Richard Anderson, former CEO of Northwest and Delta airlines, often sat in the cockpit jump seat when his airlines’ pilots flew along the Potomac River and then made a sharp turn to land at the congested Reagan Washington National Airport.
When an Army helicopter collided with a regional jet descending for landing on Jan. 29, Anderson was aware of the distinct risk factors present at Reagan National. Sixty passengers and four crew aboard the regional jet flown for American Airlines perished in the river, as did three Army crew doing a training flight on a Black Hawk helicopter.
In light of the midair accident and tragic loss of lives, people inside and outside the aviation industry are looking at some of the chronic challenges that exist at Reagan National. It was built to serve about 15 million passengers a year, but the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) reports that the small airport now serves about 25 million passengers annually.
In a Twin Cities Business interview this week, Anderson characterized the problems at the space-constrained airport, offered his solutions, and spoke candidly about how politicians in Washington, D.C., have exacerbated the congestion problems by adding flights to their home states.
Anderson and his wife live in the Twin Cities, and he serves on the Cargill board of directors. He was CEO of Eagan-based Northwest Airlines from 2001 to 2004. He came off the Delta Air Lines board in 2007 to become Delta’s CEO, a job he held until 2016. Northwest merged with Atlanta-based Delta in 2008.
Referring to Reagan National, Anderson said, “I’ve flown the jump seat in and out of there dozens and dozens of times.” He was onboard when pilots needed to land DC-9s, MD-80s, MD- 88s, Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s.
He also flew in and out of Reagan National when he was based in Washington, D.C., as the CEO of Amtrak from 2017 to 2020.
Military traffic risks
As PSA Airlines regional pilots were preparing to land the American Airlines flight at Reagan National on Jan. 29, an air traffic controller was communicating with the pilot of a nearby military helicopter.
“The U.S. military runs a helicopter shuttle system for VIPs all across and around the approaches in the airport at Washington National, which is unusual,” Anderson said, and created “more risks” than one would find at New York’s LaGuardia, Chicago’s O’Hare, or airports in San Francisco or Denver. At Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, he said, commercial airline pilots don’t have to deal with “conflicting traffic” caused by military flying.
A military base is located across the river from Reagan National. “That joint base operates a very significant helicopter shuttle service for VIP politicians and Army officials, so they don’t have to fight the traffic in D.C.,” Anderson said. The helicopters are supposed to fly within a narrow zone and at low altitude.
A key aspect of the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) crash examination is why the air traffic controller and the pilots of the regional jet and the military helicopter did not create greater separation between the two aircraft in the dark sky.
On Tuesday, the NTSB announced that data it’s gathered show the military helicopter was flying at around 300 feet when the crash occurred, even though helicopters were prohibited from flying above 200 feet.
When news of the tragedy first broke, Anderson said it was clear to him that “the planned flight path of the helicopter makes no sense.” He said the three intersecting runways at Reagan National and the incorporation of commercial and military flying left little margin for error. Military flights, he said, go straight down the Potomac River and cross virtually all the airport approaches, even on the shorter runways.
He argued that the routine shuttle flights and training flights flown by the military needlessly increased safety risks. “[Reagan] Washington National needs to be off limits to the military,” Anderson said.
“Fortunately, the Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Defense acted promptly after this accident and put in a new no fly zone for helicopters around Washington National and its approaches,” he said. “That was a wise thing to do, and a policy that had it been in place [Jan. 29], the accident would have been avoided.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who formerly represented a U.S. House district in western Wisconsin, outlined his decision Jan. 31 on the social media site X.
NEW: With the support of @POTUS and in consultation with the @SecDef, effective today, the @FAANews will restrict helicopter traffic around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport airport.
