Midair Collision over the Potomac River

The collision killed 64 passengers and crew on the regional jet plus 3 Army helicopter crew. The investigation focuses on helicopter route design around DCA, the reliance on visual separation (the 'see-and-avoid' principle), and the limitations of night vision goggles in maintaining situational awareness. How modern safety systems fail is the document's real work: not through single failure, but through the specific convergence of route design, procedural assumption, and equipment limitation. Each factor alone concealed the risk. Route design permitted helicopter operations in an airspace nominally managed for fixed-wing traffic. Visual separation worked when pilots paid attention. Night vision goggles were intended to solve the darkness problem. None of these systems broke in isolation; together, they broke down.