A Delta Air Line Taxis to his door at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after landing on January 30 in Arlington, Virginia.
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Katopodis / Getty Images Tasos
Federal aviation officials are investigating a close call between a Delta Air line passenger plane and an airplane outside Washington, DC, which sparked a collision warning and “corrective instructions” of air traffic controllers. The incident occurred almost two months after a deadly collision in the same airport between an airliner and an army helicopter.
The last incident on Friday afternoon occurred while four American Air Force T-38 tons were on the road to the National Cemetery of Arlington in northern Virginia for an overview, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. A T-38 heel is a two-seater supersonic jet used to form pilots, according to the Air Force.
Around 3:15 p.m. local time, the Delta flight 2983, bound for Minneapolis, took off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Shortly after, an alert sounded inside the passenger plane cockpit, indicating that another plane was nearby, said the FAA. In response, air controllers have issued “corrective instructions” to both planes, the agency said.
The FAA said it would investigate the incident. Delta said his driving team had properly followed the instructions in the traffic alert and Collision avoidance system (TCAS). The airline said it would cooperate with regulators to examine the incident.
“Nothing is more important than the security of our customers and people,” Delta said in a statement. The Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
The incident occurs almost two months after a American Airlines jet and a Black Hawk Army Black helicopter collided outside DCA airport, killing 67 people. In response, the FAA announced that it would considerably limit helicopter flights near the airport.
Earlier this month, At a press conference, the president of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, qualified the flight models around DCA “an intolerable risk”, stressing how helicopters and commercial planes operate at short distances from each other in an already occupied airspace.
The NTSB’s preliminary report on the murderous accident revealed that, between October 2021 and December 2024, there were more than 15,000 occurrences of close calls between commercial plans and helicopters, or when two planes were separated within 6,100 feet laterally and less than 400 feet vertically.
During this three -year period, 85 recorded incidents were recorded where they were separated from less than 1,500 feet laterally and less than 200 feet vertically.
Friday, the Flightradar24 follow-up data showed that there was a brief time when the Delta plane and the military planes flew over the same area of the Potomac river near the Potomac court of Alexandria. Two pilots, three on -board agents and 131 passengers were on the Delta Airbus A319.
According to CNN, which pointed out for the first time the incident and quoted Liveatc.net, one of the Delta pilots asked the air traffic controllers on Friday: “On this departure … was there a real plane at around 500 feet below us while we leave DCA?”
Friday evening, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota said that the incident was “incredibly dangerous”, adding that she planned to reach out to the Pentagon.
“My first call to the Ministry of Defense tomorrow: why your planes fly at 500 feet under jets of Passengers full of DCA Minnesotans to my condition,” she wrote on X.
