It's "inexplicable" how American Airlines Flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter ended up occupying the same airspace, leading to a deadly collision Wednesday night over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., former FAA Deputy Administrator Dan Elwell commented on Newsmax on Thursday.
But it is possible that the jet lost sight of the helicopter, or potentially, the helicopter lost sight of the jet, when the order came from the Reagan National Airport for the plane to land at a shorter runway, Elwell, who flew commercial jets out of Washington, D.C., for 15 years, told Newsmax's "Wake Up America."
"It's going to take a good, good bit of investigating to figure out how those two aircraft occupied the same airspace at the same time," he said. "Obviously, it's designed not to happen that way."
His comments came after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in an early morning press conference that the crash was "preventable."
Elwell noted that as a pilot, he was "very familiar with the patterns and with what the pilots were doing and the crew to land on three, three."
A few minutes before the crash, the air traffic controllers at Reagan National had asked the pilots on Flight 5342 if they could land the plane on the airport's shorter Runway 33, with the pilots saying they could, according to reports. The controllers then cleared the plane to land.
"Having flown that approach a number of times, when an aircraft is coming up from the south, it's headed due north in order to align itself to land on three, three," Elwell said. "That's 330 degrees. So roughly 30, 40 degrees off the runway that is normally used. The aircraft has to move to the east and sort of run along the bank of the river along Joint Base Anacostia (Bolling)."
The plane, he continued, "then has to bank, you know, not a huge amount, but it has to bank left to align to land on three, three."
In that scenario, by banking, the jet would have been "putting its belly toward the incoming aircraft, the helicopter which was traveling south."
That means there are times that the landing jet could lose sight of the other aircraft, said Elwell.
"If they had sight on the helicopter turning like that, they might have lost sight," he added. "The helicopter, there's so many potential scenarios where they might have lost sight of each other, but the altitudes on those two patterns are almost always resolved."
This means an investigation will be needed to determine how the jet and the helicopter got to be in the same airspace, said Elwell.
"I'm very confident that the [National Transportation Safety Board] TSB and the FAA will find out what went wrong," said Elwell. "If it's something that could possibly happen again they will resolve it. I mean, we have not had a fatal commercial aircraft accident in this country since 2009."
Meanwhile, Elwell said he did not have much more to add to Duffy's comments, "other than to say that my heart and prayers go out to the families of the folks lost as well."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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