*tumbleweed*

The American Airlines flight involved in the deadly collision with a Black Hawk helicopter over Washington, DC, seemed to increase its pitch just before the impact, preliminary data from a data recorder recovered from the plane shows.

“At one point very close to the impact, there was a slight change in pitch, an increase in pitch,” National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said at a Saturday evening news conference. “That is something that we will get you more detail on.”

The finding is one of the first pieces of information that have emerged as the NTSB works to investigate the disaster in which 67 people are thought to have been killed. The Black Hawk helicopter was training to evacuate government officials in the event of a catastrophe when the collision with the passenger jet occurred.

Preliminary findings announced at the news conference indicate the helicopter may have been flying above the altitude allowed in the corridor. Initial data shows the American Airlines regional plane was flying at around 325 feet, plus or minus 25 feet, at the time of the impact, according to Inman.

But the data available to the air traffic controllers showed the helicopter was at 200 feet near the time of the accident, Inman said, an unexplained discrepancy that will need further investigation.

If the impact did take place at 325 feet, it would have been well above the 200-feet limit to which helicopters are restricted in the corridor. The helicopter was using specialized corridors for law enforcement, medevac, military and government helicopters in the Washington area. Federal Aviation Administration charts show – and the NTSB confirmed – helicopters in the corridor must be at or below 200 feet above sea level.

Inman noted that investigators “currently don’t have the readout from the Black Hawk” so they cannot provide information about what altitude the helicopter was flying at. But “obviously an impact occurred, and I would say when an impact occurs, that is typically where the altitude of both aircraft were at the moment,” he said.

Flight tracking data from the moments before the fatal midair collision appear to show the helicopter flying 100 feet above its allowed altitude, and veering off the prescribed route along the Potomac River’s east side.

Both President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have raised the issue of altitude.

“The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Friday.

“Someone was at the wrong altitude,” Hegseth told Fox News on Friday morning. “Was the Black Hawk too high? Was it on course? Right now, we don’t quite know.”

The helicopter’s black box voice recorder has also been recovered with no signs of exterior damage, according to Inman.

The NTSB has begun interviewing air traffic control personnel, which will continue for a few days, Inman said.

The slight increase in pitch could show the pilots trying to pull the plane up after suddenly noticing the helicopter, Mary Schiavo, former inspector general at the Department of Transportation, told CNN Saturday.

“That tells us that they did not see the helicopter until just, you know, a second at impact,” Schiavo said. “But they had that one second to try to pull up.”

The discrepancy between the plane’s altitude and the helicopter altitude as reported by the air traffic controllers “is going to be the source of a lot of investigation,” Schiavo added.

Helicopter on training flight for emergencies
At the time of the collision, the Black Hawk military helicopter was training to evacuate government officials in the case of a catastrophic event.

The pilots were training for a scenario when “something really bad happens in this area, and we need to move our senior leaders,” Jonathan Koziol, chief of staff for the Army’s aviation directorate, told reporters on Thursday.

That evacuation would be part of what Hegseth described as “a continuity of government mission.”

o carry out such an evacuation, Koziol added, pilots “do need to be able to understand the environment, the air traffic, the routes, to ensure the safe travel of our senior leaders throughout our government.”


Those who were killed included three Army aviators in the Black Hawk: Capt. Rebecca Lobach, 28, who was identified Saturday; Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, 28; and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Lloyd Eaves, 39. While the Army released the names of the other two soldiers on board the Black Hawk on Friday, Lobach’s name had been withheld at her family’s request.

Pilots who fly with the 12th Aviation Battalion, based out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, frequently fly along the Potomac River and past DC’s Reagan National Airport for various missions – often carrying general officers or Army leaders to and from the Pentagon, or other VIPs elsewhere in the Northeast.

Brad Bowman, a former Black Hawk pilot and member of the 12th Aviation Battalion who served on September 11, 2001, told CNN that on the route past Reagan, the helicopters drop down to their lowest altitude of the entire flight, with the intention of getting low to “deconflict with aircraft at Reagan.”

“(T)he low level helicopter routes have been in operation for decades – that area is one of the busiest aviation operation centers in the country, if not the world,” said Bowman, who is also a senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It is a concert or orchestra of activity that requires careful communication and cooperation between pilots and Reagan tower.”

“Everyone has to be on their game and follow instruction exactly,” Bowman added.

Meanwhile, reports have emerged that may show the tragedy is part of a larger problem. In the three years before the disaster, at least two other pilots near misses collisions with helicopters while landing at Reagan National Airport.

