2025 Potomac River mid-air collision. On January 29, 2025, PSA Airlines Flight 5342 (operated as American Airlines 5342), a Bombardier CRJ700 airliner, collided mid-air with a U.S. Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River, about half a mile (0.8 km) from the approach end of runway 33 at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia. All 67 people on board the two aircraft were killed in the crash (64 on the airliner, 3 on the helicopter). It is the deadliest U.S. aviation accident since the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 on November 12, 2001.

Flight 5342 was en route from Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport in Wichita, Kansas, and was on final approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The helicopter was performing an annual evaluation to test the pilot's knowledge and proficiency in the cockpit, out of Davison Army Airfield in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Preliminary data shows the helicopter was at , while the airliner's last recorded altitude was . Reagan National requires helicopters on that route to stay below . A single air traffic controller was managing both aircraft at the time of the crash, an arrangement deemed "not normal" for that time of day at the airport. Controllers twice warned the helicopter crew about the approaching American Airlines jet; the first alert was issued two minutes before the collision.

Background

Aircraft
Flight 5342 was operated by a 20-year-old Bombardier CRJ700, a regional jet commonly used for short- to medium-haul flights. It was configured as a CRJ701ER, denoting a slightly higher seating capacity and extended range. Manufactured in September 2004, it bore the registration number N709PS and had been transferred to PSA Airlines for operations under the American Eagle brand in December 2013, shortly after the merger of US Airways and American Airlines. The flight departed Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport and was en route to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The aircraft had previously been involved in another incident back in 2017, where the aircraft hit a deer on takeoff from Charlotte Douglas International Airport; however, the aircraft was repaired and returned to service. No problems were reported when the plane took off from Wichita.

The helicopter involved was a United States Army Sikorsky UH-60L Black Hawk registered as . The helicopter was configured for use as executive transportation for senior U.S. officials and soldiers, and was flying under the callsign PAT25, indicating a "Priority Air Transport" flight. No senior officials were on board the helicopter. The helicopter, of B Company of the 12th Aviation Battalion at Fort Belvoir, was on a training flight out of Davison Army Airfield when the collision occurred.

Passengers and crew
The airliner carried sixty passengers and four crew members; the helicopter had a crew of three military personnel.

The airliner's captain, Jonathan Campos, 34, had worked with the airline for six years. The first officer, Samuel Lilley, 28, had worked with the airline for two years. Campos lived in Ormond Beach, Florida, and studied at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Lilley graduated from Georgia Southern University and lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Association of Flight Attendants reported that two of its members were on Flight 5342.

The helicopter had a crew of three Army personnel:
Captain Rebecca Lobach, 28, from Durham, North Carolina, was the pilot flying and undergoing her annual night evaluation flight. At the time of the crash, she had accumulated more than 450 hours of flight time.
An evaluator for the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Maryland, who was the pilot monitoring. 
The crew chief, Staff Sergeant Ryan O'Hara, 29, from Lilburn, Georgia.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport

The airspace around Reagan National Airport is considered to be one of the most difficult and dangerous areas to fly in America. Its airspace is restricted on both sides of the Potomac River to protect government buildings in Washington. It is also more congested by the confluence of civilian and military flights in the area. Efforts were made to reduce the congestion of the airspace around the airport, but Congress approved more flights to and from Reagan in 2024.

"Like most of the country's air traffic control facilities, the tower at Reagan airport has been understaffed for years", The New York Times reported on January 30. On the night of the collision, staffing at the tower was "not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic," according to an internal preliminary Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety report about the collision that was reviewed by The New York Times. A single controller handled helicopters in and around the airport and instructed landing and departing planes. "Those jobs typically are assigned to two controllers, rather than one" between 10 a.m. and 9:30 p.m., The New York Times wrote. The duties are normally combined at 9:30 p.m., when traffic has slackened. But on the night of the crash, an air controller supervisor combined the duties sometime before 9:30 p.m., to allow one air traffic controller to leave early.

