What went wrong after the Reagan Airport crash—and why no alcohol tests were done

Reagan Airport crash

After a Black Hawk helicopter crashed into a commercial jet at Washington’s Reagan National Airport on January 29, killing 67 people, the air traffic controllers on duty were never tested for alcohol—and weren’t tested for drugs until 18 hours later. That delay violated the Federal Aviation Administration’s own rules, and investigators are now demanding answers, the New York Times reported.

Under FAA protocol, drug and alcohol testing must be completed within two hours of any incident involving a fatality or serious damage, and absolutely no later than eight hours. But according to testimony during three days of public hearings by the National Transportation Safety Board, controllers were allowed to go home shortly after midnight—about three hours after the 8:48 p.m. crash. Only 15 minutes after they left, FAA officials concluded that testing was required. Yet no one notified the controllers until the following afternoon.

“We had drifted out of our normal process,” said Nick Fuller, the FAA’s acting deputy chief operating officer for operations, under questioning from NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy on Friday. Fuller said officials were busy reviewing tapes and determining who exactly had issued the instructions involved in the accident. By the time the team was identified, the testing window had already passed.

Eventually, the entire team of controllers was drug tested—but alcohol testing was never conducted. No one has been accused of being impaired, but NTSB board members made clear that the failure to test was unacceptable.

A recurring problem, not a one-time lapse

“This isn’t the first time,” said J. Todd Inman, an NTSB board member and former Department of Transportation official. “It was something we were trying to address in 2018. Now, it’s seven years later, and we’re saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to go back and rewrite it again.’” He added, “It shouldn’t have to be a continual process.”

Fuller said the FAA is now retraining its on-call specialists to ensure testing happens immediately after a serious incident. But the board wasn’t reassured. The lapse has raised fresh concerns about the FAA’s ability to enforce its own safety rules, especially in the high-pressure aftermath of a major crash.

At the heart of the criticism is a basic question: why weren’t the rules followed? In a system built on tight protocols and exacting standards, investigators say, there was no excuse for the delay. As Homendy put it bluntly to FAA officials during the hearing: “You knew what to do. You just didn’t do it.”