After a series of air travel incidents, including recent disruptions at a busy New Jersey airport, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, has sought to blame the previous administration for issues plaguing the Federal Aviation Administration. “Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden did nothing to fix the system that they knew was broken,” Mr. Duffy said at…
As they flew south along the Potomac River on the gusty night of Jan. 29, the crew aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter attempted to execute a common aviation practice. It would play a role in ending their lives. Shortly after the Black Hawk passed over Washington’s most famous array of cherry trees, an air…
Journalists from Radio Martí, the U.S. federally-funded news outlet aimed at communist Cuba, were in the middle of interviewing a Cuban activist in Miami on a recent Saturday when bleak looks suddenly came over their faces. The 40-year-old news agency, designed to send uncensored news in Spanish into Cuba, had just been ordered closed by…
The Federal Aviation Administration will adopt two urgent recommendations issued by a federal safety board to reduce and reroute helicopter traffic around Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C., after a midair crash of a passenger jet and an Army helicopter on Jan. 29 killed 67 people. Sean Duffy, the U.S. transportation secretary, who oversees…
More than two dozen flights headed to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were impacted on Friday by recent rules barring flights during presidential helicopter trips, flight tracking site Flightradar24 said. After a January 29 collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet killed 67 people, the Federal Aviation Administration adopted new rules…
Maryna Tymchenko walked to the U.S. embassy on Wednesday morning and held up a homemade cardboard sign over her head: “Reagan would have hated it,” the sign read, alluding to the former president who famously called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” She said she felt whiplash from the past two weeks as the United…
The family of one of the 67 victims of a plane crash last month near Washington filed two legal claims against the federal government on Tuesday, seeking compensation and signifying the beginning of what is expected to be a long and complex legal fight. The claims, which appear to be the first against the U.S….
In many ways, the issues at Reagan National’s control tower are emblematic of the fraying safety net that protects air travel throughout the United States. A Times investigation in 2023 found that close calls involving passenger planes happened, on average, multiple times each week across the country. The near misses were often the result of…
Flying helicopters near Ronald Reagan National Airport always carries some risk. But the conditions on the moonless night of Jan. 29, when an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet collided, were unusually challenging. Many of the factors that contributed to the disaster are still being uncovered as investigators from the National…
Salvage crews began lifting the wreckage of American Airlines Flight 5342 from the Potomac River in Washington on Monday morning, the start of an operation that was expected to take three days. Just after 10 a.m. Eastern, the first piece of wreckage appeared. A crane perched on a barge in the middle of the river…