Accident

Around 8:47p.m. EST, less than 30 seconds before the collision, an air traffic controller asked the helicopter crew if they had the airliner in sight (multiple similar airliners were operating in the airport). The crew confirmed visual contact with an aircraft and requested "visual separation" from the airliner—meaning they would visually acquire and maintain separation from the aircraft on their own—which the controller approved. Moments later, the controller instructed the helicopter to pass behind Flight 5342. The two aircraft collided at a height yet to be precisely established, causing the helicopter to explode and crash into the Potomac River. The airliner's airspeed was . The CRJ700's radio transponder ceased transmitting about  short of Runway 33, where the plane was cleared to land. Flightradar24 continued to show incorrect ADS-B data for 1 minute after the crash..

The collision was captured by a webcam at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and another video showed a brief trail of fire. Other videos showed the airliner in a left-hand spiral into the water after the collision, apparently missing most of or all of the left wing. Witnesses reported that the airliner "split in half" upon impact, while the helicopter crashed upside down near the airliner. A pilot in an uninvolved aircraft confirmed seeing the crash to an air traffic controller and reported seeing flares from the opposite side of the Potomac as his flight was on short final.

The airplane was equipped with a Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). However, TCAS generally inhibits its Resolution Advisories (RA) when the airplane is at an altitude below  above ground level. This precaution is taken to avoid guiding an aircraft into potential collisions with terrain or other aircraft in congested terminal airspace and to reduce pilot cognitive load during critical phases of flight.

Within three hours of the collision, authorities confirmed fatalities. As of 2:50 a.m. the following morning, no survivors had been reported, and search and rescue operations were described as "becoming more grim". By afternoon, all 67 people aboard were presumed dead.

This was the first mid-air collision to happen in the United States involving a jet airliner since Aeroméxico Flight 498 in 1986, and the first fatal mid-air collision in the United States since 2023. This was also the deadliest U.S. aviation accident since American Airlines Flight 587 on November 12, 2001, the first fatal accident involving the CRJ700 series since its introduction in 2001, the deadliest crash involving any Bombardier CRJ series aircraft (surpassing the 53 fatalities on board China Eastern Airlines Flight 5210, which was operated on a CRJ200) and the first fatal accident involving American Airlines since Flight 587. In addition, it was the first crash in the Potomac River since Air Florida Flight 90 collided with a bridge before crashing into the river on January 13, 1982.

Emergency response

Emergency personnel, including units from District of Columbia Fire and EMS (DC FEMS), Metropolitan Police Department, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, United States Coast Guard, Maryland State Police, and other assets from local, state, and federal agencies, were dispatched to the scene. According to DC FEMS chief John Donnelly, emergency responders were notified of an aircraft crash at 8:48 p.m. The first units arrived at the scene at 8:58 p.m., where they discovered the aircraft in the water. The fuselage of Flight 5342 was found upside down in three sections in the river and is being recovered. The search for debris was extended to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge,  south of Reagan National Airport. A crane used to lift debris during the response to the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, which happened nearby in Baltimore in March 2024, was brought to help pick up plane wreckage.

Fireboats and divers were deployed to search for victims and survivors. However, rescue efforts were hampered by cold temperatures, strong winds, ice, and murky water conditions. The water temperature near the crash site was recorded at . Several commercial yachts from CityCruise sailed from Washington Sailing Marina to help with search and rescue operations. On Thursday, the rescue operation turned into a recovery mission. As of Sunday evening, 55 bodies, including the three soldiers in the helicopter, had been found and identified. Officials have said they were confident they would be able to recover all bodies from the aircraft. 

After the collision, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport suspended all takeoffs and landings, diverting flights to nearby airports, including Dulles International Airport, Baltimore/Washington International Airport, and Richmond International Airport. The airport remained closed until 11:00 a.m. on January 30.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority extended Silver Line service to help passengers whose flights were diverted to Dulles International Airport and dispatched "warming buses" to help relief operations.