For years, Sen. Tim Kaine has been a vocal critic of congestion at the airport, warning it was only a matter of time before there was a deadly collision.

“We got to get to the bottom of this crash and then take necessary steps to keep people safe,” the Virginia Democrat told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

The inadequate staffing at the Reagan airport tower was also hardly an anomaly. Airports around the country have struggled with controller staffing levels for years, according to a CNN review of government data and interviews with aviation experts.

The Trump administration is working with the Federal Aviation Administration to increase staffing levels of air traffic controllers, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday.

“We’re going to surge air traffic controllers. We’re going to bring in the best and the brightest,” Duffy told Tapper on Sunday.

But the yearslong training process for certified air traffic controllers means the increase in staffing won’t happen overnight, Duffy said.

Now they have all the bodies

NEW: Two airport employees arrested for leaking the video footage of the D.C.
collision last week to CNN.

67 people are deceased because people didn't do their jobs right and they're
arresting people who shared a video?

Two Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority employees are now facing
charges of "computer trespass" after allegedly making an "unauthorized copy"
of the video.


https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1886572416257650904

The people who shared it will have been well aware that what they were doing was illegal.

Black Hawk helicopter had safety system turned off during Washington plane crash…


A key safety system was turned off in a US army helicopter when it crashed into an American Airlines flight last week, killing 67 people.

Ted Cruz, the chairman of the Senate commerce committee, told reporters that the Black Hawk helicopter had switched off an advanced surveillance technology known as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B).

“This was a training mission, so there was no compelling national security reason for ADS-B to be turned off,” Mr Cruz said on Thursday, following a briefing from federal transport bodies.

Mr Cruz said the helicopter would still have appeared on radar because it had a transponder on it, but said ADS-B would have been significantly more accurate.

Investigators are still working to establish what precisely caused the collision between the helicopter and American Airlines Flight 5342 close to Washington DC’s Ronald Reagan National Airport.

All 64 people onboard the jet, which included a number of teenage figure skaters, and the three service members in the helicopter were killed in the US’ deadliest air disaster since 2001.

Mr Cruz, the Texas senator, said he had asked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to conduct a review of helicopter routes near other congested airports.

This was known on the day of the crash, they seem to be regurgitating news now

…I think maybe some media sources just take a little longer to feed through so we think it’s an update in information and it’s not, you know…

Its quiet a key thing in the investigation, whose idea was it for instance if this was a training exercise....surprised more has not been made of it

an increase in pitch, maybe the pilots saw the black hawk helicopter? :think:



no @Cherie, the question more is, how could these two collide, when this training exercise had been thoroughly been planned


i'd more wanna know, if the American Eagle flight had any delays or something, something what messed up the schedule


this is a theory what i have (as someone who watches a lot of air crash investigation, i got some knowledge here and there)



it's ok if that was the black hawk's flight path for its training exercises, and i think commercial aircraft should normally perfectly fine avoid them



so what was different about this specific accident?

an airplane needs to follow a series of waypoints on its flight path, depending on how fast you are flying, exactly planned on which time you'll be at which waypoint


there have been similar mid-air collisions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_G...-air_collision



and this one is a similar incident involving a commercial airline and a military aircraft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britis...ays_Flight_142

were these american eagle pilots aware they had the training space for the black hawk in their flight path? (or is this a similar incident not being aware of descending in military airspace)


and a similar incident in 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_A...-air_collision

…it’s really difficult to filter through articles and news reports, isn’t it…and to know what is actually any type of update or what is just speculation …I read on one article, I think that it was an abc news article…that it wasn’t known for sure atm whether a tracking system had been installed at all on the helicopter and that an evaluation of that was being waited for…I’m not sure if any truth in that at all and maybe nothing is being ‘made of’ as you say because nothing yet is confirmed and it’s just speculation ….

My algorithm says it was a lesbian driver of the helicopter committing suicide.

That is terrible to say.

oh my god


someone in the ATC accidentally pressed on the mic, the crew of the Black Hawk didn't hear enough information about where the American Eagle plane was


instead they got a heterodyne, which is a beeping sound, if more communicate at the same time on the same frequency, so the Black Hawk crew i think were trying to ask this, however this didn't get through due to the ATC pressing on the mic at the same time also saying something



this ''heterodyne'' problem has been fatal before, at Tenerife, with the collision between a Pan Am and a KLM plane

Army Blackhawk pilot in DC crash failed to heed flight instructor’s command 15 seconds before deadly collision: report
https://nypost.com/2025/04/27/us-new...lision-report/

Outrageously dangerous on a training flight...