Matthew L. Wald writes that a federal investigation of the accident will take time, but the lines of inquiry that it will pursue are clear.
It is too soon to know all the important factors that brought a Canadair Regional Jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter simultaneously to precisely the same spot, near the approach end of Runway 33 at DCA. There were sixty passengers and four crew on the American Airlines flight, and three soldiers on the helicopter; all died.
investigators will also want to know whether the helicopter received the second transmission from the tower warning of the converging flight paths. In cases of collisions on the ground, some radio transmissions have not been received because they were “stepped on” by someone else keying a microphone at the same moment. The New York Times reported that control-tower staffing was “not normal” at the time of the accident, with one controller doing tasks usually done by two.
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