A crash site involving an American Airlines flight and a US Army helicopter in the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, seen from Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington, on Jan 30, 2025. Technology that would have allowed air traffic controllers to better track the movement of an Army helicopter before it collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River last week was turned off at the time of the crash, Cruz said in an interview on Feb 6, 2025. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
WASHINGTON: Technology that would have allowed air traffic controllers to better track the movement of an Army helicopter before it collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River last week was turned off at the time of the crash, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in an interview on Feb 6.
Members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, of which Cruz is chair, received a closed-door briefing with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board on the midair collision between an American Airlines commercial jet and a Black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan National Airport that killed 67 people last week.
Senators, including Cruz, were updated on the investigation and told that the NTSB needed to collect valuable evidence from the helicopter still resting in the Potomac. The wreckage of the helicopter is expected to be recovered on Feb 6.
Senators shared few details after the briefing, saying that many more questions needed to be answered before they could make a determination about what went wrong that night. What is known is that the Army was performing a training mission in the Black Hawk in an effort to allow one of the pilots to receive her annual certification.
But Cruz expressed concern that tracking technology for the Black Hawk was turned off during the training mission. When in use, the technology, called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, broadcasts an aircraft’s position, altitude and speed.
It allows air traffic controllers to not rely solely on radar tracking, which can have a delay of a few seconds. It thus provides an extra safety layer to help prevent crashes.
Military helicopters can turn off the technology during what are called “continuity of government” missions so that no one can track where government officials are being flown. But Cruz said that was not the case on Jan 29, the night of the crash.
“In this instance, this was a training mission, so there was no compelling national security reason for ADS-B to be turned off,” Cruz said.
The Army declined to comment on what Cruz said about the helicopter and the technology.
“We’re going to let the investigation play out and not get ahead of the NTSB findings,” said Col. Roger Cabiness, an Army spokesperson.
Cruz said the helicopter was equipped with a transponder, a device that broadcasts its location, but ADS-B is considered far superior technology.
Cruz also called for the FAA to review all helicopter routes that pass through commercial airspace to see whether other widespread changes needed to be made for how they travel along busy routes.
Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the NTSB, said in an interview with reporters Thursday that preliminary findings from the Black Hawk’s cockpit voice recorder indicated the pilots were using night-vision goggles at the time of the collision.
Homendy said that if pilots were flying without the night vision goggles, they would typically declare themselves “unaided”, but this statement was absent from the cockpit voice recorder data. Further analysis is needed to reach a definitive conclusion about the goggles, she said.
Former Black Hawk helicopter pilots interviewed by The New York Times noted that the combination of dark skies and bright lights surrounding the airport could have affected the pilots’ ability to see the American Airlines jet as it approached for landing if they were wearing the goggles.
Also on Thursday, the FAA said it would slightly reduce the number of flights per hour in and out of Reagan National because of inclement weather and the fact that one runway remains closed during the investigation of the crash. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
