Closed Reagan Airport: did the authorities react too soon after the midair collision?

I could always begin this article with, “Normally I don’t like to write about events right as they unfold”.  Needless to say, like much “Breaking News” reporting, they intuitively avoid a deep analysis because any such analysis won’t age well.  And I prefer thoughtful analysis over coming out with the latest scoop.  Then again, I also realize now this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve featured current events within the last few months.  And, when one lives in the national’s capital, it’s often easy to stumble directly upon the epicenter of a major event.  So, without further ado, I present the primary news topic on this day of our Lord: a closed Reagan Airport (DCA).

I’m pretty miffed that my phone camera refused to focus as I was idling along the passenger drop-off point at Reagan National, moving 5 mph since others were behind me.  But I had no choice: I was taking the pics through the windshield, and driving while shooting images is obviously pretty unsafe even in the best of conditions.  The fact remains: these images effectively capture the closed Reagan Airport as it currently looked on a mild Thursday afternoon in late January.

Lousy those these images may be, they get the point across.  Considering that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had announced at about 9:30 pm the complete closure of DCA until Friday morning at the earliest, it was a bit surprising to see what looked like a fairly busy departures queue during the early afternoon that Thursday (yesterday, as this article goes to post).  After all, the closed Reagan Airport was the FAA’s response to a midair collision between American Eagle (American Airlines) Flight 5342 and a Blackhawk UH-60 helicopter that had departed from nearby Fort Belvoir, on Wednesday night, just a little before 9:00 pm Eastern.  The two aircraft collided within the DCA airspace right as the commercial flight (carrying sixty passengers and four crew) was getting ready to land; the Blackhawk had three onboard.  As search and rescue teams began to assemble along the banks of the Potomac River, where both aircraft had plunged after the crash, a closed Reagan Airport was inevitable.  More than 500 flights got cancelled or diverted in the immediate aftermath.

Nonetheless, it sure didn’t look closed early afternoon the next day (Thursday), when I took these photos.  What happened overnight?  At some point the FAA determined that DCA could reopen, so it did…at around 11:30 on Thursday morning.  Some of the articles covering this event even reflect a last-minute change, where the URL still says “closed until Friday” yet the article itself got updated with details of DCA’s reopening.

Alas, I cannot help but think that the search and rescue mission was deemed fruitless in the early hours of Thursday morning, so executive order glumly shifted the undertaking to a recovery mission, dredging the wreckage and finding as many casualties as possible, from a collision that had no survivors.  Though the last few days have been mild, the previous ten days often had nighttime temperatures in the single digits, which is about as cold as one can expect in northern Virginia.  Here’s what the Potomac looked like on Saturday, January 25, at Theodore Roosevelt Island in Arlington County:

It was the most frozen I had seen the river in the eight years I lived here.

Fast forward five more days, and here’s the river a bit further south along the George Washington Memorial Parkway, near the Columbia Island Marina:

Even with mild temperatures approaching the low 50s Fahrenheit, a thin sheet of ice still glazes the surface.  The water is no more than 5 or 6 degrees above freezing.  At those temperatures, the fatigue or unconsciousness that accompany hypothermia can occur within fifteen to thirty minutes, and death will occur within an hour.  Even worse: the body can experience “cold shock”, inducing conditions akin to an anxiety attack, which will prompt rapid breathing, evaluated heart rate, and reduced competence at maneuvering out of the situation.  Besides, a mighty river like the Potomac is likely to have currents even in the coldest weather conditions, making the situation difficult for even the most capable swimmers.

All these conditions pointed to a rescue mission so time-sensitive that, even thirty minutes later after the event, the likelihood of finding survivors was minimal.  As a result, the widespread announcement shifted from a closed Reagan Airport to its almost immediate reopening by late morning Thursday.  As I drove along the GW Parkway near the airport Thursday afternoon while it was fully operative, most visitor parking areas were still closed: Gravelly Point, the popular gathering site with soccer fields on a promontory right beneath and north of the flight line, was dominated by media crew and staging areas.  The National Park Service had closed portions of the Mount Vernon Trail south of Gravelly Point to runners and bikers.  However, other access points to the Trail adjacent to DCA did appear to be open; I saw a few runners chugging along on the path right next to the airport access lanes.  Meanwhile, south of the Airport, Daingerfield Island was also closed off to parking.

These closures prevented me from finding any reasonable parking spot where I could get out and walk a short distance to investigate.  Understandably, this horrendous accident scene doesn’t need any more annoying gawkers like me.  What the situation ultimately reveals is that any time the public faces a emergency like a closed Reagan Airport—one of the busiest mid-sized terminals in the country—the justification for closure must be extreme, and it must face constant reassessment to avoid a downstream crisis from all the other diverted flights.  Weird as it was to see an active airport when I was expecting some liminal space photography, it was a confusing but welcome relief when, an hour later, I witnessed a Southwest flight clearly in takeoff from DCA.  Unfortunately, the main reasons things could return to normal so quickly was that there was no chance of pulling out survivors from the river.

Whether its a closed Reagan Airport or an open one, I’m sure we’ll learn much more over the days ahead.  And we can use this time to commemorate the lives lost so suddenly.