Marine One's warning calls before mishap went unheard by Reagan air traffic controllers, NTSB says

Air traffic controllers in Washington and the pilots of President Trump's helicopter met to discuss communication issues one week before a jet was allowed to take off just as Marine One left the White House, federal investigators said Thursday.

Controllers reported not receiving the standard three-minute warning call ahead of Marine One flights and both sides agreed to an alternative in those instances — but that plan to relay the radio call through someone else was also unsuccessful on the day of the Aug. 4 incident near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report shows.

Having both the jet and helicopter in the air at the same time 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 NTSB report found.

CBS News previously reported that the Marine One pilot tried to contact the tower at Reagan three times to alert air traffic controllers that the presidential helicopter was minutes away from liftoff. The tower at one point acknowledged the communication but asked for the pilot to repeat the message because it "was broken and unreadable."

The Federal Aviation Administration 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.

"Marine One flights are piloted by the finest aviators in the world, and the White House maintains the utmost confidence in these patriots and other security officials who are responsible for ensuring the President's safety," White House spokesman Kush Desai told CBS News in a statement in response to the NTSB's preliminary report. "Although the President was at no point in harm's way during the August 4th momentary loss of separation, the White House continues to work with relevant military, FAA, and other security personnel to ensure the President's continued safety."

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.

Since mid-July, Mr. Trump's helicopter has been lifting off from the Ellipse, the park south of the White House, while construction has been going on for a new helipad behind the White House.

After the incident earlier this month, FAA technicians discovered 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 construction, the NTSB report stated. So the FAA moved the radio receiver out of a neighborhood near the airport and to the top of the tower at Reagan to fix the problem.

In a statement, the FAA said Thursday it "took immediate action following the Aug. 4 incident involving Marine One, including relocating an antenna to improve communications between DCA air traffic controllers and Marine One pilots and reviewing the procedures involved. The three-minute notification was communicated by alternate means, acknowledged by a controller and positive contact was established with Marine One before takeoff."

The NTSB said preliminary estimates show the helicopter and plane were just over 0.8 miles apart laterally and about 700 feet 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 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 life" 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."

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.

It isn’t just having backups, either (that is, not just checking to see if they are there)

You need to occasionally functionally test the backups. Whenever we had to to major upgrades of some of our systems, we incorporated elements into our testing plans that would test the viability of the backup.

Many years ago, we had a MUMPS based system, and it was incredibly reliable, and we ran it for about six years without much of a blip.

We had a major issue back in 2006 where we did have a catastrophic problem, and when we tried to restore the database-the backups were present, but not viable and we could not restore from them.

It was terrible.

It was a critical system we could not operate the department without, or at least not operate without going all the way back to a paper-based system.

The paper-based system would be acceptable for an hour or two in the middle of the night when there were far fewer Radiology studies being performed, and when the system came back up (say, after an upgrade had been completed or a serious systems issue had been resolved) we had to have a process to put all of those exams performed during the downtime into the now running system.

That was very painful for an hour or two of downtime when you may have had under 50 Radiology procedures performed during that time. During the day, on a weekday, you might do 2000 procedures a day at my hospital due to all the outpatients coming in for scheduled CT, MR, and other kinds of exams that they didn’t want to cancel. Honestly, I don’t remember how we did that. (I think I created a standalone database that would generate unique identification numbers, and we would print hundreds of them and deliver them to the different departments for their use, but...I blanked all of that out of my head. It was that bad.

That major system failure back in 2006 was before I purchased a cell phone, so I had to sleep on the floor of my office at home for almost a week, where there was both a phone and a computer that I could jump onto in an instant. It was simply awful. My wife made a button for me that says “I SURVIVED THE GREAT RIS CRASH OF 2006!” and it is still on my bulletin board as I type this.

It all sounds so archaic and unprepared now, but back then, there were lessons to be learned. Hospitals back then suffered with IT related issues because money was always short, and Administrators didn’t often understand things like the importance of redundant systems with valid backups and formal tests of restore procedures.

When it came down to hiring nurses, buying a special machine for an Operating Room that goes “BING!” (Monty Python reference there) or purchasing the necessary IT based components to ensure redundancy, you can guess which one always got lopped off of the budget. Not after that, though. And I am not that embarrassed, because this was the common state of many hospitals IT systems, even the big, fancy-named ones you might recognize.

My organization, to their credit, got religion with respect to these thing, built an enormous, beautifully organized and designed data center, and began seriously spending the money and making the right (or at least the best attainable) systems decisions. It was marvelous.

When I retired last year, we still did not have a plan to operate our department effectively in a full downtime, not just one where our system went down, but the entire spectrum, where EVERYTHING IT related goes down, network, switches, data closets, etc.

But about a year before I retired, we did have a real nightmare real life scenario related to us on a conference call where we had nearly 100 people from multiple states all over our region, administrators, IT people, doctors, etc. where we all got to hear the true story of a hospital in one of the states, a medium sized one that was one of the sole level I trauma center for that region, meaning they could take in all cases no matter how serious they were.

They were infected with a ransomware virus, and it took everything down, lock, stock, and barrel. When they tried to restore from backups, the backups had also been searched out and locked with the ransomware.

From a hospital perspective, it was apocalyptic, trying to function with no IT, no medical histories, no old imaging studies, nothing. It affected us all so deeply that they began (and still are looking as far as I know) for formalized ways to function when everything goes away except perhaps electricity. Most hospitals, especially Level I trauma centers, have backups for that.

I sure am glad to be retired, but sometimes, I wish I could retire some of the knowledge of weaknesses in systems.

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