U.S. military helicopter crashes like the one that took down a commercial American Airlines flight over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night are very rare, but there has been an uptick in these incidents in recent years, according to military statistics and an aviation expert.

A total of 64 people, including passengers and flight crew members, were aboard AA Flight 5342 from Wichita to Reagan National Airport (DCA). Three soldiers were conducting a training operation on the Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk that came from Fort Belvoir in Virginia. 

“It’s concerning, certainly, the number of incidents that there have been,” Timothy Loranger, an aviation attorney at Wisner Baum and a Marine Corps veteran, told Fox News Digital. “But if you compare it to the thousands and thousands of hours of flights that occur without any incident … that’s all very good.”

The collision has sparked questions about how such a devastating accident could happen in one of the most tightly controlled airspaces in the country and the world. The last significant fatal commercial crash happened in 2009, when a Continental Airlines flight crashed into a house in Buffalo, New York, killing 49 people. 

The controller who was handling helicopters Wednesday night was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from the airport runways, the Times reported. Those assignments are typically assigned to two controllers.

A plane flies near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, in the aftermath of the collision of American Eagle Flight 5342 and a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, on Jan. 30, 2025. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

“I don’t know exactly how the staffing occurred in that particular air traffic control tower,” Hegseth told “Fox & Friends.” “It sounds like there was a shortage [of controllers], and the investigation will tell us more about that. But the environment around which we choose pilots or air traffic controllers, as the president pointed out correctly yesterday, better be the highest possible standard — the best of the best who are managing … a flight a minute and managing radio traffic.”

Fox News Digital has reached out to the FAA.

The air control tower at Reagan Airport has been understaffed for years with 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023. The FFA and controllers’ union, however, called for 30 controllers in its staffing targets.

Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin, Liz Friden and Louis Casiano contributed to this report.