Military air traffic controllers briefly lost contact with an Army helicopter as it neared the Pentagon on a flight that caused two commercial jets to abort their landings in early May at a Washington airport, the Army confirmed to CBS News Friday.
An Army official confirmed that on May 1, the Pentagon tower lost contact with the Black Hawk helicopter for about 20 seconds as it was coming to land.
FAA air traffic controllers at the airport aborted the landing of a Delta Air Lines Airbus A319 during the Black Hawk’s initial flight toward the Pentagon because they realized both aircraft would be nearing the Pentagon around the same time, Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman, the head of Army aviation, told the Associated Press in an exclusive interview.
Because of the 20-second loss of contact, the Pentagon’s tower did not clear the Black Hawk to land, so the helicopter circled the Pentagon a second time. That’s when air traffic controllers at the airport decided to abort the landing of a second jet, a Republic Airways Embraer E170, because they did not have a confident fix on the Black Hawk’s location, Braman said.
The Army said in a news release Friday evening that the cause of the lost contact with the Black Hawk is thought to be that a temporary antenna was in a location that did not maintain contact with the helicopter as it was coming in to land at the Pentagon. The Army said its initial review “found no deviations from approved flight paths and no risk of intersecting air traffic.”
Braman told the AP that the antenna was set up during construction of a new control tower and has now been moved to the roof of the Pentagon.
The Army said the aircraft’s location was continuously broadcast throughout its flight through its Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) Out system.
In initial reporting on the aborted landings, an FAA official suggested the Army helicopter was on a “scenic route.” But the ADSB-Out data, which the Army shared with the AP on Friday, shows the crew hewed closely to its approved flight path — directly up the I-395 highway corridor, which is called Route 5, then rounding the Pentagon.
Reagan National Airport air traffic controllers had directed “go-arounds” for the two commercial aircraft “out of an apparent abundance of caution,” the Army said in its statement. The first go-around occurred before the Black Hawk arrived at the Pentagon helipad and resulted from “an issue with sequencing of air traffic by DCA Tower,” according to the Army, and the second occurred during the Black Hawk’s subsequent traffic pattern and was based on “conflicting positional data from legacy tracking systems.”
Braman said federal air traffic controllers inside the Washington airport also didn’t have a good fix on the location of the helicopter. The Black Hawk was transmitting data that should have given controllers its precise location, but Braman said FAA officials told him in meetings last week that the data the controllers were getting from multiple feeds and sensors was inconclusive, with some of it deviating by as much as three-quarters of a mile.
“It certainly led to confusion of air traffic control of where they were,” Braman said.
The Black Hawk was not carrying any passengers.
The aborted landings on May 1, first reported by the AP, added to general unease about continued close calls between government helicopters and commercial airplanes near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after a deadly midair collision in January between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter that killed 67 people.
In March, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that helicopters would be permanently restricted from flying on the same route where the collision occurred. After the May 1 incident, the Army paused all flights into and out of the Pentagon as it works with the FAA to address safety issues.
The FAA declined to comment on whether its controllers were unable to get a good fix on the Black Hawk’s location because of their own equipment issues, citing the ongoing crash investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.
An NTSB official told CBS News Friday that the agency was not briefed on the Army’s findings and only learned about them after reading the report from the Associated Press.
“The NTSB is leading this investigation,” the NTSB official told CBS News. “That is well known. It is disappointing — frankly, shocking — that the Army would choose to release what is clearly investigative information through a media exclusive rather than provide it directly to us.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is pushing to have the agency modernize its air traffic control systems and equipment, which has failed controllers responsible for Newark Liberty Internal Airport’s airspace at critical moments in recent weeks.
Kris Van Cleave and
Eleanor Watson
contributed to this report.