Airline passenger fatalities

Figure skating community
Among the passengers were several U.S. Figure Skating athletes, personnel, and family members returning from a national development camp held in conjunction with the 2025 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas. As many as 15 passengers may have been affiliated with figure skating.

Coaches traveling as passengers were Russian nationals Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, the pair skating gold medalists at the 1994 World Figure Skating Championships, along with Russian three-time figure skating champion and coach Inna Volyanskaya and another Russian coach, Alexandr Kirsanov.  A Chilean skater and his father were also on the plane.

It was the second time members of the U.S. Figure Skating team died in an aviation accident, after the 1961 crash of Sabena Flight 548 in Belgium. A former competitor indicated that it was rare to have many American skaters flying together following the 1961 crash.

Other fatalities 
Among other passengers on Flight 5342 were four members of the D.C.-based UA Steamfitters Local 602 union; three students and six parents from schools of Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia; former Loudoun County Public Schools students; two attorneys from a D.C. law firm; a civil rights attorney; a colonel of the Philippine National Police; a Wichita native attending college in Ohio; Lindsay Fields, the president-elect of the National Association of Biology Teachers; two Chinese nationals, a Pakistani, two Polish-American nationals, an unspecified number of German nationals; and a Danish citizen.

Aftermath

On January 31, 2025, the FAA restricted helicopter flights near the airport. The FAA partially closed both the route that the Black Hawk was on when it collided with the CRJ700 and another route that runs south of the Key Bridge in Washington and connects the neighborhood of Georgetown to Rosslyn, Virginia. These routes, designated Route 4 and Route 1 respectively, remain open only to police, medical, air defense, and presidential transport flights.

On January 31, 2025, PSA Airlines retired flight number 5342 and stated that the new number for the Wichita to Washington National route would be Flight 5677.

Investigations

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the FAA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Army announced they would launch investigations into the collision. The NTSB prepared an investigation team to send to the site of the accident. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also stated it would help with the response, though there were no indications of terrorism or criminal activity. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) deployed two investigators to help the investigation, since the Bombardier CRJ700 was designed and manufactured in Canada.

On the evening of January 30, the flight recorder ("black box") of Flight 5342 was recovered from the wreckage and brought to the NTSB lab for evaluation. The helicopter was fitted with a combined voice and flight data recorder, which was recovered on January 31.

Preliminary data shows the helicopter was at 325 feet, while the airliner's last recorded altitude was 300 feet. Reagan National requires helicopters on that route to stay below 200 feet. A single air traffic controller was managing both aircraft at the time of the crash, an arrangement deemed "not normal" for that time of day at the airport. Controllers twice warned the helicopter crew about the approaching PSA jet, with the first alert issued two minutes before the collision, according to radio transmissions.

Responses

Aviation
American Airlines CEO Robert Isom, in a video statement produced by the airline, said that the pilots flying the airliner were experienced. American Airlines also launched a hotline for family members of passengers on Flight 5342. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the captain of US Airways Flight 1549, argued for the creation of more safety zones as well as more restrictions on flight patterns after the crash.

Domestic
President Donald Trump was briefed on the collision shortly after it occurred. Shortly after midnight, Trump wrote on Truth Social questioning the actions of the air traffic controllers and asserting that the situation could have been prevented. Trump also criticized the helicopter crew for flying too high. Later that morning, Trump released a statement calling the crash a "terrible accident," thanking emergency responders and saying of the victims: "May God bless their souls."

In later remarks during a White House press conference, Trump alleged that the FAA's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals supported by former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama may have been partly to blame for the crash. Trump criticized the FAA for being open to hiring air traffic controllers with "hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism." This was a policy introduced in 2019 by the first Trump administration's FAA, which announced a program to allow 20 people with "targeted disabilities" (as mentioned by Trump above) to train at air traffic control centers for air traffic operations careers; however, several of the listed disabilities such as epilepsy, poor vision, and some mental disorders were still disqualifying for air traffic controllers per FAA regulations. A policy in 2013 by the Obama administration's FAA that encouraged the hiring of minorities as air traffic controllers was continued by the first Trump administration's FAA. Trump also criticized the former transportation secretary under Biden, Pete Buttigieg, accusing him of promoting the DEI goals at the FAA.

