Inside the Tower; Unmanned; Wonder of the World | 60 Minutes Full Episodes [6:57-11:58]

And every time that a controller made these safety reports, another controller was compiling data to back up the recommendation. And many recommendations were made, and they never went too far. DCA is unique. It's owned by the federal government, and the number of daily flights is ultimately determined by Congress. Since 2000, lawmakers added at least 50 flights to the already congested airport and approved another 10 in 2024. Some hours are overloaded to the point where it's over the capacity that the airport can handle. Was there pressure to get more planes in and out? Yeah, there was definitely a pressure. If you do not move planes, you will gridlock the airport. DCA moves 25 million passengers a year, 10 million more than its intended capacity. Its location near the heart of DC makes it popular, but also problematic. Stricted airspace near the airport shields the White House, the U.S. Capitol and other government buildings. For years, funneling planes and helicopters into the same narrow corridor over the Potomac. And Hanokka showed us on her map of the airspace why the tarmac is just as tricky. There are only three short runways at DCA and none are parallel. And so if a plane's coming in because these runways intersect, everything is connected. Everything is connected. There is no independent operation, not DCA. DCA's main runway, runway one, is the busiest in the country with over 800 flights a day, roughly one every minute. To make it work, Hanokka says air traffic controllers often relied on what they called a squeeze play. A squeeze play is when everything is dependent on an aircraft rolling and aircraft slowing. And you know, it's going to be a very close operation. So they're really just ones going up and ones going in at the same time. And that is a really common operation. Two airplanes on one runway within seconds of each other. Is that normal at other airports? No. So you'll get new controllers come in, so they've transferred from other facilities and they'll look at the operation and say absolutely not. And they'll withdraw from training. And that when I was there, it was about 50%. About half of the people that walked in the building to train would say absolutely not. A year after the crash, nearly one-third of the controller positions in the DCA tower are unfilled. It was surprising walking into that work environment. How close the aircraft were. Is it just going to be accepted there? Yeah. This is what has to happen in order to make this airspace work. And it did work. It works until it did end. In January, the NTSB determined the mid-air collision of flight 5342 and the Black Hawk helicopter was preventable. In its 388-page report, investigators didn't identify a single cause of the accident. Rather, they called out systemic failures, including ignored warning signs about risks at a helicopter route that was designed so poorly that in some parts of the sky, it allowed for just 75 feet of vertical separation between helicopters and passenger jets. I flew these routes hundreds of times. During his 20 years in the army, Tim Lilly flew Black Hawk helicopters often down the Potomac River near DCA. The night of the crash, investigators say, the Black Hawk crew was relying on what's called visual separation. Literally, just looking out the window to avoid nearby passenger jets. To apply visual separation, the pilot has to positively identify the other aircrafts. And say, that's the plane you're talking about? That's the plane. And he has to maintain constant surveillance on that aircraft, which is impossible under these conditions. Impossible, he says, because the crew was likely wearing night vision goggles, which Lilly says limit what a pilot can see. I'll help people out with this at home because I think we've all watched enough movies where you see somebody put on night vision goggles and they can see everything. But that's not the case, especially under these conditions, that's not the case. So when you have a lot of bright lights, like you do in, you know, Washington, D.C. area, everything gets washed out through the goggles. I care one Washington, I just saw someone or two none or not or zero. The NTSB built this simulation to show what those Black Hawk pilots saw, or rather, what they couldn't see. That green circle indicates the pilot's view wearing night vision goggles. That purple circle is the American Airlines jet they were supposed to be looking out for. You can see how it's hard to distinguish between an airliner and ground lights. Night vision goggles also limit peripheral vision.