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) January 31, 2025
Today’s decision will immediately help secure the airspace near Reagan Airport, ensuring… pic.twitter.com/Oo6B9H8z8S
Duffy announced that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) would restrict helicopter traffic around the airport. “Today’s decision [that took effect Jan. 31] will immediately help secure the airspace near Reagan Airport, ensuring the safety of airplane and helicopter traffic,” Duffy wrote. He released a map of the airport area, with a no-fly zone marked in red that affects helicopters.
Anderson stressed the importance of allowing the NTSB to do its work. “The NTSB is an incredibly skilled and capable organization with the best investigators in the world,” he said. “The one rule in aviation safety is follow the process, participate in the process, and let the process work to get to the cause analysis on the accident.”
Small airport, congested operations
“You have a huge demand market [at Reagan National] because it’s a 10-minute cab ride from the Washington Monument and Congress,” Anderson said. The Pentagon is in the same vicinity as well as many private defense contractors. Many people linked to the federal government prefer the convenience of flying in and out of Reagan National than traveling a longer distance to use Washington Dulles International Airport.
But Anderson emphasized that the Reagan National airport is small. It’s in the state of Virginia and located on only 860 acres.
Many airports, including Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, have what Anderson called “long, stable approaches,” so a pilot is essentially flying in a straight line for several miles before landing.
Anderson recalled what it was like being in the cockpit as a pilot was using the “river visual” approach to Reagan National.
“The instruction is to fly the center of the river, and the Potomac River has a lot of curves,” he said. “You’re curving your way around the river, and the reason for that is [airplane] noise. There are a lot of tall buildings on the Virginia side, and on the D.C. side you can’t get close to the monuments, the Capitol, or the White House. So you fly down this canyon of buildings.”
When the plane is about 500 feet in altitude and close to landing, the pilot needs to make a turn. “That’s just not normal in aviation,” but Anderson quipped that Reagan National functions the way it does because “congressmen want to get to work easily.”
He noted that Reagan National relies heavily on a north-south runway that spans about 7,500 feet, which is the runway that’s used by large commercial jets as well as smaller aircraft.
“It’s America’s busiest runway,” Anderson said. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority stresses that fact on its website. “Because of the short length of its runways, over 90% of DCA’s [Reagan National] flights use its main runway, making it the busiest runway in America with over 800 daily takeoffs and landings, which is a takeoff or landing every minute during most of the day,” the airports authority said.
At five high density airports—Reagan National, Kennedy and LaGuardia in New York, O’Hare, and Newark in New Jersey—the federal government awards “slots” or permits to airlines, so they can take off and land at the busy airports.
“The slot rule manages congestion by controlling the frequency of takeoffs and landing,” the airports authority said.
There is a second major regulation, called the perimeter rule, in force at Reagan National. “The perimeter rule limits nonstop flights at DCA to 1,250 miles from Washington, unless the government has granted an exception,” the Airports Authority wrote. “Of the airport’s 800-plus daily flights, there are already 40 flights that meet this exception. With a record number of flights and passengers, the existing rules are needed now more than ever.”
Political jockeying to obtain flights
“The airport is slot-constrained because it only has one runway for big commercial airplanes,” Anderson said. “The government ought to really understand what the [operational] capacity of the airport is and shouldn’t just add more slots.”
Because Reagan National is operating with such a high volume of flights on one runway, it quickly runs into delay issues when bad weather or another factor disrupts the schedule. With a small physical footprint, it’s easy for the airport to get clogged when planes are trapped because of a ground stop that prohibits them from taking off.
In a May 2023 memo, the Federal Aviation Administration addressed flight delays at Reagan National. Since January 2022, the FAA reported, Reagan National was 10th among the most delayed airports in the National Airspace System, while ranking only 19th on flight operations. It said that Reagan National is “more delay prone” than other U.S. airports. “About 20% of departures and 22% of arrivals experience average delays of 67 minutes coming in and out of DCA,” the FAA said. The agency noted that adding more flights at Reagan National would increase the frequency of delays.
