Deadly Crash Focuses Attention on Helicopter Traffic at Reagan Airport

The flight path that an Army Black Hawk helicopter took before its fatal collision with an American Airlines regional jet, long a concern to aviation officials, was closed to most helicopters after the deadliest aviation accident in the United States in nearly a quarter of a century.

The Federal Aviation Administration restricted two commonly used helicopter routes that run north and south along Washington’s Potomac River, both of which were traveled by the Black Hawk that smashed into the jet on Wednesday night, to all but the most essential flights.

On Friday, Sean Duffy, the new U.S. transportation secretary, who oversees the F.A.A., touted the closures as a critical new safety measure. “The American people deserve full confidence in our aviation system, and today’s action is a significant step towards restoring that trust,” he said in a statement.

Mr. Duffy is not the first federal official to view the heavily traveled helicopter routes around Ronald Reagan National Airport as a problem.

F.A.A. air-traffic overseers have for years viewed the clogged airways around Reagan, which attracts a high number of military and official government flights because of its location as well as a busy flow of commercial ones, as a point of concern — so much so that they issued a warning in a 2023 memo assessing the impact of adding new flight routes to the airport.

Some legislators have worried, too. Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, warned last year about the prospect of people asking lawmakers to comment after a tragedy and saying, “You were warned and you voted for it anyway.”

Mr. Kaine’s prognostication, which was made just before Congress voted to add five new round-trip routes to Reagan, proved painfully true this week, after 67 people perished in a fiery collision above the Potomac. Divers on Friday were still searching for bodies in the water.

The new helicopter route closures, which were told to the airspace’s approved users on Thursday but not announced more broadly until Friday, effectively block off helicopter access to the north and south of the airport, said a helicopter pilot who was briefed on the decision by an F.A.A. email alert and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential message.

The F.A.A. gave no end time for the restrictions.

The change cuts off parts of two aerial routes commonly used by military and law-enforcement helicopter pilots along the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. A rarely used portion of a third route that crosses directly over the airport is also now curtailed.

The new F.A.A. restrictions make exceptions for helicopter flights that are tending to medical emergencies that involve key government officials or are related to national-security missions.

Senator Tammy Duckworth, the Democrat of Illinois who piloted Black Hawk helicopters during her military career, described the curtailments in an interview as “a wise decision for now.”

The newly restricted helicopter routes are a roughly four-mile-long section of what is called Route 1, which stretches from the Memorial Bridge on the Potomac River to the South Capitol Street Bridge on the Anacostia River, and the entire four-and-a-half-mile-long Route 4 from Hains Point to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge on the Potomac.

The Army helicopter that collided with the civilian airliner had flown along the now-closed section of Route 1 and had just turned onto Route 4 south of Hains Point when the crash occurred.

In a news briefing at the White House on Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the helicopter was doing “routine annual retraining” at night along “a standard corridor for a continuity of government mission.”

The Army on Friday identified two of the three crew members who were aboard the Black Hawk as Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Md., the helicopter’s co-pilot; and Staff Sgt. Ryan O’Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Ga., the Black Hawk crew chief. The identity of a third crew member, a female pilot whose remains appear not yet to have been recovered, were withheld at the request of her family, a break from standard practice.

Army officials said on Friday that the female pilot was undergoing her annual evaluation flight with Warrant Officer Eaves serving as her evaluator.

Such flights practice carrying high-ranking officials to safe locations away from Washington should the nation’s capital come under attack.

Those “continuity of government” flights would almost certainly fall under the exception made for “national security missions,” according to the pilot who received the F.A.A. notice.

At a news conference early Friday evening, officials at the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the collision, were asked whether airspaces that host a combination of civilian and military aircraft should be re-examined.

“I can’t give you a definitive answer on that,” said J. Todd Inman, an agency member who is involved in the investigation. “What I can say is, in this incident, it should not have happened.”