Officials release harrowing simulation of what pilots saw right before American Airlines plane collided with Black Hawk

Simulated footage of the deadliest plane crash in 20 years has been released by investigators examining why American Airlines Flight 5342 smashed into a US Army Black Hawk helicopter.

The horrifying crash claimed the lives of all 67 people aboard both aircraft, with the Bombardier CRJ700 regional airliner colliding with the Army Black Hawk as it made its final approach to Reagan National Airport.

Many in the aftermath of the mass casualty event questioned the extent to which each of the pilots was responsible for the mid-air collision. But a harrowing simulation released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has revealed a major reason why both aircraft failed to separate.

Using Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2024, the independent federal agency was able to model what happened in the moments before the crash for both the Black Hawk belonging to the US Army's 12th Aviation Battalion and the American Airlines medium-haul aircraft.

The helicopter was flying under the command of Captain Rebecca Lobach, who was undergoing her annual night flying evaluation, as well as Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Eaves and Staff Sergeant Ryan O'Hara.

The simulation shows the challenge facing the helicopter pilots, who were forced into attempting to keep visual separation from the much larger aircraft, which blended into the lights of Washington DC behind it.

Tragically, the NTSB says the Black Hawk was around 100ft above the 200ft limit for helicopters flying in the area near the airport, which has one of the most regulated and complicated airspaces in the country, due to its proximity to important government buildings.

The crushed and twisted wreckage of the regional jet was pulled out of the Potomac the next day (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Investigators believe this could have been an equipment fault, with several other altimeters on aircraft in the battalion showing incorrect height readings, according to preliminary NTSB findings.

The investigators' simulation shows how rapidly the American Airlines flight came out of the darkness for the Black Hawk pilots.

Similarly, for the American Airlines crew, due to the darkness, the pilots had barely seconds to react to the unexpected presence of the helicopter in their flight path.

Board members of the NTSB have ruled that there were a 'multitude of errors' and 'systemic issues' at a number of the organizations implicated by the crash, with the FAA coming under the most stringent criticism.

Pilots flying in the dark were incapable of recognizing the potential conflict between the helicopter and the American Airlines flight due to a lack of adequate charts provided by the FAA for the area around the busy airport.

With authorities not creating valid separation routes for aircraft around the airport, despite thousands of 'close proximity events' in recent years, the federal government accepted responsibility for the crash in December 2025.

The Justice Department accepted that it 'owed a duty of care to plaintiffs, which it breached, thereby proximately causing the tragic accident.' It also added that both pilots 'failed to maintain vigilance so as to see and avoid each other.'