this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Summary

An American Airlines regional jet carrying 64 people collided midair with a Sikorsky H-60 military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday night.

The PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 was on approach from Wichita when the crash occurred around 9 p.m. ET. At least one aircraft ended up in the Potomac River, prompting a major emergency response.

The FAA closed the airport, and the NTSB is leading the investigation.

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[–] newthrowaway20 23 points 10 hours ago

Didn't Musk fire the head of the FAA like 10 days ago?

[–] P00ptart 61 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

This happens right after trump disbands the aviation safety advisory committee. This feels familiar...

[–] TheRealKuni 3 points 7 hours ago

Honestly this crash has been coming for a while. We’ve had so many near-misses in the US on or near runways lately. ATC is understaffed and overstressed. It was just a matter of time.

(Though from what I can tell ATC did their job here, this seems like it was a mistake by the training crew on the Blackhawk. But we’ll have to wait for the final report to know for sure.)

[–] fuzzywombat 33 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 11 minutes ago) (2 children)

This is terrible tragedy. It's been few hours since the accident and no words on survivors so it's looking grim. NTSB has lot of work to do to figure out what happened so it won't happen again.

Edit: Just watching the press conference at 1am and they won't talk about survivors or fatalities. It's a bad sign.

2nd Edit: blancolirio video Juan Browne does excellent analysis on aircraft incidents.

3rd Edit: 2nd blancolirio video This update is tough to watch.

[–] Maggoty 11 points 16 hours ago

The Potomac is not a gentle river. Even if people survived to get into the water it would be very difficult to survive. And the water is freezing too.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

Agreed that press conference and the far away footage not good. River is very cold and icy as well

[–] fuzzywombat 4 points 16 hours ago

That area is not very windy but 32-34F which is pretty cold. Not good.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Why was a Blackhawk helicopter just hanging around DC?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 hours ago

DC has tons of helicopters flying over all the time, many don't show on tracking systems since they're military so there's a crowdsourced one at map.copterspotter.com.

[–] TheRealKuni 4 points 7 hours ago

As I understand it’s a pretty common route for military helicopters. Lots of bigwigs in DC who get transported by the military from place to place. This was a training flight, so no VIPs being transported by the Blackhawk. Just three crew members.

The job of the helicopters on that route is to avoid aircraft visually, which isn’t easy at night. They were told by ATC to maintain visual of the CRJ and pass behind it, and the helicopter said they had visual, but must have been mistaken.

[–] RememberTheApollo_ 63 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

This sucks. First fatal airliner crash in the US in a while.

[–] mkwt 20 points 18 hours ago

More than a decade

[–] [email protected] -1 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Where did you read there were fatalities?

[–] halcyoncmdr 69 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Even without confirmation, there's basically zero chance that a jet on final approach striking a helicopter, with at least one of the aircraft in the Potomac... Could possibly result in no fatalities.

Almost surely everyone on the helicopter, at least.

[–] kn33 18 points 18 hours ago

I was listening to a stream of the radio. There was definitely talk of confirming that the boat house was the best place to drop off bodies.

[–] RememberTheApollo_ 14 points 18 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks. Original article and leading AP report didn't have the anonymous sources.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

I was curious whether there have been mid-air collisions in history without fatalities as I thought that chances for that are basically zero. But apparently, it happened at least six times in the history of aviation.

[–] rjc 22 points 18 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 hours ago

Shiiiiiit. I was looking out my window around quarter to nine and saw a weird bright orange spot off towards DC. Didn't think anything of it in the moment; I'm right under a flight path, not too far from a military airfield, all sorts of weird lights flying over all the time. But looking at that footage that's exactly what it looked like. Christ.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 17 hours ago

Wow, that's just awful, after seeing the vid I can't imagine there are any survivors. RIP to all.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 18 hours ago

Holy shit that is awful

I’m so sorry to the families of everyone involved, that is a huge tragedy.