The Federal Aviation Administration will adopt two urgent recommendations issued by a federal safety board to reduce and reroute helicopter traffic around Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C., after a midair crash of a passenger jet and an Army helicopter on Jan. 29 killed 67 people.
Sean Duffy, the U.S. transportation secretary, who oversees the F.A.A., announced the changes in a news conference on Tuesday. The recommendations included restricting a busy helicopter route running along the Potomac River that was used by the Army Black Hawk the night it collided with an American Airlines regional jet.
Mr. Duffy also said he spoke with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier in the day about carving out an alternate route for military operations around the restricted air space at National Airport. There will be some exemptions for medical emergencies, law enforcement, and presidential and vice-presidential travel, Mr. Duffy said.
“We’re in a situation where we’re threading a needle allowing helicopters to fly down the same airspace as landing aircraft,” he said.
The announcement came hours after the National Transportation Safety Board made the recommendations, which were based in part on a review of data that found thousands of instances of airplanes and helicopters coming in close proximity of one another near the airport in recent years.
Jennifer Homendy, the board’s chairwoman, said at a news conference that the N.T.S.B. had also found that, from 2011 to 2024, an urgent airplane alert was triggered at least once a month, instructing pilots to take emergency action to avoid hitting nearby helicopters. Airline pilots are expected to follow the alerts, known as resolution advisories, over other commands, including air traffic control instructions.
In more than half those instances, which were documented in voluntary safety reports and F.A.A. data, the helicopter may have been flying above permitted altitudes for the route. Two out of three such collision threats took place at night.
Investigators have been trying to understand why the Black Hawk was flying above the maximum height for its route and how it ended up in the path of the passenger jet.
In response to the data review and other findings, the safety board recommended that the F.A.A. permanently ban helicopter traffic along much of a corridor known as Route 4 — which the Black Hawk was traveling on the night of the collision — when planes are using the airport’s Runway 33. A key section of the corridor runs between Hains Point of East Potomac Park and the Wilson Bridge near National Airport.
Airplane traffic on the runway accounts for less than 10 percent of departures and arrivals, so the helicopter closures would be limited, the N.T.S.B. said.
It also recommended that the F.A.A. designate an alternative helicopter route when that segment is closed to helicopter traffic.
“We’ve determined the existing separation distances between helicopter traffic operating on Route 4 and aircraft landing on Runway 33 are insufficient and pose an intolerable risk to aviation safety,” Ms. Homendy said in a news conference.
Mr. Duffy criticized past F.A.A. administrations for failing to identify the safety risk helicopters poses to commercial planes landing at the National Airport despite access to years’ worth of available data highlighting the problem.
The N.T.S.B.’s recommendations reinforce recent calls from Congress and U.S. airlines for the F.A.A. to permanently restrict some helicopter traffic around National Airport.
In a statement, a group of families of some of the crash victims said they would push for lasting reforms.
“While the N.T.S.B.’s report sheds light on key factors of this event, it also reinforces what we, as the families of the victims, already suspected: Serious, systemic failures in air travel safety cost our loved ones their lives and continues to threaten public safety,” they said in the statement.
The recommendations were shared alongside a preliminary report prepared by N.T.S.B. crash investigators on their initial finding into the events that led to the plane crash, which was the deadliest in the United States since 2009 when a Colgan Air flight went down near Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people.
