U.S. military helicopter crashes like the one that took down a commercial American Airlines flight over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night are very rare, but there has been an uptick in these incidents in recent years, according to military statistics and an aviation expert.
A total of 64 people, including passengers and flight crew members, were aboard AA Flight 5342 from Wichita to Reagan National Airport (DCA). Three soldiers were conducting a training operation on the Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk that came from Fort Belvoir in Virginia.
“It’s concerning, certainly, the number of incidents that there have been,” Timothy Loranger, an aviation attorney at Wisner Baum and a Marine Corps veteran, told Fox News Digital. “But if you compare it to the thousands and thousands of hours of flights that occur without any incident … that’s all very good.”
The collision has sparked questions about how such a devastating accident could happen in one of the most tightly controlled airspaces in the country and the world. The last significant fatal commercial crash happened in 2009, when a Continental Airlines flight crashed into a house in Buffalo, New York, killing 49 people.
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Crew retrieve wreckage of American Airlines Flight 5342 in the Potomac River near Washington, D.C., on Jan. 30, 2025. The plane was involved in a fatal collision with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter the previous night. (Leigh Green for Fox News Digital)
“Is there something that we can point to? Training? Is the budget of the military sufficient to make sure that pilots and the crew have enough training and experience in order to fly those aircraft?” Loranger said. “Those are the kinds of questions that have to be asked. If it’s a problem with the aircraft itself, a mechanical issue, what is that? Is it a design issue? Is it a manufacturing issue? Is it a maintenance issue?”
Military helicopter crashes, while uncommon, have been occurring more frequently over the last year, according to Army data.
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FBI agents stand near debris, after American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a Black Hawk helicopter while approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and crashed into the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, on Jan. 30, 2025. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Fiscal year 2024 had the most severe aviation incidents that resulted in fatalities since fiscal year 2014 and the worst rate of deaths and severe injuries from incidents per 100,000 hours since fiscal year 2007, according to Army statistics.
Fox News counted at least 10 deaths from U.S. military helicopter crashes alone in 2024, including five Marines in the same aircraft, and multiple others injured. Since 2012, there have been 21 Black Hawk crash deaths.
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Loranger called the uptick in military helicopter deaths last year “concerning.”
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told “Fox & Friends” on Friday that officials “will get to the bottom of what happened here.”
“It’s completely unacceptable in our nation’s capital or anywhere. The military trains, and it trains robustly. And we’re not going to stop training, even though there’s a pause on this unit, on this exercise, which is an important one. And we should have that pause until we get to the bottom of this,” Hegseth said. “…We have to train safely. Something like this can never happen. And it’s completely unacceptable.”
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The instructor pilot in charge who was flying the Black Hawk on Wednesday for a training operation apparently had 1,000 flying hours, which is considered very experienced, and the co-pilot who was also being evaluated had 500 flying hours, which is considered an average amount of experience, according to a U.S. official who spoke to Fox News.
“This is a relatively easy route,” an Army chief warrant officer five with decades of experience flying Army helicopters told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday. The pilot was flying down the center of the river, which is generally dark, likely wearing night vision goggles. Memorial Bridge would have been their last checkpoint.
The Jan. 29 Washington, D.C., plane-helicopter collision map.
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Military and other government helicopters fly the same route almost daily, the senior Army pilot and warrant officer told reporters.
“This should not have been a problem,” the official said.
Loranger described DCA as “a very complicated airspace, very busy airspace.”
Photos of victims following the collision between an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter. (Getty Images)
“There’s a lot of airplanes and aircraft flying in and out,” he said, adding that planes have systems in place designed to help give information to pilots about pilots or other objects flying nearby to avoid collisions like the one on Wednesday. It might have been difficult for the commercial airplane and the Black Hawk to see each other at night over the river, Loranger said.
Staffing at the air control tower at DCA was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to an internal preliminary Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) report reviewed by The New York Times.
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The controller who was handling helicopters Wednesday night was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from the airport runways, the Times reported. Those assignments are typically assigned to two controllers.
A plane flies near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, in the aftermath of the collision of American Eagle Flight 5342 and a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, on Jan. 30, 2025. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
“I don’t know exactly how the staffing occurred in that particular air traffic control tower,” Hegseth told “Fox & Friends.” “It sounds like there was a shortage [of controllers], and the investigation will tell us more about that. But the environment around which we choose pilots or air traffic controllers, as the president pointed out correctly yesterday, better be the highest possible standard — the best of the best who are managing … a flight a minute and managing radio traffic.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to the FAA.
The air control tower at Reagan Airport has been understaffed for years with 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023. The FFA and controllers’ union, however, called for 30 controllers in its staffing targets.
Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin, Liz Friden and Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/dc-plane-crash-military-aircraft-collisions-raise-questions-about-training-equipment-expert-says
