The organisation of flight routes around Washington D.C. poses an “intolerable" risk to flight safety and needs to be revised.
This is one of the main recommendations of a preliminary report on the 29 January collision between an American Airlines (AA) plane and a helicopter near Ronald Reagan Airport that resulted in 67 fatalities.
The director of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Jennifer Homendy, has recommended closing the corridor used by military helicopters on the day of the crash, when planes are landing on the runway to which the AA plane was heading.
Since the collision, helicopters have been temporarily barred from the vicinity of the airport, but the NTSB is calling for a permanent measure.
“We have determined that the existing distance between helicopter traffic in Corridor 4 and aircraft landing on Runway 33 is insufficient and poses an unacceptable risk to flight safety, increasing the chance of mid-air collisions,” Homendy said at a press conference.
The separation between the two flight routes is only 23 metres, added the NTSB director.
