One year after a Wichita-based passenger plane and U.S. Army helicopter crashed in the airspace above Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the National Transportation Safety Board announced its findings that a chain of systemic failures led to the crash.
The findings come as families and friends of the 67 people killed in the crash mark a year that has brought mourning, national advocacy efforts and a batch of lawsuits against the federal government.
The Greater Wichita Ministerial League will host a community prayer service at Wichita City Hall on Thursday to remember the victims of the crash. The interfaith gathering is noon to 1 p.m. in the City Council chambers.
Eisenhower National Airport has also placed a temporary memorial in its terminal to remember and honor the victims. The memorial will be there through Sunday.
On January 29, 2025, American Airlines Flight 5342 left Wichita’s Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport. Aboard were two pilots, two flight attendants and 60 passengers — some of whom were native Kansans, business travelers and young ice skaters wrapping up a development camp after the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
The flight was coming in to land at Reagan National Airport when it collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter on a training mission. The three pilots aboard the helicopter and everyone on the American Airlines flight were killed.
During an NTSB hearing in Washington, D.C., this week, board member Michael Graham, a Wichita native, told an audience of victims’ families and friends and aviation officials that the crash was the final stage of years of compounding failures.
“Any individual shortcomings were set up for failure by the systems around them,” Graham said. “We are not here today to place blame on any individual or any organization, but we are here to ensure those systems that failed to protect 67 people on January 29th, 2025, never fail again.”
The NTSB pointed to the placement of the helicopter route along one of the busiest runways in the United States as one of several probable causes of the crash. The board also called out potential equipment errors in the helicopter, an overworked air traffic tower and an over-reliance on visual separation techniques.
“This complex and comprehensive one-year investigation identified serious and long-standing safety gaps in the airspace over our nation’s capital,” said Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the NTSB. “Sadly, the conditions for this tragedy were in place long before the night of Jan. 29.”
NTSB investigators found that there was a close call between another helicopter and airplane at the location of the crash in 2013. Air traffic controllers at DCA were so shaken by the incident that they formed a working group of DCA tower staff and local helicopter operators to address safety concerns.
The group made several recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration, including removing one of the routes the Army helicopter used on the night of the crash and marking risky “hot spots” on aeronautical charts of the area.
“The FAA chose not to act,” said Brian Soper, an NTSB investigator.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy also called out the FAA’s failure to take the board’s recommendations against relying on see-and-avoid — which requires pilots to see approaching aircraft and make a decision about how best to avoid the aircraft themselves.
“We should be angry,” Homendy said. “This was 100% preventable. We’ve issued recommendations in the past that were applicable here. We talked about see and avoid for well over five decades. It’s shameful.”
The board voted to issue 50 recommendations to the FAA (33), the U.S. Army (7), the Department of War (5), the Department of Transportation (3) and Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (1).
Homendy said the majority of those recommendations can be put into practice with departmental policy changes. The rest will require the passage of new laws by Congress.
“I’d like to see the entire recommendations be adopted in legislation tomorrow,” Homendy said.
