Potomac Plane Crash: NTSB Findings, FAA Changes, and Lawsuit

The Potomac plane crash on January 29, 2025, killed all 67 people aboard American Airlines Flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter after the two aircraft collided on final approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. It was the deadliest U.S. commercial aviation disaster in more than two decades. The National Transportation Safety Board has since blamed systemic failures at the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army, the U.S. government has formally admitted legal liability, and a consolidated wrongful-death lawsuit is scheduled for jury trial in April 2027.

What Happened That Night

Flight 5342 was a Bombardier CRJ-700 operated by PSA Airlines on behalf of American Airlines, inbound from Wichita, Kansas, with 60 passengers and four crew members. As the jet descended toward Reagan National, it crossed paths with a Sikorsky UH-60L Black Hawk, callsign PAT25, flying a nighttime training mission with three Army crew members using night-vision goggles. The helicopter was based at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and the flight served as a combined annual check ride and night-vision evaluation for Captain Rebecca Lobach, the pilot under evaluation. Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves was the instructor pilot, and Staff Sergeant Ryan O’Hara was the crew chief.¹

The two aircraft collided at 8:47:59 p.m. Eastern Time, roughly half a mile southeast of the airport. Both were destroyed on impact and fell into the icy Potomac.² D.C. Fire and EMS Chief John Donnelly confirmed there were no survivors.³

The Final Seconds

Flight recorders and air traffic control audio pieced together the sequence. A conflict alert between the two aircraft activated in the DCA control tower at 8:47:33 p.m., about 26 seconds before impact. Seven seconds later, controllers asked the helicopter crew whether they had the approaching jet in sight. The crew requested visual separation, which was approved, but investigators later concluded the crew likely mistook a different aircraft for Flight 5342.⁴

A critical tower instruction directing the helicopter to “pass behind” the jet was partially blocked by an overlapping 0.8-second microphone transmission from the helicopter itself; the crew never heard it. One second before impact, Flight 5342’s pilots pulled the nose up sharply, with elevator deflection near maximum. It was too late.⁴ The CRJ’s Traffic Collision Avoidance System generated an automated “Traffic, Traffic” advisory, but its design limits at low altitude prevented it from issuing a resolution advisory, the kind of command that tells pilots to climb or descend.⁵

An instrument failure in the helicopter had caused the crew to read their altitude as roughly 100 feet lower than their actual position. That put PAT25 somewhere between the mid-200s and above 300 feet, well over the 200-foot ceiling for the helicopter route near the airport.¹ Visibility simulations later showed that through night-vision goggles, against the cultural lighting of the D.C. skyline, the helicopter crew likely never saw the approaching plane.⁶

Who Died

The 67 dead included 60 passengers and four crew aboard the jet, plus the three soldiers in the helicopter. The figure skating community was struck particularly hard: 28 of the passengers were skaters, coaches, and their relatives returning from an annual development camp for high-performing youth skaters in Wichita.⁷

Among them were Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, the 1994 world pairs champions and two-time Olympic competitors who coached at The Skating Club of Boston; 16-year-old Spencer Lane and his mother Christine; former Disney on Ice performer turned coach Inna Volyanskaya; 12-year-old skater Brielle Beyer; and sisters Everly and Alydia Livingston, ages 14 and 11, traveling with their parents.³ Kiah Duggins, a civil rights attorney and Harvard Law graduate set to join Howard University School of Law as a professor that fall, was also aboard.⁸ Two associates at Washington litigation boutique Wilkinson Stekloff, Elizabeth Keys and Sarah Lee Best, died as well, along with five members of Plumbers, Pipefitters and Steamfitters Local 602 and two members of the Association of Flight Attendants.

What the NTSB Blamed

The NTSB held a public board meeting on January 27, 2026, and issued a final report, AIR-26-02, running more than 500 pages. The board approved 74 findings and 50 safety recommendations.⁵

The probable cause, the board found, was the FAA’s placement of a helicopter route dangerously close to a runway approach path, its failure to regularly review helicopter routes using available safety data, and its failure to act on prior recommendations to reduce the risk of a midair collision near Reagan National. Contributing factors included overreliance on visual separation between aircraft, the helicopter crew’s inability to maintain effective visual separation, and the tower team’s loss of situational awareness due to high workload from combining the helicopter and local control positions.⁹¹⁰

Air Traffic Control

On the night of the crash, a single controller was handling both airplane and helicopter traffic in the DCA tower. Those duties had been combined about an hour earlier than normal, and the collision happened roughly 20 minutes later. A preliminary FAA report cited by the New York Times described staffing as “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” though an official familiar with tower operations called it “adequate.”¹¹

Separate radio frequencies for helicopters and airplanes compounded the workload problem by allowing blocked transmissions to prevent critical instructions from being fully received. The NTSB also faulted the FAA for failing to act on safety data and warnings from local controllers and helicopter operators about collision hazards near the airport. Chair Jennifer Homendy called it an “unacceptable culture of complacency.”⁹⁵

Army Oversight

The Army lacked a flight data monitoring program for helicopters operating near major airports and had limited participation in aviation safety reporting systems, meaning routine altitude excursions and near-misses went unrecognized.⁵ The Army also failed to ensure its pilots understood the effects of error tolerances on barometric altimeters, the issue that put the PAT25 crew well above the 200-foot route ceiling.¹⁰

