A Black Hawk helicopter pilot who crashed into a passenger plane over Washington, D.C., in January apparently didn’t do what her co-pilot told her to do and change course seconds before the crash.
The New York Times released a new report on Sunday that talks about the many mistakes that were made before the crash earlier this year near Ronald Reagan National Airport. The crash killed all three military personnel on board the helicopter and all 60 passengers and four crew members on American Airlines Flight 5342, which was coming in from Kansas.
The Times says that Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, who joined the Army in 2019, was flying the helicopter as part of a yearly flight test. CW2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, her co-pilot, was also teaching her how to fly. Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, the third member of the team, was helping with technical gear in the back.
When airport air traffic controllers told the crew that a passenger plane was coming close, the crew acknowledged the information and asked to use “visual separation.” This is a method where pilots use their own observations of their surroundings to avoid nearby traffic instead of following controllers’ instructions.
According to the Times’ investigation, the helicopter made a lot of mistakes that led to the crash. Two major mistakes were that it didn’t lower itself below the maximum altitude for its route, and Lobach didn’t seem to follow Eaves’ instructions to turn left seconds before the crash.
In the minutes before the crash, the Black Hawk was meant to drop to 200 feet, but it was still above that level.
Then, 15 seconds before they ran into the passenger plane, Eaves allegedly told Lobach, “he thought that air traffic control wanted them to turn left.” This was after getting another message from air traffic control about where the passenger plane was (which The Times says was probably cut off).
The helicopter and Flight 5342, which was going for Runway 33 at an altitude of about 300 feet, would have had more room if they had turned left, The Times wrote. “She didn’t go left.”
The Daily Beast asked the Federal Aviation Administration for a response, but they didn’t answer right away.
There were many things that led to the terrible crash on January 29. At the time, the FAA’s safety report said that the number of people working at the airport’s control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.”
The accident is still being looked into by the National Transportation Safety Board, and the final report will be out in early 2026.