As more details emerge about Wednesday night’s tragic aircraft collision near Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. that took the lives of 67 people, increased scrutiny is being paid to the increasingly high volume of commercial flights over the nation’s capital combined with a steady stream of military aircraft activity.

On Friday, authorities reported that they had recovered 41 bodies from the Potomac River after a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on a nighttime training flight accidentally collided with an American Airlines regional jet, which was only moments away from landing at Reagan National Airport (DCA). All 64 passengers and crew aboard the jet as well as all three servicemembers aboard the helicopter reportedly perished. It was the first major commercial airline accident since 2009.

Experts say the American Airlines jet was on a correct course heading and was on its final descent for landing and would have been unable to maneuver out of the path of the oncoming helicopter. It remains unclear why the Black Hawk was flying at the same altitude of 400 feet as the airliner, as the airspace where the accident occurred had a restriction of 200 feet for helicopters, according to experts.

Another likely factor in the collision is the high number of aircraft that were in the sky on Wednesday night. According to former Black Hawk pilot Lt. Col. (Ret.) Darin Gaub, the fact that the helicopter pilots did not deviate from their speed or altitude all the way up until the moment of impact suggests that the pilot did not see the oncoming American Airlines plane. Even though the Black Hawk pilot “acknowledged a message from air traffic control warning about a passenger plane in the copter’s flight path,” Gaub suggested that the pilot “might have been looking at the wrong plane.” Indeed, further expert analysis of the incident suggests that the helicopter pilot may have had another airplane behind the American Airlines flight in sight, without realizing that the AA plane was, in fact, right on top of them.

How did the Black Hawk pilot not see the oncoming AA plane? Gaub noted that many factors were at play, including the fact the helicopter pilot and crew were all using night vision goggles which restricts the field of vision “down to about 40 degrees.” Another factor may have been “the bright lights emanating from the bustling metropolis below.” “When you fly in an environment that is so lit up with city lights, and you also then blend in aircraft lights, and many aircraft flying, it can actually all kind of blend together,” Gaub remarked. “At certain altitudes, you can actually have a difficult time differentiating between an aircraft with its lights on and cars on the streets and streetlights.”

The fact that military helicopters are authorized to crisscross over the flight paths of incoming passenger jets at one of busiest airports in the country has been a source of intense controversy for decades, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Over the years, Congress has authorized more and more flights to be added at Reagan National, which “was designed for about 15 million passengers a year.” But by 2023, “its volume has grown to more than 25 million a year, and a daily average of 820 takeoffs and landings.”

As a result, airline pilots have been lodging complaints for years about the logjam of passenger jet traffic having to deal with a steady stream of oncoming military helicopters, which are often used to ferry politicians and other VIPs in and out of the nation’s capital.

“Why does the tower allow such nonsense by the military in such a critical area?” wrote a pilot in 2006. “This is a safety issue, and needs to be fixed.” In 2013, another pilot filed a report with the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) after a near-miss with a helicopter. “I cannot imagine what business is so pressing that these helicopters are allowed to cross the path of airliners carrying hundreds of people! What would normally be alarming at any other airport in the country has become commonplace at DCA.” Just last April, following yet another close call between an airliner and a helicopter, a pilot wrote, “Suggestion: Need to have better separation for DCA traffic on the river visual to the helicopter traffic that is flying up and down the river.”

On Thursday, Brigadier General (Ret.) John Teichert told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” that the issue of air traffic congestion over Washington must be addressed.

“[T]he number of flights out of DCA [is] grow[ing], [including] all of the helicopter traffic that is only there for first response law enforcement or military purposes,” he observed. “[I]t is such a tight area of airspace because of the population and the limits, based on national security, that it is worth having a full discussion about whether there is too much traffic in and out of DCA, and to reassess the processes, procedures, and techniques of military and law enforcement aircraft to make sure that there [are] no unnecessary missions going on in that airspace.”

Teichert, who formerly served as assistant deputy under secretary for the Air Force for International Affairs, went on to argue that the tendency for Congress to add flights onto Reagan National’s schedule for the sake of convenience needs to be reexamined.

“[W]e have two very capable airports in the D.C. area, one up in Maryland (BWI), one out at Dulles (IAD),” he noted. “[They] could handle some of this traffic. And we need to be careful that we’re not trading in convenience and creating risk like [what] seemingly happened last night. The investigators first will preserve perishable evidence. Second, they’ll figure out what happened. But most importantly, they’ll get to the root cause of why it happened so that we can update procedures, policies, techniques, and airspace so that nothing like this happens again. That’s their primary charge.”

“[I]t’s sad that it requires a tragedy to bring us back to focus[ing] on what is essential,” Perkins concluded.