DFW airspace is crowded and busy. What is being done to avoid aircraft collisions?
Aviation experts and aircraft collision investigators have so far refrained from pinpointing the exact conditions or potential blunders that allowed a passenger jet and a military helicopter to collide midair near Washington Wednesday evening.
Some have tentatively pointed to the area’s aerial congestion as a possible culprit.
The crash, which claimed 67 lives, occurred in one of the nation’s most crowded and tightly controlled patches of airspace. Ronald Reagan National Airport, the ultimate destination of American Airlines Flight 5342, is home to one of the nation’s most cluttered runways. Commercial airliners jetting to and from the airport share the skies with military aircraft from nearby bases crisscrossing the country’s capital.
Flights leaving DFW Airport, the region’s flagship air terminal, boarded roughly 27 million more passengers than planes leaving Reagan in 2023, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. DFW, like Reagan, is only one of several bustling airports in its neighborhood. Around 8.5 million commuters boarded planes leaving Dallas Love Field in 2023; billions of pounds of cargo move through Alliance Airport in Fort Worth annually, making the facility one of the country’s busiest industrial airports.
Are the Metroplex’s busy skies, and those of other American metropolises, especially susceptible to a similar tragedy?
“In the New York area, you have Newark airport, you have LaGuardia and JFK — absolutely not a problem at all,” said Richard Levy, a former American Airlines pilot turned aviation consultant. ”Is it busy for the controllers? Yes, it is. But you have airspace separation, and the airplanes stay in those departure/arrival paths.”
A series of high-profile near-misses (or “incursions,” in aviation speak) in recent years has prompted nationwide government investigations into air safety gaps and protocols. As of May 2023, only 0.9% of the nation’s air control towers were adequately staffed, according to a New York Times investigation into the causes of near-collisions; an internal FAA report obtained by the outlet found that Reagan’s control tower was understaffed on the night of Wednesday’s crash.
Still, federal aviation officials assured frightened flyers that American airspace is among the safest places in the world to be on a plane.
The FAA documented 30 runway incursions per one million takeoffs and landings last year, about the same near-miss rate as 2015. Most of the incidents posed “no immediate safety consequences,” according to federal investigators; only one constituted “a serious incident in which a collision was narrowly avoided.”
“Continue flying,” Levy said. “Aviation is still much, much safer than driving your car to work or to the dentist or across the United States.”
Despite the overall safety of the system, experts suspect Wednesday’s tragedy will prompt changes, if not wholesale overhauls.
“Obviously there was a failure somewhere, or maybe an opportunity to prevent this, whether it was with stricter procedures or stricter communication protocols,” said Joel Martinez, an airport planner and lecturer at Baylor’s Institute for Aviation Sciences. “But that’s yet to be determined.”
“In accidents, every accident, without exception, there’s an error chain,” Levy said. “There are multiple failures and mistakes. That is what’s going to be examined, that’s what’s going to be improved, and that’s what’s going to be changed out of this regretful midair collision.”
This story was originally published January 30, 2025 at 3:26 PM.
