An air “safety incident” in which Donald Trump’s Marine One helicopter came closer than permitted to another aircraft over Washington DC is under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Air traffic controllers are believed to have mistakenly failed to halt commercial flights at Ronald Reagan National airport in northern Virginia on Tuesday afternoon when the military helicopter took off from the White House with the president on board.
A “loss of separation” incident occurred in which the helicopter and a recently departed passenger jet bound for Florida came closer to each other than regulations allow, a source told Reuters. The aircraft are not believed to have been on a collision course.
The FAA said in a statement that it was “investigating a safety incident involving Marine One but it didn’t appear to be a dangerous close call and the aircraft weren’t apparently converging”.
Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, told the Wall Street Journal: “Marine One flights are piloted by some of the best aviators in the world, and at no point was the President in harm’s way.”
The episode followed a tightening of proximity rules in the wake of a January 2025 collision between a commercial airliner and an army Black Hawk helicopter over the nation’s capital that killed 67 people. The government eventually admitted negligence in what was the deadliest crash on US soil in more than two decades.
The aircraft involved in Tuesday’s incident was an Embraer E170 jet operated by Envoy Air, a wholly owned subsidiary of American Airlines, as flight 3742 to Pensacola. The tracking website Flightaware showed it left its gate at Reagan National at 2.18pm on Tuesday, 34 minutes later than scheduled, and was in the air 16 minutes later at 2.34pm.
Marine One took off from the Ellipse near the White House at 2.33pm to take Trump to Joint Base Andrews and a flight to Los Angeles, according to a pool report.
FAA rules implemented after last year’s tragedy require aircraft to remain separated by at least 1.5 miles horizontally and 500ft vertically around airports, and the sources told Reuters that it appeared Marine One and the plane did not maintain separation. One said it appears they were not converging during the incident.
Marine One and the Envoy jet continued their journeys without incident, with the Embraer landing in Pensacola at 3.33pm CT after a flight of 2 hours and 16 minutes.
The Guardian has contacted the White House and American Airlines for comment.
Reuters learned from its sources, who were speaking under the condition of anonymity, that the FAA planned to convene a safety review team to investigate the incident.
A third aircraft, regional flight Republic 4700 from North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham international airport to Washington DC, was 3 miles (5km) from Reagan national at the time of the incident and was ordered to fly around before landing at 2.52pm, one of the sources said, confirmed by Flightaware tracking.
The FAA imposed permanent restrictions on helicopter operations around Reagan national following last year’s mid-air collision. The US government conceded in December in a response to a lawsuit filed by one of the victims’ families that failures of the FAA and army played a role in the crash.
“The United States admits that it owed a duty of care to plaintiffs, which it breached, thereby proximately causing the tragic accident,” it said.
The National Transportation Safety Board said in January that a series of systemic failures by the FAA led to the collision, citing its decision to allow helicopters to travel close to the airport with no safeguards to separate them from airplanes.
The FAA has since banned mixed helicopter and jet traffic around the airport, and commercial traffic is typically halted when Marine One is in flight around the airport.
