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For years, air traffic controllers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport raised alarms about potential safety threats. These warnings came long before the tragic midair collision on January 29, 2025, over the Potomac River, which resulted in the deaths of 67 people when a military training helicopter collided with a commercial airliner.
“The warning signs were all there,” said Emily Hanoka, a former air traffic controller at Reagan National, in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday. She explained that local safety councils were formed by controllers, and every safety concern reported was backed by data from fellow controllers. Despite numerous recommendations for improvements, these concerns were largely unheeded.
Hanoka detailed the immense pressure experienced by controllers to maintain a steady flow of air traffic at the busy airport, which manages approximately 800 flights daily. The airport’s operations are often tightly scheduled on its limited runway system.
“There are times when the number of flights exceeds what the airport can safely accommodate,” Hanoka noted. She had completed her shift shortly before the catastrophic accident occurred that evening.
In a related development, a graphic timeline of the tragic plane crash near Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., was featured by Fox News.
“There was definitely a pressure. If you do not move planes, you will gridlock the airport.”
Notably, it was not the air traffic of the commercial airlines, but a military training aircraft flying at the incorrect altitude through “helicopter alley” that crashed into the unsuspecting airliner.
A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into the side of an American Eagle regional jet approaching Reagan National just before landing, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. Federal investigators later issued urgent safety recommendations focused on separating helicopter and fixed-wing traffic near the airport.
Since the disaster, regulators have moved to tighten procedures.
There were multiple near-misses just a day before the disaster, according to CBS, and 85 near-collisions reported between 2021 and 2024 during the Biden administration.
“There were obvious cracks in the system, there were obvious holes,” Hanoka said. “You had frontline controllers ringing that bell for years and years, saying this is not safe. This cannot continue. Please change this. And that didn’t happen.”
Rescue and salvage crews pull up a plane engine as cranes work near the wreckage of an American Airlines jet in the Potomac river from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, on Monday, Feb. 3, in Arlington, Va. (Jose Luis Magana)
The airport’s 25 million airline passengers a year is reportedly 10 million more than its intended capacity.
To handle the load, Hanoka described “squeeze play” maneuvers unique to that crammed airspace and three runways where two aircraft are on one runway within seconds of each other.
“A squeeze play is when everything is dependent on an aircraft rolling, an aircraft slowing, and you know it’s gonna be a very close operation,” she said. “And that is a really common operation.”
Air traffic controllers coming from other locales give the airport’s stress work a hard pass, she said.
“So you’ll get new controllers come in, so they’ve transferred from other facilities and they’ll look at the operation and say, ‘Absolutely not,’” she continued. “And they’ll withdraw from training. And that, when I was there, was about 50%.
“About half of the people that walked in the building to train would say, ‘Absolutely not.’”
The father of the crash victim pilot, Tim Lilley (inset), said the Jan. 29 mid-air collision near Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., was “so preventable.” (FOX Business/AP/Ben Curtis)
“It was surprising walking into that work environment, how close aircraft were,” Hanoka said.
Reporting last week said the FAA suspended the use of visual separation between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in that airspace and shifted controllers toward radar-based separation, while restrictions were also imposed on certain helicopter operations near Reagan National.
The safety concerns Hanoka described align with broader findings from investigators. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed systemic FAA failures and found the crash was preventable, with concerns including overreliance on visual separation and longstanding risks in the airspace around Reagan National.