WASHINGTON — Regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration are tightening safety rules in congested airspace around major airports, suspending the use of visual separation between helicopters and planes, the agency said on Wednesday.
The announcement comes more than a year after a U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopter collided with an American Airlines regional jet near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, killing 67 people.
The FAA also identified two recent close calls that led to the change in policy, including an incident involving a commercial jet and a police helicopter at San Antonio International Airport in February, and a second incident in March involving a Beechcraft 99 and a helicopter at Hollywood Burbank Airport near Los Angeles.
"We are proactively mitigating risks before they affect the traveling public," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement. "We identified an overreliance on pilot 'see and avoid' operations that contribute to safety events involving helicopters and airplanes."
Visual separation is a procedure where air traffic controllers warn pilots about nearby aircraft, and instruct the pilots to avoid the other craft through visual observation.
The FAA says its data analysis revealed that visual separation is "not enough of a safety mitigation tool" in high-traffic areas. Going forward, the FAA says air traffic controllers must rely instead on radar to actively manage aircraft to keep them separated at specific distances.
In its final report on the midair collision near Washington, the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the crash in part on the air traffic system's "overreliance on visual separation," as well as the "lack of effective pilot-applied visual separation by the helicopter crew."
Investigators say the helicopter's crew likely never saw the plane before the collision, resulting in the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in decades.
Copyright 2026 NPR
