On the night of January 29, 2025, the Potomac River was black glass under a cold winter moon. An American Airlines CRJ‑700, Flight 5342, came sliding down the invisible chute on final approach toward Runway 33 at Reagan National Airport. A U.S. Army Sikorsky UH‑60L Black Hawk was climbing in the opposite direction, slicing through the air on a training evaluation run.
They met in the dark at a little less than 300 feet. Impact was a flash and a thunderclap. The rotors caught the jet’s nose like a giant scythe, tearing its aluminum skin and obliterating the cockpit in a spray of glass and aviation fuel. The fuselage split, yawing sideways into an unnatural angle that promised no survivors. The Black Hawk’s blades shredded themselves into a mess of titanium and fiberglass shrapnel, sending the gearbox and cabin into a death spin.
It’s likely that all 67 souls aboard both machines were gone before gravity finished its work. The country hadn’t seen carnage like this in its skies since 2001.
A Lying Altimeter
The NTSB’s hearings pulled the curtain back: the Black Hawk’s altimeter was wrong—by 80 to 130 feet. That meant the pilots thought they were in safe airspace when they were barreling straight into a commercial flight path. Pilots are taught to trust their instruments, and those involved in the January disaster are no exception.
Later tests on other helicopters in the same battalion showed the same fault. It wasn’t a one‑off glitch. It was a hidden, systemic flaw, quietly stalking every mission.
Disaster was inevitable.
Seeing Without Seeing
The Black Hawk crew was wearing night‑vision goggles. In war zones, they can be a lifeline. Over a lit city in peacetime, they can be a trap. Peripheral vision shrinks to a tunnel. The bright chaos of Washington blurred and flattened. Twice, the crew reported seeing traffic they believed to be the oncoming airliner. Twice, they were wrong. Through the green haze, they could not read the truth.
The Missed Warning
Air traffic control knew trouble was brewing. Fifteen seconds before impact, the tower told the helicopter to pass behind the CRJ. But the message came tangled—overlapping with the crew’s own radio chatter. Static and timing buried the order. The pilots may never have heard the one command that could have saved them.
The Swiss Cheese Effect
Investigators called it the “Swiss cheese” effect. Hole after hole lined up in the worst possible way. The FAA had been drowning in near‑miss reports around Reagan National—15,200 in three years. More than 85 involved helicopters busting through the invisible walls meant to separate them from airliners. Controllers had begged for rerouted chopper corridors. They were stonewalled. Political priorities and continuity‑of‑government flights carried more weight than the safety warnings.
That night, the tower was short‑staffed. One controller was juggling commercial arrivals and helicopter traffic—a dangerous split focus. The Black Hawk’s ADS‑B transponder, which could have given the jet a chance to see and avoid, was switched off. Even if it had been on, the CRJ lacked the equipment to read the signal.
A Preventable Disaster
It didn’t have to happen.
- Fix the altimeters.
- Ban or restrict NVG‑only visual separation in urban airspace.
- Keep helicopters out of commercial approach lanes during critical windows.
- Staff the tower so one set of eyes isn’t doing the work of two.
- Mandate ADS‑B transmissions for all military aircraft in shared skies.
Every one of those measures could have been a single, solid wall in the cheese. None of them were there.
Hearings That Cut to the Bone
The NTSB’s summer hearings brought the failures into harsh daylight:
- Confirmation of a recurring altimeter error across the Army fleet.
- Testimony that FAA controllers had pushed for safety changes years ago, but were blocked by political considerations.
- Evidence that the critical “pass behind” order never made it into the Black Hawk cockpit.
- Proof that the FAA ignored its own collision‑risk data while helicopters kept crossing into arrival corridors.
Every fact dropped like a hammer. Every omission stank of bureaucracy’s slow rot and tendency to react only to disaster.
Changes Made
In the wake of the crash:
- The FAA closed the most dangerous helicopter routes near Reagan to all but law enforcement, medical, presidential, or defense flights.
- Route 4 will now shut down whenever Runway 33 is active.
- The Army is inspecting and recalibrating every Black Hawk altimeter in its inventory.
- ADS‑B use is under review for mandatory implementation in all non‑combat flights near civilian airspace.
- The FAA is restructuring tower staffing at Reagan so that controllers aren’t double‑hatted during high‑traffic periods.
They’re good steps. They’re also too late.
The Inconvenient Truth
What happened over the Potomac wasn’t fate. It was the culmination of ignored warnings, faulty machines, and split‑second bad luck—the kind of bad luck that stops hearts and ends careers.
Now the wreckage has been cleared and the hearings are wrapping, but the shadow hangs low over Washington’s skies.
If the new rules stick—if the gear is fixed, the routes are re‑drawn, and the controllers are given the bandwidth to do their jobs—then maybe the next time two aircraft close in on each other over the capital, they’ll pass with nothing worse than a flash of navigation lights in the dark.
And maybe nobody’s family will get the agonizing call that came for 67 of them that night.