An Army report held back since May blames every layer of control for the collision that killed 67

A lieutenant general’s review for the U.S. Army has concluded that “breakdowns across all layers of conflict management caused this accident,” the report’s author wrote about the January 2025 midair collision over the Potomac River. An Army Black Hawk and American Airlines Flight 5342 struck each other while the jet was descending to Reagan National Airport, and 67 people died. The review was finished in May 2026 and reached the public on Oct. 8, when the Associated Press obtained a copy from families of the victims.

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The officer is not named in the coverage available, and some passages of the document were redacted before release.

A review finished in May and public only in October

The Army conducted the investigation itself, which makes the document an internal accounting by the service whose helicopter was involved. According to the Associated Press account carried by ARLnow, the report was completed in May, the Army had not released it, and families who had pressed the service for months were the ones who put a copy in reporters’ hands. The Army did not immediately comment on that account, and a fuller wire version says the service made the report public a few hours after the AP had it.

Accounts of the report describe no legal wording. They carry no language about liability, privilege or blame for named individuals, and the author’s finding is framed as a systemic cause: breakdowns across every layer of conflict management, meaning the way the Army, the tower and the crews were supposed to keep aircraft apart. The Army’s own statement, as relayed by the AP, said the service recognizes the families’ need for answers and remains committed to transparency about its review.

Two broken radio calls and narrowed night-vision views

On the Army side, the report acknowledges the military’s own failings. It calls the two broken radio transmissions the most salient contributing factor in the helicopter crew’s failure to identify Flight 5342 as the jet circled to land on the airport’s alternate runway. The pilots were also wearing night-vision goggles, which narrowed their field of view and made a lit airliner hard to pick out against the city’s lights. The NTSB’s separate findings line up with the radio point: it found degraded reception meant the helicopter crew missed the word “circling,” and that the instructor pilot likely never positively identified the jet.

The tower is not spared either. The report says the controller could have prevented the crash by giving the helicopter crew more detail on the plane’s position and by warning the airliner about the approaching helicopter. In the NTSB chairwoman’s pre-release testimony, the board found the local controller gave the helicopter a traffic advisory but none to Flight 5342, and that a standard safety alert with positive control instructions could have averted the collision.

75 feet of vertical separation, and only along the riverbank

The route itself is the third layer. The helicopter route in use gave only 75 feet of vertical separation from a plane landing on the secondary runway, and only if the helicopter stayed near the riverbank. That margin leaves no room for the Black Hawk altimeter’s accepted error. The NTSB found the helicopter was flying nearly 100 feet higher than its instruments showed, and its testimony explains why: altimeter tolerances stack, so the crew likely read an altitude about 100 feet lower than the true one and believed they were under the route’s ceiling.

The NTSB also reported that the FAA and the Army did not recognize that the route’s low maximum altitudes were incompatible with altimeter error, and that 260 of 523 northern Route 4 flights it analyzed exceeded the published altitude limits at some point. Its list of Army shortcomings adds no documented training on fixed-wing procedures at the airport, altimeter data that was never verified on a recurring basis, and a transponder check that failed to detect that ADS-B Out was not transmitting.

The Army says it has acted on part of this. After the ADS-B Out problem surfaced, all 3,585 affected Army helicopters were inspected and reconfigured, helicopter crew training was strengthened, and the service is working on how it monitors safety concerns and on an agreement with the FAA to share close-call information.

The NTSB’s parallel findings and what remains open

The report recommends that the Army review helicopter practices in every major city where its aircraft operate, so the same risks are not sitting elsewhere. An anonymous Army official told the AP that a review of flights in Los Angeles and the Seattle-Tacoma region is under way. The NTSB’s roughly 400-page final report, published after a year-long investigation, directs four recommendations to the Army: revised training for Washington-area crews, flight-data accuracy checks at least every 18 months, total-error altimeter data in operator manuals, and annual transponder inspections.

Families have been critical of the pace. A May 2025 scorecard from the Families of Flight 5342 gave the Army a failing grade for weak communication and limited transparency. Tim Lilley, a former Army Black Hawk pilot whose son Sam Lilley was first officer on the American Airlines jet, said the Army owes the families and the American public a full accounting of how these risks were allowed to persist, and he still wants more detail than the report supplies.

The NTSB told the Army it is pleased with progress on seven of its eight recommendations, but it has faulted the FAA for not implementing roughly a third of its own. Congress has not settled the question either: the House and Senate have each passed different aviation safety bills, and a compromise that could require collision-avoidance systems has yet to reach a vote in both chambers.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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