NTSB Report: Controllers Warned Marine One Crew About Radio Failures a Week Before Trump Helicopter's Close Call With Jet

Air traffic controllers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport met with the pilots of Marine One a week before an Aug. 4 close call with a passenger jet to fix a known problem: they weren't getting the mandatory three-minute warning before the president's helicopter took off.

The fix didn't hold. According to the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report released Thursday, the same communication failure happened again on the day Marine One carried President Trump to Joint Base Andrews, this time with an Envoy Air flight in the sky at the same time.

The three-minute warning exists specifically so DCA's tower can hold other traffic while Marine One departs. When the warning doesn't get through, both aircraft can end up airborne together in one of the most congested pieces of airspace in the country.

What actually went wrong

The NTSB says Marine One tried to reach the tower twice before takeoff, including through a backup channel at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. Neither attempt worked. NOTUS, citing certified audio recordings in the report, said the first call "was not received at all" and the second was "broken and completely unreadable."

FAA technicians later traced the cause to geography, not equipment failure. The report found there wasn't "adequate line-of-sight to ensure communications between the radio transmitter/receiver and The Ellipse," where Marine One has been operating temporarily during construction at the White House. The frequency itself was working fine that day, with no outages reported.

Separately, ATC.com published its own recording showing the Marine One pilot did radio "three minutes to life," exactly as required under a 2013 agreement between the FAA and the military. The tower controller apparently never got a clean copy of it. Audio captured the controller's confusion moments later: "Uh, Marine One, you said, uh, you're proceeding as briefed?" followed by, "OK, no three minutes, roger, proceed as briefed."

How close it actually got

The NTSB's preliminary estimate puts the helicopter and the Envoy Air jet about 0.8 miles apart laterally and roughly 700 feet apart vertically at the closest point. The jet's crew told investigators their onboard collision-avoidance system issued a traffic warning right after takeoff, but they never visually spotted the helicopter. Marine One's pilots saw the jet, called a "momentary delay," and the plane climbed away safely. Nobody aboard the airliner was hurt.

White House spokesman Kush Desai said in an Aug. 4 statement that "at no point was the President in harm's way," a point every outlet covering this story, from the AP to the New York Post to NOTUS, reported without dispute.

Why the rule existed in the first place

The FAA locked in the halt-all-traffic-during-helicopter-crossings rule after the Jan. 29, 2025 collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter near the same airport, which killed 67 people. That crash exposed just how thin the margin for error is in DCA's airspace, where military and commercial traffic constantly overlap.

The Bangor Daily News noted that congressional hearings after last year's disaster revealed a Pentagon-to-tower hotline at Reagan had been broken for more than three years, and the FAA didn't even know it. This isn't the first time a supposedly foolproof communication link between military aircraft and DCA controllers has quietly failed without anyone catching it in real time.

The unresolved part

The NTSB's report is preliminary. It identifies the line-of-sight problem at The Ellipse as the likely cause but doesn't yet say whether that's a permanent fix-it item tied to the White House construction timeline, or whether the FAA and Secret Service have implemented a reliable backup since Aug. 4. No new NTSB safety recommendations have been announced as part of this preliminary release. Investigators typically issue a final report with formal findings and recommendations months after a preliminary one, so what changes procedurally at DCA and how fast remains an open question.

For now, the arrangement that failed twice, once in the week-earlier meeting's proposed fix and once again on Aug. 4, is presumably still the backup plan until the agencies involved say otherwise.