D.C. plane crash investigators say Black Hawk crew may not have heard order to go behind plane

The crew of the Army Black Hawk helicopter that collided in midair with an American Airlines jet over Washington, D.C., and crashed into the Potomac River might not have heard instructions from an air traffic controller to pass behind the plane, investigators said Friday.

National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said a recording from the helicopter cockpit suggests the crew may have missed the key instruction just before the Jan. 29 collision, in which all 67 aboard the two aircraft were killed.

Seventeen seconds before the collision, a radio transmission from the air traffic control tower at Ronald Reagan National Airport directed the helicopter to pass behind the airliner, Homendy said. The transmission was audible on both aircraft cockpit voice recorders.

The Black Hawk crew may have never heard the words “pass behind the” during the transmission from the controller because the helicopter’s microphone key was depressed right then, Homendy said. The mic key lasted 0.8 seconds, the chair said.

The collision likely occurred at an altitude of about 325 feet, investigators have said, which would put the Black Hawk above its 200-foot limit for that location.

Cockpit conversations a few minutes before the crash indicated conflicting altitude data, Homendy said, with the helicopter’s pilot calling out that they were then at 300 feet, but the instructor pilot saying it was 400 feet, Homendy said.

“At this time we don’t know why there was a discrepancy between the two,” Homendy said.

The helicopter was on a check flight that night when the pilot was being tested on the use of night vision goggles and flying by instruments, Homendy said. Investigators believe the crew was wearing night vision goggles throughout the flight.  

The collision was the deadliest plane crash in the U.S. since 2001, when a jet slammed into a New York City neighborhood just after takeoff, killing all 260 people on board and five more on the ground.

It will take more than a year to get the final NTSB report on last month’s collision, and Homendy warned reporters that many issues were still being probed.

“We’re only a couple weeks out,” from the crash, she said. “We have a lot of work to do.”