The U.S. government on Dec. 17 admitted negligence by federal employees in the Jan. 29 midair collision between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that killed 67 people.
“Prior to, and on the night of the midair collision, the defendants knew, or should have known, that [American Eagle] 5342 was transiting one of the busiest airspaces in the United States, and they knew, or should have known, that the airport approaches, and the airspace in the vicinity of Washington D.C.’s Reagan National Airport, presented certain safety risks, specifically including the possibility of a midair collision,” it reads.
The government admitted that previous “near miss” events near the airport should have been analyzed to prevent a midair collision and required Army personnel to exercise vigilance when operating aircraft nearby.
“Because of defendants’ collective failure to analyze the data and information at their disposal, and due to their failure to operate and/or control aircraft with the highest degree of safety, this midair collision was, tragically, an accident waiting to happen,” the filing reads.
The government stated that the Army crew “negligently failed” to exercise the required vigilance to ensure safe visual separation from the passenger aircraft and that the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) air traffic controllers “failed in their two most important priorities, namely to separate aircraft in airspace and issue safety alerts when aircraft are in an unsafe proximity to one another.”
It also stated that the pilots operating the Army helicopter and passenger jet “failed to maintain vigilance so as to see and avoid each other.”
The Epoch Times reached out to the FAA for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
Robert Clifford, an attorney for the family of one of the victims of the crash that filed the suit, said the government “rightfully acknowledges that it is not the only entity responsible for this deadly crash, and, indeed, it asserts that its conduct is but one of several causes of the loss of life that January evening.”
American Airlines filed a separate motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Dec. 17, saying that it was sympathetic to the families’ “desire to obtain redress for this tragedy” but that the “proper legal recourse is not against American.”
“It is against the United States government. ... The court should therefore dismiss American from this lawsuit,” the filing reads.
The American Airlines regional jet was flying a daily route from Kansas to the nation’s capital when it collided with the Black Hawk helicopter, which was on a training mission.
