The National Transportation Safety Board has scheduled a three-day investigative hearing focusing on the midair collision of an American Airlines passenger jet and a military helicopter over Washington, D.C., in January.
The hearing will take place July 30 to August 1 in Washington and will be livestreamed. More information, including an agenda and a witness list, will be released in the coming weeks, the NTSB said.
The NTSB is responsible for investigating civilian transportation accidents, though other agencies sometimes investigate alongside it. It has already released a preliminary report on the D.C. crash, which recommended restricting helicopter movements in the vicinity of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (KDCA).
The American Airlines flight was approaching Reagan National when it collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on a nighttime training mission. The two aircraft fell into the Potomac River, and all 67 people on board were killed.
The accident has raised concerns about staffing levels at the FAA’s ATC facilities and the operation of military aircraft in close proximity to commercial airplanes.
It is now known that there were many near misses at and around Reagan National in the years leading up to the crash, and there have been some close calls in the months since. In March, collision warnings sounded in the cockpit of a Delta Air Lines flight after a brush with a U.S. Air Force T-38 jet flying from Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia.
The collision over the nation’s capital was the first major crash involving a U.S. commercial passenger flight since Colgan Air Flight 3407 in New York in 2009.
