An American Airlines plane prepares to take off as investigators carry pieces of wreckage from the waters of the Potomac River after American Airlines flight 5342 on approach to Reagan National Airport crashed into the river after colliding with a US Army helicopter, near Washington DC, on 30 January, 2025. Photo: AFP
Staffing was thin in the air traffic control tower at Washington's Reagan National airport at the time of the deadly crash between a passenger jet and an army helicopter, US media has reported.
Staffing was "not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic" according to an internal preliminary Federal Aviation Administration safety report quoted by The New York Times.
"The controller who was handling helicopters in the airport's vicinity Wednesday night was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways," the report said.
"Those jobs typically are assigned to two controllers, rather than one."
The National Transportation Safety Board said it not would determine the cause of the incident or speculate until its investigation was complete, NTSB safety board member Todd Inman said at a briefing Thursday.
The collision occurred late evening on Wednesday as the airliner came into land after a routine flight from Wichita, Kansas.
Reagan National is a major airport located a short distance from downtown Washington, the White House and the Pentagon. The airspace is extremely busy, with civilian and military aircraft almost constantly moving in the area.
"I think there are a lot of speculations this stage, and the investigation hasn't really begun," Hassan Shahidi, chief executive of the independent Flight Safety Foundation, told AFP.
"There's different shifts... that come in and are put together with the right staff to handle the amount of traffic.
"Sometimes air traffic controllers handle one frequency. Sometimes they handle two frequencies. Sometimes they handle more than two frequencies.
"That is all dependent on the situation, on the traffic level, and the time of day. This was at night, at 9.00pm, when the traffic is subsiding."
- AFP
