Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport is known for its close proximity to Washington, D.C., but after its first deadly plane crash in more than four decades, several of the airport’s difficulties are under scrutiny.
Reagan Airport, or DCA as it is also known, has faced questions about its viability and flight load in past years, but with the midair collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 arriving from Wichita, Kansas, and an Army Black Hawk Sikorsky H-60, many of those concerns are resurfacing. These are some of the concerns and questions surrounding the airport.
Crowded, limited airspace
Due to the importance and high concentration of critical functions to the country in Washington, D.C., there is a flight-restricted zone roughly 15 nautical miles around Reagan Airport. The FRZ restricts flights in the airspace to government planes, regularly scheduled flights in and out of DCA, and flights which have received a waiver under conditions outlined by the Federal Aviation Administration.
With the various flight restrictions in place, including no-fly zones over the National Mall, the White House, and the Vice President’s residence, there is limited flight space for the airlines and military aircraft coming from the various military bases around the capital.
Much of the airspace shared by military aircraft and civilian airliners comes on the Potomac River, which has DCA and multiple bases near its banks. Planes landing at Reagan Airport must follow closely specific landing and takeoff routes. The aircraft involved in Wednesday’s crash were both in standard flight patterns, according to officials.
Jim Brauchle, an aviation attorney with Motley Rice LLC and former Air Force navigator, told the Washington Examiner the combination of restricted airspace, narrow pathways, and high congestion, is one of the most complicated factors in landing and taking off at DCA.
“Not only the commercial traffic, but you’ve got general aviation, private aviation, and then you throw in the military as well, and the helicopter traffic in or around the airport,” Brauchle said. “And so you not only, you’re combining two things, restricted routing and a lot of airplanes and causing a lot of congestion in a small space.”
Busy airport despite its size
Reagan Airport opened in 1941, and its incredibly close proximity to Washington, D.C., has made it a popular way of flying to the nation’s capital, despite its small size. The airport has restrictions on the distance that flights may travel, with some exceptions for select flights beyond the perimeter.
Of the three major airports in the greater Washington area, DCA is the smallest, behind Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and Dulles International Airport. Lawmakers from outside the beltway have lobbied for more flights to different parts of the country due to the airport’s convenience over the other two airports.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) had pushed for the American Airlines flight route from Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport to Reagan Airport, which began in January 2024. Moran said in a press conference early Thursday morning that he had taken the route before, calling the accident a “very personal circumstance.”
When Congress debated adding additional flight slots to DCA, lawmakers and officials from D.C., Maryland, and Virginia had sharp opposition, arguing the airport is already too crowded. Congress included five additional slots for Reagan Airport in the FAA reauthorization passed last May.
“Every federal and regional entity involved in operations at DCA – DOT, the FAA, and MWAA – warns of negative impacts for safety, delays, and cancellations from these changes. Ignoring these warnings is foolish and dangerous. We strenuously object to added traffic at DCA, which is already dramatically over capacity,” seven members of Congress from Virginia and D.C., said in a joint statement after additional slots were approved.
Brauchle said the time crunch with the added slots can sometimes have a “negative effect on performance” if there is significant congestion, as lawmakers have warned could occur with the additional slots.
“If you’re late out of the gate, but you got to make your take-off slot you’ve got, you’re hurrying. You’re trying to get checklists done. Same thing with trying to land,” Brauchle said. “So anytime you have high congestion, that increases the workload on the crew, which always can – you know, doesn’t always happen – but it can have a negative effect on performance.”
The flight route to and from Wichita was not one of the five new slots but was added before the newest routes.
Small runways
DCA has three runways, all of which are shorter than most of the other runways at the other two major airports in the area. At Reagan Airport, the main runway, 1/19, is 6,869 feet, which is far smaller than the four runways at Dulles, which range from 9,400 to 11,500 feet and the three runways at BWI range from 5,000 feet to 10,503 feet. The smallest runway at DCA, 4/22, is only 4,911 feet.
The runway American Airlines Flight 5342 was moments from landing on, runway 15/33, is only 5,204 feet in length. The runway goes from southeast to northwest, meaning the approach is slightly different from the north to south main runway and is only used for smaller regional jets.
The approach pilots have to take to land on runway 15/33 is “unique,” according to Brauchle, who detailed that the approach leads to the plane flight path and the designated helicopter flight path is only hundreds of feet apart.
“When you’re coming in, the approach is you fly up the eastern side of the river until you’re about a mile and a half from the end of the runway, and there’s a point there, navigation point, then you begin a turn of the left of 50 degrees and then land,” Brauchle told the Washington Examiner, about the approach.
“And when you make that turn, you’re at 490 feet, and so between that and the runway, you know you’re crossing over the river, so you’re descending from essentially 500 feet to zero,” he added. “Yet at the same time, there is that helicopter route that’s 200 feet, and below, directly underneath that final approach course. The fact that it’s only separated by several hundred feet is pretty close.”
The small runways mean significant congestion at times, though that does not appear to be a factor in the early evidence regarding the crash. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which operates DCA and IAD, has said there is no space to expand the runways from their current length and the airport authority claims Reagan Airport is “routinely” rated as among the country’s most challenging by pilots for takeoffs and landings.
The main runway, 1/19, is where more than 90% of the flights take off and land at Reagan Airport, and it was the busiest commercial runway in the country in March 2023, with 819 daily scheduled flights.
The airport has also had several close calls with near collisions on the runways in recent years, prompting concern about the flight load for the small runways. The collision on Wednesday happened over the Potomac River rather than on a runway at the airport.
Past questions about airport’s viability
As security has continued to tighten in the decades since DCA first opened, discussions on the viability of the airport have been had – especially following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Reagan Airport – which is located less than a mile from the Pentagon – was closed for weeks, and its continued usage was widely debated by lawmakers. While regularly scheduled airline flights resumed on Oct. 4, 2001, with restrictions, general aviation did not resume until 2005.
Brauchle believes there could “potentially” be discussions about changing the operations and procedures for the airport pending the investigation but said the aviation community tends to adapt well after incidents.
“The aviation community does a good job of learning from accidents and trying to implement changes to increase safety and not replicate accidents. So you might potentially see maybe lower traffic counts or maybe moving some of those – making more route restrictions as far as maybe limited to daytime operations or those kinds of things,” Brauchle said.
“So there’s a lot of different ways they can go, depending on what they determined from the investigation,” Brauchle added.
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The airport has had few incidents in recent decades, with the Air Florida Flight 90 into the 14th Street Bridge in January 1982 being the last deadly crash near the airport. The 1982 crash also saw a plane plunge into the Potomac River, but the river was frozen over and did not involve another aircraft. There were five survivors and 78 fatalities in the Air Florida crash.
The last deadly commercial airline crash in the U.S. was in February 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 on board and one person on the ground.
