flight, also flew Black Hawks as an Army combat aviator until leaving the service in 2006. He has been giving speeches across the country, calling the safety culture that led to the accident a “leadership failure” by the Army.
“This was a very unfortunate set of circumstances that all lined up,” he said in an interview. “What I want to do with the Army is not just condemn them, you know. Why I’m trying to engage with them is, I want to make Army aviation better. Because they deserve it.”
‘Make This Happen’
For decades, the 12th Aviation Battalion was composed of seasoned Army aviators who had gained experience by flying in other units.
Some of its work involved the prestigious but routine duty of transporting military brass. At any given hour, a portion of the unit’s aviators were also on call for an important but extremely rare mission: a secretive duty known as continuity of government, documents show. That involves rushing elected officials out of Washington to safe spaces in the event of an attack.
In recent years, however, the battalion began accepting graduates directly from Fort Rucker, the Army flight school in Alabama.
Those newbie helicopter pilots had about 150 hours of flight experience, according to N.T.S.B. documents. (For context, most major airlines require pilots to have obtained at least 1,500 hours to apply for a pilot job.) That, plus the graduates’ lack of experience in a multifaceted airspace like Washington’s — which includes a no-fly zone over the White House — made for a steep learning curve.
Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, the pilot flying the Black Hawk at the time of the accident in January, had arrived at Fort Belvoir directly from flight school in July 2021.
On arrival, she and many others faced a built-in disadvantage: They had been taught on newer helicopters than the ones their unit often used.
Since 2018, students at Fort Rucker had learned on a Black Hawk model called the UH-60M, or “Mike” in Army parlance. Those helicopters were introduced to the Army in 2006. They include a digital, moving-map display and an autopilot function that allows pilots to maintain a steady altitude — essentially a vertical cruise control.
But at the 12th Aviation Battalion, two-thirds of the pilots flew “Lima” models, which were first delivered to the Army in 1989 and lacked those features. The Black Hawk that crashed on Jan. 29 was a Lima.
Unit leaders had asked for Mikes around 2020 and again in 2022, recalled Austin Roth, an Army combat veteran who was an instructor pilot there at the time, in an interview. But, he said, the requests were denied on both occasions.
After the accident in January, the Army said it would upgrade the battalion’s fleet by the end of 2026.
Transitioning from the Mike to the Lima is “a challenge for all pilots,” Bradley Haase, another former battalion instructor, said in an interview. “There are a lot of nice-to-have things that you don’t have anymore.”
Seasoned instructors like Mr. Haase and Mr. Roth, who both served 20 years before retiring, have grown scarcer at the 12th Aviation Battalion and at other units.
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Some were lured away by well-paying jobs at airlines. Others left as part of a planned culling of aviation specialists that occurred more than a decade ago, Maj. Gen. Clair A. Gill, the commanding officer at Fort Rucker, said in an interview.
“That experience that we need to mentor the young folks that we’re putting in the Army isn’t there at the rate that it used to be,” he said.
It was in the early 2020s, when recent graduates were arriving and the loss of longtime instructors was becoming evident, that other Washington-area helicopter pilots began complaining about close calls with the Army Black Hawks, according to documents and interviews.
Lt. Col. Erika A. Holownia, who took command of the battalion in 2023, told the N.T.S.B. that she had at some point asked the Army to stop sending those recent graduates to her unit. “We do need a little bit more experience in that formation,” she said.
As of February, recent graduates made up about 10 percent of the pilots and other crew members on base, Colonel Holownia said.
The Army declined to reveal what the proportion is currently.
The battalion tried to compensate for some of the Limas’ deficiencies by providing workarounds. Those sometimes failed, too.
Devices called Stratuses, which can provide real-time information on nearby air traffic through an iPad connection, were in short supply, according to N.T.S.B. documents.
Colonel Holownia blamed “ongoing” budget limitations for the problem. Pilots on missions got first dibs on the Stratuses, documents show, often leaving pilots on training flights without them.
N.T.S.B. documents show that a Stratus had been checked out of the battalion’s inventory on Jan. 29 and not replaced. It is not clear whether the crew that crashed was using the device that night.
Danielle O’Hara, the widow of Staff Sgt. Ryan O’Hara, the technical expert, or crew chief, who died in the back seat of the Black Hawk, told the N.T.S.B. that supply shortages seemed endemic to Army aviation.
“There was always a lack of gear, there was a lack of training equipment, and commanders always said, ‘Make this happen,’ from the top down,” she recalled. “It was a very frustrating phenomena to witness.”
Fewer Hours, More Mishaps
The Jan. 29 accident occurred at a time when Army aviation was facing a potentially crippling problem: decreasing flight hours and increasing accidents.
Over the past decade and a half, the average hours flown by a crewed Army aircraft dwindled to 198 per year, according to a Congressional Budget Office report published late last year, from a peak of 302 per year in 2011 — a decline of more than a third.
The 12th Aviation Battalion’s young pilots lived out those statistics.
Instead of being seasoned by combat, where they would fly every day and in dynamic conditions, they were often handling duties on base, hoping their names would pop up on a flight schedule that week.
Even the pilots deemed the least proficient were required to fly only an average of five hours per month, documents show. There could also be long gaps between flights, risking the erosion of skills.
In recent years, the number of major episodes in Army aviation writ large increased substantially, according to Flightfax, an Army aircraft safety publication.
In 2024, there were 15 “Class A” accidents, defined as those resulting in property damage of $2.5 million or more, the loss of an aircraft or a death or permanent disability. That was the most in nearly a decade.
The prior year, when there were 12 such accidents, three Army soldiers were killed and a fourth was injured when two Apache helicopters collided in Alaska. And a midair collision of two Black Hawks on a medical evacuation training mission in Kentucky killed nine soldiers.
