Eight Seconds Over Washington: The Collision of American Airlines Flight 5342

Описание: #midaircollision #washingtondc #americanairlines

On January 29, 2025, American Airlines Flight 5342 was on a routine nighttime approach into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when, in a matter of seconds, it became the center of one of the most consequential aviation tragedies in modern U.S. history. In this documentary, Eight Seconds Over Washington, we examine how a regional jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter converged over the Potomac River, resulting in a midair collision that claimed 67 lives and exposed critical vulnerabilities in one of the most complex airspaces in the world.

This film reconstructs the final minutes leading up to the collision using verified timelines, air traffic control procedures, and publicly released investigative findings. Rather than focusing on speculation or individual blame, the documentary explores how tightly constrained airspace design, overlapping civilian and military operations, communication limitations, and razor-thin safety margins aligned in a way that left almost no room for error. Eight seconds — that was the margin between routine flight operations and irreversible loss.

Through a careful, fact-based narrative, this documentary places the accident within the broader context of U.S. aviation safety, examining why near-miss warnings had occurred repeatedly in the same corridor and how long-standing risks remained unresolved. The story of Flight 5342 is not only about a single collision, but about how complex systems fail — quietly, incrementally, and often invisibly — until a single moment brings those failures into view.

Eight Seconds Over Washington is a documentary about learning, accountability, and the responsibility that follows tragedy. It asks a fundamental question at the heart of aviation safety: how do we ensure that the conditions which allowed this collision to occur are never allowed to align again?
#flightaccident #ntsb #ntsbinvestigation #planecrash