The US government has now acknowledged mistakes made by the pilots and a controller in an Army Black Hawk helicopter and in the Reagan National Airport tower during the January 29 two-aircraft crash over the Potomac River that killed 67 people.
The admission is a part of court papers filed by the Justice Department in United States District Court in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday as part of a civil suit brought earlier this year by the family of a passenger who died on American Eagle flight 5342.
“The United States acknowledges that it owed a duty of care to Plaintiffs, a duty it breached,” the latest brief says, setting the stage for the families to seek damages again.
The admission in the 209-page court filing is an unusual one from the military as the National Transportation Safety Board wraps up its independent investigation of the crash.
Sixty-seven people died in a midair collision after the Army crew informed controllers in the airport control tower that they would maintain “visual separation” from flight 5342, which was about to land at National Airport.
“The United States concedes that pilots operating PAT25 failed to maintain standard visual separation from AE5342,” the filing says.
🚨🇺🇸 BREAKING: U.S. GOVERNMENT ADMITS FAULT IN DC MIDAIR COLLISION THAT KILLED 67 AS BIDEN-ERA AVIATION FAILURES COME INTO FOCUS
67 people are dead because of government failures.
The Department of Justice filed court documents Wednesday admitting the US government breached its… pic.twitter.com/oBnLsmZQ9R
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) December 17, 2025
The US government also concedes in its suit that an air traffic controller in the tower “did not comply” with an FAA directive for how to conduct air traffic control.
“The United States agrees that the Army and the FAA are responsible for unnecessary loss of life resulting from the crash of an Army helicopter and American Airlines Flight 5342 at Reagan National Airport. But the government “correctly identifies itself as not being solely responsible for this deadly crash,” plaintiff attorney Robert Clifford said in a statement in response to the filing.
Despite what it admitted on Wednesday, there still appears to be some finger-pointing and legal distinctions the Justice Department is drawing in court.
In a lengthy reply to the lawsuit, federal government lawyers acknowledge that the Black Hawk crew’s choices in flight were a “cause-in-fact and a proximate cause of the accident and death.”
They also say the federal air traffic controllers working at DC-area airport not liable and can’t be held responsible for the crash because they didn’t cause it.
The commercial airlines are still contesting the lawsuit, demanding that it be thrown out by the court and not making the same admissions that the federal government did on Wednesday.
At public hearings this summer, the NTSB honed in on cultural problems in the Army’s 12th Aviation Battalion, potential errors in the helicopter’s altimeters and whether helicopter routes around the airport were designed to be an accident waiting to happen.
The NTSB’s final report and probable cause are not expected until next month at the earliest.
Lawyers representing victims’ families allege that the crash “was caused by the confluence of a variety of failures on the part of U.S. Government personnel…Who knew or, in many cases, should have known about certain safety risks associated with Washington D.C.’s Reagan National Airport (‘DCA’), including but not limited to substantial and ongoing risk for mid-air collision.”
And they also argue that the crew of the helicopter, which was on a low-altitude training mission, were wearing night-vision goggles that “unreasonably deviated” and distracted them “unnecessarily” and limited their field of vision.
“The airspace near DCA is busy at times and the risk of midair collision cannot be reduced to zero,” conceded the federal government in its filing.
In a statement, an Army spokeswoman said the “Army understands and respects the need for families to have more information as long as it does not interfere with their caseworkers’ efforts to build compensable claims.” We know many people are looking for more details about the incident and what steps we are taking to help ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment outside the court filing.