After those incidents, Army aviation conducted a “stand-down” across the service, halting helicopter flying for 24 hours while soldiers completed newly mandated safety training.
The 12th Aviation Battalion had not had a Class A flight accident since 2017, when a Black Hawk crashed at a golf course in Leonardtown, Md., killing a soldier. The surviving crew members sued the helicopter’s manufacturer, alleging a sudden mechanical failure. The case was “resolved,” said their lawyer, Timothy A. Loranger. He declined to provide more details.
F.A.A. data that was pulled at the request of the N.T.S.B. earlier this year showed that between October 2021 and December 2024, a commercial aircraft came within a very short distance of a helicopter roughly every two weeks near National Airport.
The N.T.S.B. did not indicate how many of those close calls involved Army aviators.
One of the concerns was that a certain runway at National Airport served as overflow when air traffic was particularly busy. That runway, called 33, was used for landing about 4 percent of the time. But when it was, it could be highly dangerous for helicopters traversing their route, because it meant that planes were descending over their heads.
The safest solution would be for the helicopters to hold back at a spit of land called Hains Point until the plane was on the ground, or to change course entirely. But that worked only if everyone grasped the peril of the situation.
“Any time that you are operating in the vicinity of an airport, you study the airport chart,” Jon-Claud Nix, a former Marine Corps helicopter combat and instructor pilot, said in an interview. “You know what the approaches are there. You know what the active runways are there.”
In the wrongful death lawsuit, the government denied an assertion by a plaintiff’s lawyer that the Army battalion did not train or familiarize its pilots with the commercial jets’ approach to Runway 33.
But interviews by The Times and testimony at the N.T.S.B. hearings paint a more complex picture of how thoroughly the battalion members and their instructors understood the challenges of National Airport’s airspace.
Chief Warrant Officer 5 David E. Van Vechten Jr., a senior instructor pilot, told the N.T.S.B. during the hearings that he had flown the helicopter route near National Airport that the Black Hawk used that night “hundreds” of times during his four years at the battalion. Over those years, he encountered an airplane landing on Runway 33 “less than 10 times,” he said.
An N.T.S.B. investigator then asked about his knowledge of Runway 33: “You said yesterday that you were not intimately familiar with the approach path for Runway 3-3 that airliners used. Is that correct?”
“That’s correct,” Mr. Van Vechten replied.
Numerous unit aviators, including Colonel Holownia, told the N.T.S.B. they believed that as long as they kept to their required height on that route and stayed on course, there was minimal risk.
It turns out that was wrong. N.T.S.B. officials investigating the crash revealed that a plane had to descend at such a steep drop onto Runway 33 that the vertical distance between it and a helicopter flying beneath could be only 75 feet at most — a tiny margin of error.
And tragically that night, the Black Hawk was not flying at the required height. Rather, at the point of impact, it was about 80 feet higher than the maximum allowed altitude, investigators determined. The margin of error was erased.
Mr. Roth, the former battalion instructor pilot, who knew the crew members who died in the crash, told The Times that during his years at the 12th Aviation Battalion, officers there did not brief pilots on the existence of the Runway 33 landing path, nor on the treacherous vertical distance created when planes used it.
“Had we known, it would have been kind of hammered more frequently,” he said.
By contrast to the Army testimony, local pilots told the N.T.S.B. that they were fully aware of the caution required for that area.
“We just don’t get anywhere near an aircraft approaching 3-3,” Mr. Smith, the Maryland police helicopter pilot, told the N.T.S.B. in a May interview.
The possibility of a helicopter crashing into a plane at that juncture, he said, had been his and his colleagues’ biggest fear for 20 years.
Progress Made, Progress Lost
Years ago, Mr. Smith tried to intervene with the Army to correct what he saw as a lack of awareness of the Washington airspace.
After he wrote to the F.A.A. in 2022 to vent his frustration over the 12th Aviation Battalion helicopter that had flown frighteningly close to his pilot, Mr. Smith invited some of the unit’s aviation safety officers to an in-person meeting.
His goal, he told other local pilots in a March 18 email, was to lower the prospect of midair collisions. The Army had accepted the invitation and seemed to listen to his concerns.
“Very productive,” Mr. Smith wrote, while asking the other aviators to chip in money for hamburgers and hot dogs for another upcoming meeting.
The progress proved fleeting, according to local pilots.
Over time, 12th Aviation Battalion members stopped attending Mr. Smith’s gatherings, which he tried to hold quarterly.
“By the time I arrived, there was no connective tissue between 12th Aviation and all the other operators,” said Mr. Dressler, the former Army pilot who flew the airspace as a medical aviator from late 2023 to late this year.
Even after the Jan. 29 crash, it is not clear what, if anything, has changed at the 12th Aviation Battalion.
After the collision, the unit paused training flights for about three months.
On May 1 — just as those flights had resumed — a close call with an Army Black Hawk bound for the Pentagon prompted National Airport tower controllers to ask two airplanes to abort their landings at the last minute, causing alarm.
Weeks later, on the night of May 29, a Prince George’s County helicopter was flying southeast of Washington when it spotted on its dashboard display a helicopter flying uncomfortably close.
The county’s helicopter made two quick turns and then, finally, a quick descent in an effort to avoid colliding.
Sgt. Jason Huntley, the county pilot, said in an email that he came within 200 feet of the other helicopter.
The helicopter Mr. Huntley encountered was from the 12th Aviation Battalion.
Andrea Fuller contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Kate Kelly covers money, policy and influence for The Times.
The post How the Army Caused Alarm in the Washington Skies Years Before a Fatal Crash appeared first on New York Times.
