The National Transportation Safety Board provided an update on its investigation into the deadly midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last month, including the potential that there were “bad data” on the Army helicopter.
The Jan. 29 crash between an American Airlines flight from Wichita, Kansas, and an Army helicopter on a routine training mission resulted in all 67 people on both aircraft being killed. The NTSB took over the investigation shortly after the incident and offered its first press conference on the incident in nearly two weeks on Friday.
NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said at the briefing that investigators are examining potential discrepancies between the actual altitude of the Army helicopter and the altimeters in the Black Hawk helicopter.
“We are looking at the possibility of there may be bad data. We’re looking at — were they seeing something different in the cockpit that differs from the [flight data recorder] data, which was radio altimeter,” Homendy said.
Responding to a question from a reporter about the possibility that the helicopter may have believed they were at one altitude but were actually at a different one, she added that it was “possible” but that “we have a lot of work to do until we get to that.”
The radio altitude of the helicopter when it collided with the American Airlines flight was 278 feet, which was above the maximum 200 feet helicopters are permitted to be at on that route. Homendy stressed that the radio altitude “does not mean that’s what the Black Hawk crew was seeing on the barometric altimeters in the cockpit.”
Homendy also revealed that the command from the air traffic controllers for the Army helicopter to “pass behind the CRJ” may not have been heard by the Black Hawk crew seconds before the collision.
“[Cockpit voice recorder] data from the Black Hawk indicated that the portion of the transmission that stated ‘pass behind the’ may not have been received by the Black Hawk crew,” Homendy said.
When asked about the decision to suspend most helicopter traffic indefinitely near the airport, the chairwoman said that while the investigation continues, the NTSB may offer urgent safety recommendations prior to the end of the investigation.
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“So for example, we will issue an urgent safety recommendation if we see that something needs to be acted on immediately; we won’t wait till the end of the investigation. We won’t wait till the end to issue recommendations in the final report. We will take action. We will issue an urgent safety recommendation if we need to. So that’s open right now in all areas,” Homendy said.
The midair collision last month was the first deadly commercial aviation crash in the United States since 2009.
