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WASHINGTON — The ongoing White House construction contributed to radio problems that kept air traffic controllers from hearing calls warning that President Donald Trump’s helicopter was getting ready to take off, so they cleared an airline jet to take off just as Marine One took to the air earlier this month, federal investigators said Thursday.
The week before the president’s helicopter got too close to that Envoy Air jet near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, air traffic controllers and Marine One pilots met to discuss controllers not receiving the standard three-minute warning call ahead of Marine One flights, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board. They made plans to relay radio calls through someone else if there were future problems but that was also unsuccessful on the day of the Aug. 4 incident.
Technicians discovered after the fact that the reason Marine One was having trouble talking to the tower at times was because the helicopter shifted to a new location during the White House construction. So the Federal Aviation Administration moved the radio receiver out of a neighborhood near the airport and to the top of the tower at Reagan to fix the problem.
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“Even though they were aware of some previous communications issues, they never got at the root cause,” aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said.
The FAA said in a statement that it took immediate action after the incident by moving that antenna “to improve communications” between the airport and Marine One pilots.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to the preliminary report, although the ongoing NTSB investigation does limit what it can say about the incident.
A deadly crash in 2025 prompted new safety procedures
Having both the jet and helicopter in the air at the same time also seemed to violate safety procedures put in place after last year’s midair collision near the busy airport that killed 67 people, but officials stressed that the president was never in danger. The Pentagon also has a longstanding agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration to provide controllers with a three-minute warning before the president’s helicopter takes off that predates last year’s crash.
The NTSB said recordings from the tower showed that the controllers never heard the calls from Marine One’s pilot that day warning that the helicopter was getting ready to take off, but separate recordings posted by ATC.com show the helicopter did make those calls.
The helicopter pilots tried to relay their three-minute call through the helicopter facility at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, but that was also unsuccessful.
The FAA decided after an airliner collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter on Jan. 29, 2025, that all takeoffs and landings at the airport would be halted anytime a helicopter passes by on a conflicting route. The airspace near the White House and Reagan is heavily congested with military and commercial aircraft.
The FAA has acknowledged that the helicopter and airliner briefly got too close before the two aircraft started to move away from each other. The airplane quickly climbed above the helicopter after Marine One’s pilots saw the plane and paused until it safely left the area.
The NTSB said preliminary estimates show the helicopter and plane were just over 0.8 mile (1.3 kilometers) apart laterally and about 700 feet (215 meters) apart vertically at their closest. The crew of the Envoy Air flight told investigators they received a traffic warning from their collision avoidance system right after they took off, but they never saw the helicopter.
The controllers didn’t hear Marine One’s warnings
The official FAA recordings from the tower at Reagan did not include the warnings that Marine One was getting ready to head to Andrews Air Force Base with the president aboard that day.
A recording posted by ATC.com showed the Marine One pilot telling the tower that the helicopter was “three minutes to lift” just like the 2013 agreement between the FAA and the military calls for. But the controller seemed surprised a few minutes later when the helicopter took off.
“Uh, Marine One, you said, uh, you’re proceeding as briefed?” the controller asked before giving the helicopter directions and commenting, “OK, no three minutes, roger, proceed as briefed.”
After the controller warned the helicopter about the plane taking off, the Marine One pilot said he saw the traffic and declared, “We’ll be doing a momentary delay.”
Guzzetti, who is a former crash investigator for both the NTSB and FAA, said he doesn’t fault the controllers because they never heard Marine One’s warnings. And once they did realize the helicopter was taking off, they quickly warned the pilots and ordered another plane coming in to Reagan to abort landing and circle around.
“In this case, the controller did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not receive the transmission saying that they were three minutes away from taking off. So he had no reason to hold the airplane that was lining up and waiting,” Guzzetti said.
After last year’s midair collision, it became clear that poor communication between air traffic controllers and the military had been a longstanding issue. During a congressional hearing, it came out that a hotline connecting the Pentagon to the tower at Reagan hadn’t been working for more than three years, and the FAA hadn’t even realized it.
The NTSB said that after this incident involving Marine One, FAA technicians determined that there wasn’t adequate line of sight between the radio receiver at the airport and the location where the helicopter takes off at the White House. So those radios were moved from the neighborhood where they had been located to the top of the tower at Reagan. Subsequent tests showed the radios working well after that change.
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