The leaders of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority want to manage Reagan National for short-haul flights that don’t extend beyond a radius that exceeds 1,250 miles. Washington Dulles International Airport, which is about 26 miles from the U.S. Capitol, is designated to handle longer flights.
Despite strong opposition from the airports authority, Congress has repeatedly approved exemptions to the slot rule that’s meant to address congestion. In addition, many of the slots approved have been for flights that exceed the 1,250 mile limit contained in the “perimeter rule.”
Anderson said he watched this drama play out when Congress would be considering FAA reauthorization legislation. “There’s a big negotiation over perimeter exemption slots, and that negotiation behind the scenes is about senators and congressmen being able to fly nonstop from DCA to their home, if they live outside the perimeter of 1,250 miles,” he said.
When the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 was signed into law in May 2024, it included 10 slot exemptions that permitted flying beyond the 1,250 mile distance limit.
After multiple rounds of these “beyond-perimeter” exceptions over several years, there’s currently nonstop service from Reagan National to Austin, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Juan, Seattle, and Portland, Ore.
If they could use their political clout to win an exemption, Anderson said many lawmakers chose to nail down those nonstop flights for their home states. They didn’t want to “stop in Denver or Minneapolis [to catch a connecting flight] to get home,” he said.
Informally, Anderson said, some people in the airline industry named the exemptions after the people who secured them, including the late Sen. John McCain, who wanted to fly nonstop from Reagan National to Phoenix.
Lifting the ‘perimeter rule’ at Reagan
While the airports authority hasn’t persuaded Congress to adhere to the perimeter rule, it’s steadfast about keeping current regulations in place.
“The long-standing slot and perimeter regulatory structure is essential for maintaining the operational and economic balance between the small, space-constrained and over-crowded Reagan National (DCA) and the much-larger Dulles International (IAD), which is equipped to handle bigger planes and longer flights as the region’s growth airport,” the airports authority said on its website.
Airline veteran Anderson holds a much different opinion.
“There shouldn’t be a perimeter rule,” he said. “That is an arcane rule that was in place when we flew DC-9s and 727 airplanes that didn’t have that much range.”
Despite the airport’s congestion and delay problems, Anderson said politicians keep adding flights to get around the perimeter rule.
“When you listen to Sen. [Mark] Warner and Sen. [Tim} Kaine, the people who represent Virginia, Maryland, and the area around there, they’re appealing for no more flights,” he said.
Anderson supports placing a cap or limit on the number of flights that can operate from Reagan National. Simultaneously, he favors getting rid of the perimeter rule, so a constrained number of flights wouldn’t have any limits on the distances they fly.
“The only reason we keep adding flights is senators and congressmen want to fly nonstop home from Washington National when Congress is over,” Anderson said. “Eliminate the perimeter rule. It is government intervention at its worst.”
Anderson makes a free market argument in advocating a shift in policies at Reagan National.
“Consumer demand would dictate what the schedule destinations are out of Washington National rather than the government,” Anderson said. “Today the government’s doing it, and it’s not doing a very good job of it because it can’t accommodate all the demands.”
One option would be freezing the number of flights allowed at current levels. “I think there are a lot of carriers that have slots that would like to fly them outside the perimeter, but instead they fly the smaller markets,” he said.
In recent years, he said, members of Congress would be “arguing with each other about whose turn it is to get a pair of slots to their favorite city in their state. That’s not a good process. That’s a poor process for allocating a scarce resource. A scarce resource ought to be allocated by the marketplace.”
Boeing 737s and 757s and Airbus A320s could readily fly from Reagan National to Los Angeles and other western cities and states, a region where Anderson said there has been considerable population growth in recent decades.
“But we’re living with this antiquated, artificial regulation” at Reagan National, Anderson said, partly to “protect Dulles Airport” from competition.
“By now, Dulles should be standing on its own,” Anderson said.
Liz Fedor covered the airlines beat for seven years for the Minnesota Star Tribune.
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