Breaking the String of Jewels

When I was a child growing up in Northern Virginia, a favorite summer evening activity in my family was to pick up a pizza at the Italian Store and go down to Gravelly Point. There we watched the planes land just across the field at Reagan National Airport until sunset. As the jets flew over the park in their final descent, they always seemed so much closer to the ground than they actually were. And they came so often! My brothers and I chased them with our arms outstretched, up and down the field while they came screaming toward the runway in an endless line.

Those summer evenings were all I could think about when I saw news of the plane crash on Wednesday night just short of the runway. The plane, a passenger jet carrying about 60 people inbound from Wichita, collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter, carrying three soldiers. Everyone died. It was the first commercial airline accident in the United States since 2009 and the one with the most fatalities since 2001. The collision occurred at night, so the only footage available is of a blurry fireball over the Potomac River. I think it is for the best that the full horror remains occluded in darkness. 

In the aftermath, once all the conspiracies were cleared away by the cold light of day, it became clear what had happened. The helicopter, which was on a routine mission, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was too high, the pilots couldn’t see the plane—no one knows exactly how a Black Hawk ended up in a passenger jet’s landing path. But it was not the first time that a helicopter and a passenger jet were caught occupying the same air space. In fact, around Reagan, it’s relatively common. The airport, though small, is heavily trafficked because of its proximity to Capitol Hill (flights land or take off every few minutes). And, to make matters more complicated, the airport is located just across from the military’s Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling, which regularly runs training exercises up and down the river. It was only a matter of time before, amid all the bustle, there was an accident.

And, in fact, pilots have been warning of just such an accident for decades. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal found that there have been a few near misses in recent years. Last year, after a pilot nearly collided with a helicopter while coming in for a landing, he complained that the airport and military base needed “to have better separation for DCA traffic on the river visual to the helicopter traffic that is flying up and down the river.” And even earlier than that, in 2006, another pilot issued a similar warning. “Why does the tower allow such nonsense by the military in such a critical area?” he asked. “This is a safety issue, and needs to be fixed.” But until something went horribly wrong, there was little incentive to do anything.

The details of what exactly occurred above the river on Wednesday are still forthcoming. I am not a pilot; I know nothing about air traffic control; I do not intend with this column to blame anyone or even offer a theory. More than anything I am reconsidering one of the golden memories of childhood. When my brothers and I were kids, we did not just chase the airplanes. We counted them. And the helicopters. And the power boats. And the hang gliders. There were so many, all at once. It was a thrill to be in the middle of it all, at the apex of the Bush Era, watching the world converge on that small strip of land where the narrow, dirty Potomac of Washington, D.C. opens to the broad, muddy expanses of Virginia. But now I see it all differently. What was a pleasant memory is tinged with a sense of foreboding. And I imagine the same is true of others who, like me, still enjoy watching the proceedings at Reagan with boyish delight. 

Of all the reports filed since the accident, the one I found most affecting came from Ari Schulman, an editor in the city who witnessed the crash on his commute home. He writes that as he was driving down the George Washington Parkway, he found himself looking out the window at that “string-of-jewels effect” created by a long, regal line of landing planes. There was a gap in front, where the plane closest to the runway should have been. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the flaming jet. When he doubled back to investigate further, there was nothing to be seen on the ground. And in the sky, “the line of jewels lined up for the airport was almost all gone—the planes had diverted.”

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