Trump administration officials also criticized diversity policies on January 30, agreeing with Trump's claim that such policies may have caused the crash. Vice president JD Vance said, "When you don't have the best standards in who you're hiring, it means on the one hand, you're not getting the best people in government. But on the other hand, it puts stresses on the people who are already there." Sean Duffy, the United States Secretary of Transportation, said, "We can only accept the best and the brightest in positions of safety," while Pete Hegseth, the United States Secretary of Defense, said, "The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department and we need the best and brightest," including in "our air traffic control."  White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt supported Trump's claim by stating that it was "common sense" to be concerned about potential negative effects of DEI initiatives.

Duffy also said, "What I've seen so far, do I think this was preventable? Absolutely." Hegseth also said that the helicopter crew were "fairly experienced," and undergoing "routine annual retraining—night flights on a standard [flight] corridor for a continuity-of-government mission." 

Kansas Senators Roger Marshall and Jerry Moran said that they were communicating with authorities about the collision. Don Beyer, U.S. representative for , where the airport is located, said he was in contact with airport officials about the crash.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin stated that first responders from Northern Virginia were being sent to help recovery efforts. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly stated that she was in contact with authorities about the collision. Maryland Governor Wes Moore raised Maryland's Emergency Operations Center status to "Enhanced" to help recovery operations.

Several far-right social media users falsely claimed the helicopter pilot to be Jo Ellis, a transgender woman who served in the Virginia Army National Guard; however, a subsequent statement from the National Guard disproved this, saying that there were no Virginia National Guard personnel aboard the helicopter. The magnitude of these claims led to "Jo Ellis" being a trending topic on X as well as her releasing a response that she was alive and not involved in the crash.

A vigil was held at the Wichita City Council chambers in memory of the victims.

Backlash to Trump's comments
President Donald Trump received pushback for his claims that DEI initiatives were to blame for the crash, including by former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, whom Trump criticized in his address. Buttigieg stated that Trump's claims were "despicable" and that he should be "leading, not lying". Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota criticized Trump for "blaming this deadly crash on minorities and white women" and that the comments were "disgusting, racist and sexist". Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York also criticized Trump's remarks, calling them "idle speculation". Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen criticized Trump by stating that he was "making a political show out of this awful tragedy" about the crash. "Sully" Sullenberger responded to Trump by stating that "an airplane cannot know or care" about a pilot's race or gender but can only care about "what the control inputs are" and that he was "disgusted" by Trump's comments. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut stated that Trump was "blaming Black people and blaming women who work at the FAA without any evidence." Representative Jesús "Chuy" García of Illinois stated that Trump was "exploiting disaster to continue to spread racist lies and divisiveness across the country."

International
The International Olympic Committee said they "extend their heartfelt sympathies to all those affected, which we understand may include Olympians, young athletes, and their support staff." At the 2025 European Figure Skating Championships, which had begun the morning of the collision, a moment of silence was observed to mourn the figure skaters and family members lost. The International Skating Union and many international skating federations also offered their condolences.

Pope Francis sent a telegram to the White House expressing condolences for the victims of the collision. The Russian Embassy in the United States sent condolences to the families of the Russian nationals who died in the crash. The Chinese foreign ministry expressed condolences to the families of the crash victims and demanded a full investigation of the disaster. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered his condolences "to [the] grieving family members and loved ones who are facing unimaginable loss" and support of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada throughout the investigation.

See also

2025 in aviation
List of accidents involving sports teams
List of mid-air collisions

Notes

References

External links

Playback of Flight AA5342 – Flightradar24
KDCA Tower, KDCA Tower/Approach, and Helicopter ATC Audio Archive – LiveATC
Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) Audio Archive – Broadcastify

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