FAA guidance on helicopter route altitudes and boundaries was itself found to be “unclear and inconsistent,” leading operators to misinterpret published altitudes as providing separation from fixed-wing traffic when no such separation existed. Aeronautical charts used by airplane pilots did not even depict nearby helicopter routes that crossed their approach paths.⁵

Technology Gaps

Neither aircraft carried collision avoidance technology capable of providing effective alerts in the low-altitude environment near the airport. The NTSB noted that if the jet had been equipped with an airborne collision avoidance system using ADS-B In, which receives location broadcasts from nearby aircraft, its crew could have received a collision alert 59 seconds before impact. Military helicopters frequently operated with their ADS-B Out transmitters turned off, even on non-combat missions, making them harder to track.⁵⁹

The Government’s Admission of Fault

On December 17, 2025, the U.S. Justice Department filed a 209-page court document formally admitting liability. “The United States admits that it owed a duty of care to Plaintiffs, which it breached, thereby proximately causing the tragic accident on January 29, 2025,” the filing stated.¹² The government acknowledged that an air traffic controller violated visual separation procedures and that the Army pilots failed to “maintain vigilance so as to see and avoid” the jet. It also conceded being “on notice of certain near-miss events” involving Black Hawks and aircraft in the area.¹³

The admission was not blanket. The government denied that FAA or Army officials acted with negligence, specifically denied that air traffic control actions were a “proximate cause” of the crash, and argued that American Airlines and PSA Airlines also bore responsibility.¹⁴

The Lawsuit and Trial

The admission came in response to a master complaint filed in September 2025 by Rachel Crafton, the widow of Casey Crafton, a youth soccer coach from Connecticut. The consolidated federal case, In re: Mid-Air Collision in Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2025, case number 1:25-cv-03382, is before U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes. More than 120 families have joined in support of the litigation.¹⁵

American Airlines and PSA Airlines argued for dismissal, contending liability should rest with the government. In a February 2026 ruling, Judge Reyes declined to dismiss the airlines, noting that ticketing, branding, airport lounges, uniforms, and baggage claim all carry the American Airlines name.¹⁶ A jury trial is scheduled to begin April 12, 2027.¹⁷

What the FAA Changed

Within two days of the collision, the FAA restricted helicopter traffic over the Potomac near Reagan National. Those temporary restrictions were made permanent in January 2026, effectively closing the specific helicopter route involved in the crash, with limited exceptions for presidential transport, law enforcement, and medical emergencies.¹⁸

Other DCA-specific changes included reducing the hourly arrival rate from 36 aircraft to 30, redrawing helicopter zone boundaries to push them farther from the airport, and establishing a new helicopter transition route south of the airport to increase vertical separation from commercial traffic. Authorized tower staffing was set at 30 certified controllers, with additional supervisors added; as of January 2026, 22 certified controllers were working, with eight in training and four temporarily assigned from other facilities.¹⁸

Nationally, the FAA suspended the use of visual separation between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft near busy airports, requiring radar-based separation instead. It mandated ADS-B Out broadcasting for all aircraft operating in the DCA area, completed a nationwide audit of helicopter route charts in November 2025, and stated it would begin rulemaking to require ADS-B In situational awareness technology. As of early 2026, the agency said it had fully addressed seven of the NTSB’s 50 recommendations and planned to address more than half by the end of 2027.¹⁹

Where Legislation Stands

The Rotorcraft Operations Transparency and Oversight Reform Act, known as the ROTOR Act and sponsored by Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, passed the Senate unanimously in December 2025. The bill would mandate ADS-B In technology on aircraft and repeal certain military exemptions from aviation technology requirements.²⁰ The House rejected the ROTOR Act on February 24, 2026, when it failed to reach the two-thirds supermajority required under suspension of the rules, falling on a 264–133 vote. House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Sam Graves indicated plans to pursue a separate, broader bill called the ALERT Act.²¹ Separately, the Department of Transportation is directing $12.5 billion from a domestic policy law passed in summer 2025 toward modernizing the National Airspace System and FAA infrastructure.²²

1
People. Army Helicopter Crew Details Before DC Collision
2
NTSB. Aviation Investigation Report AIR-26-02
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NBC News. Plane Crash Victims DC American Airlines Black Hawk
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NTSB. NTSB Preliminary Report DCA25MA108
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NTSB. NTSB Press Release NR20260127
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NPR. NTSB DCA Midair Collision Black Hawk Helicopter
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U.S. Figure Skating. Recognizing the 28 Lost on Flight 5342
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Harvard Law School. Kiah Was All Light
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USA Today. NTSB Final Report Potomac Crash
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NTSB. NTSB Investigation Page DCA25MA108
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Politico. DC Plane Crash Safety Warnings
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CNBC. US Army Helicopter Collision American Airlines Jet
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NBC Washington. U.S. Admits Fault in Deadly Midair Collision Over Potomac River
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ABC News. Army FAA Admit Failures Deadly Mid-Air Crash
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NBC Boston. Families of DC Plane Crash Victims to Announce Lawsuit
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Live 5 News. Judge Declines Dismiss American Airlines DCA Crash Lawsuit
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CourtListener. Crafton v. American Airlines, Inc.
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FAA. FAA Statements Midair Collision Reagan Washington National Airport
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The Air Current. FAA DCA Crash Recommendations Response NTSB
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Senator Warner. Warner Kaine Applaud Unanimous Senate Passage of Aviation Safety Legislation
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Roll Call. Senate Aviation Safety Bill Rejected by House
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Politico. NTSB Washington Crash Meeting