Collision Warnings Numbered 100+ Last 10 Years at Reagan

Airline pilots got more than 100 collision warnings for helicopters in the decade leading up to last month's deadly air crash that killed 67 people at Reagan National Airport, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

The 104 incidents generated by the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System were logged by air traffic controllers, and concerns were separately surfaced to the Federal Aviation Administration, which controls the routes of helicopters and planes and dictates procedures, the Post reported.

It's unclear what actions — if any — were taken by the FAA, but the route description for the Black Hawk helicopter that collided with an American Airlines commercial airliner on Jan. 29 was verbatim what it was in 2012, according to the Post.

"If they want to prevent this, they have to move that route," former air traffic controller Al Castillo told the Post. "Why is that route still there?"

In 2020, air traffic controllers raised concerns to FAA managers, including in writing, about the close calls they were experiencing, according to the report. Further, controllers offered suggestions to mitigate the dangers, including moving helicopter routes farther from the flight paths of airlines.

"The helicopter routes around DCA allow for little margin for error," Steve Ganyard, a former Marine Corps fighter pilot, told ABC News. "You cannot have aircraft constantly flying so close together and expect to maintain safety."

Over the last three years alone, there were 24 incidents where airline pilots aborted landings and circled before landing to avoid a collision, the Post reported. One of those came the day before the fatal crash, when a Republic Airways passenger jet was forced to abort its first attempt to land at Reagan after a helicopter appeared in its flight path.

"The FAA controls those routes, dictates the procedures," Army Col. Mark Ott, deputy director of aviation at Army headquarters, said at a recent briefing. "It is the FAA that controls how helicopters transit and the routes that fly around here. And we will certainly be interested to see what, if anything, they decide to do."