Recovery teams search the wreckage after the crash of an American Airlines plane on the Potomac River as it approached the airport on January 30, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images/AFP)
The flight path of an Army helicopter before it collided with an American Airlines Group Inc. passenger jet this week above Washington is emerging as a key line of inquiry in the probe of the midair tragedy that killed 67 people.
The Sikorsky H-60 Black Hawk helicopter carrying three military personnel was traveling between two dedicated flying zones, National Transportation Safety Board member J Todd Inman said at a briefing on Thursday evening.
While Inman didn’t go into detail, helicopters are limited to 200 feet in the area of the crash above the Potomac River - just outside of Ronald Reagan airport, where the American regional jet was approaching to land.
Impact occurred at an altitude of about 350 feet, according to flight-tracking data, which would put it outside of the standard path for the helicopter route, based on published Federal Aviation Administration guidelines.
Inman and NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy declined to speculate on the cause of Wednesday’s crash or initial findings, citing longstanding practices meant to shield disaster probes from outside influence.
However, President Donald Trump weighed in on the helicopter’s flight path, saying in a post on his Truth Social network on Friday that the Black Hawk was "flying too high, by a lot.”
"It was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???,” Trump wrote.
The President’s latest comments add to views that he and members of his administration have shared publicly on the possible causes of the crash, which ranks as the worst civil aviation disaster in the US in decades. Trump said in a previous post shortly after the accident that the helicopter should have avoided the jet, which he said was on a "perfect” line of approach.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also suggested the helicopter was out of position.
"There was some sort of an elevation issue that we have immediately begun investigating at the [Defense Department] and Army level,” Hegseth said at a White House briefing on Thursday. In a separate video, he said he expected the probe "will quickly be able to determine whether the aircraft was in the corridor and at the right altitude at the time of the incident.”
The airspace around Reagan airport is among the most congested in the country.
Complex rules govern military, private and commercial aviation activity surrounding the busy airport, which sits near the White House, the US Capitol and the Pentagon.
Even a separation of as little as 200 feet between two aircraft "is not a lot,” Bruce Landsberg, former vice chairman of the NTSB, said in a Bloomberg TV interview on Friday.
While he didn’t know whether the Army craft was outside its envelope, "I suspect that the helicopter routes have a prescribed altitude that is critical to adhere to,” he said.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigation chief for the FAA, said there are many unanswered questions that go beyond whether the military helicopter was at the proper altitude.
It’s unclear, for example, if its crew actually saw the regional jet, given the helicopter pilot communicated with the air-traffic controller that he saw the traffic, but perhaps wasn’t looking at the right aircraft, Guzzetti said.
The pilots on the helicopter were also wearing night-vision goggles, Hegseth said, devices that can affect peripheral vision.
"It could just come down to a failure to see and avoid,” Guzzetti said.
