The National Transportation Safety Board is far from completing its report on what went wrong that caused the crash into the Potomac River last week. In the end, no matter what else happened, the helicopter pilot was not supposed to barrel into a large commercial airliner.
It is also already known that the tower at DCA was understaffed at the time of the crash. When one air traffic controller has to do the work of two, it makes an already stressful job even worse. This doesn't mean they did it wrong this time, but at the very least it should be a warning. Elon Musk's dream of firing thousands of government employees to shrink the government is going to run into arguments like: "Oh, so you want fewer people looking out for air safety, rail safety, maritime safety, etc., so we get more accidents like in January?"
But there is another scapegoat here, that may or may not get named in the final report: Congress. For years, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority has warned Congress that the D.C. airspace is already overcrowded and unmanageable. Yet Congress, which has oversight over the two Washington airports, keeps adding flights from DCA to far-flung corners of the U.S. because some Congresscritter wants a direct flight from DCA to Wichita or somewhere else out in the sticks and is in too much of a hurry to get to IAD, which is 25 miles west of the Capitol in suburban Loudoun County, VA, and which is far less congested than DCA. Congress has added 60 flights out of DCA since 2000. Runway 01/19 at DCA is the busiest commercial runway in the U.S., with an average of 819 takeoffs and landings every day, even more than 07L/25R at the famously congested LAX, with 781 movements per day. LaGuardia's busiest runway clocks in at 528 movements/day. No runway at JFK makes the top 10. DCA was designed to handle 15 million passengers/year. It now has 25 million and is growing. Here is a map of the flights going into or out of DCA at the time of the crash:
The red lines are for planes arriving or departing DCA. The green squiggles are flights in and out of Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. The many helicopters in the area are not shown. DCA is a very dangerous airport to start with, because it has three runways, each of which crosses the other two. In addition, two of the three are very short, 5,000' and 5,204' respectively, and the longest is only 7,179'. By way of contrast, the four runways at JFK have lengths of 8,400', 10,000', 12,079', and 14,511' respectively. A short runway means the pilot has to align for landing perfectly and there is no margin for error. With far too many flights per day and massive helicopter traffic in the area, it is a miracle that crashes at DCA aren't more common. Yet Congress keeps ordering more flights there. Whose fault is that? (V)