After Wednesday’s fatal crash which took down a commercial jet and a military helicopter on a training flight at Washington DC’s Reagan National airport, public officials and aviation experts are resurfacing concerns about how uniquely congested the airspace is around the country’s capital.
Last year, Bill Johnson, a commercially-certified pilot and a retired US army explosives expert, saw more than 20 UH-60 army helicopters fly over his house in one hour as he was working outside in his vegetable garden in Annandale, a residential community in Virginia’s Washington DC suburbs.
Martin Chalk, a former British Airways captain who retired in 2020, posited that military pilots might need to train in this particular area to prepare for transporting senior political and military figures to and from the area, which is close to the Pentagon as well as the White House, Capitol Hill and other buildings at the heart of the federal government.
On Thursday, during his confirmation hearing before the Senate armed services committee, Daniel Driscoll, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the army, questioned why military helicopters need to conduct training exercises near such a busy commercial airport.
“As we have said countless times before, DCA’s runway is already the busiest in the country,” Virginia US senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Maryland’s senator Chris Van Hollen and then senator Ben Cardin, all Democrats, said in a joint statement months before the law was passed.
