Downed Black Hawk was practicing secretive evacuation plans
WASHINGTON – Top U.S. officials said a military helicopter was on a regular training mission when it collided with a civilian airliner over the Potomac River on Wednesday night. The scenario its pilots were preparing for was anything but routine.
The UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter’s unit, the 12th Aviation Battalion, has a unique mission set – quickly evacuating top U.S. officials to secure locations such as one in Pennsylvania in the event of a catastrophe or attack on the U.S. government.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Fox News interview Friday that the helicopter was performing a “continuity of government” drill, which helped the pilots “rehearse in ways that would reflect a real world scenario.” He declined to offer much more detail, saying he didn’t want to get “into anything that’s classified.”
The government doesn’t disclose details of its evacuation plans for top officials, but they likely involve Raven Rock Mountain, a facility in Pennsylvania that has been used since the 1950s as an alternate command center in the event of a nuclear war.
“Plans for continuity of government are among the Pentagon’s most tightly held secrets,” said Mark Cancian, a defense analyst who follows Pentagon operations with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They cover who would be evacuated, how, and where they would go.”
Even the mission’s chief beneficiary, President Donald Trump, appeared caught unawares by its purpose. At a news conference Wednesday, he was asked to clarify comments by Hegseth on the continuity of government plans.
“I don’t know what that – what that refers to,” he said.
The importance of the 12th’s mission helps explain why the Pentagon has continued the practice flights in the crowded airspace around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, even as flights into and out of the airport have grown in number in recent years.
The Government Accountability Office said in 2021 that there had been some 88,000 helicopter flights in the area from 2017 to 2019, 37% of which were military flights. The report was commissioned by local lawmakers because of noise complaints stemming from all the flights.
The crash, which killed 64 people on the American Airlines jet and the three crew members of the helicopter, will draw scrutiny to all that traffic, and on Friday the Federal Aviation Administration suspended flights. That may temporarily put an end to one of the unit’s missions – VIP flights for senior government leaders.
Hegseth told a White House briefing Thursday that the crew was “on a routine annual re-training of night flights on a standard corridor for a continuity of government mission.” The helicopter was based at Davison Army Airfield in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
“Some of their mission is to support the Department of Defense if something really bad happens in this area, and we need to move our senior leaders,” Jonathan Koziol, chief of staff for the Army’s aviation directorate, told reporters Thursday. “They do need to be able to understand the environment, the air traffic, the routes, to ensure the safe travel of our senior leaders throughout our government.”
In 2019, Bloomberg News disclosed based on Army budget documents that the service was asking Congress for approval to shift $1.55 million for aircraft maintenance, air crews and travel in support of an “emerging classified flight mission” to include modifying a specialized location to review classified material, known as a SCIF.
The money initially supported flying of 10 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, largely at night. Later that year the Army acknowledged that “the facilities are currently undergoing renovation,” for what’s now “an enduring mission.”
Several lawmakers from Virginia and Maryland as well as the District of Columbia’s representative asked Hegseth in a letter to “continue the current operational pause or to divert this unit away from” the airport area until the National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report is released.
Following the release of NTSB’s preliminary report, the representatives requested that the Army review strategies in accordance with any findings “to permanently relocate such helicopter training out of the National Capital Region’s airspace, or, at a minimum,” redirect training flights, with exemptions, they wrote.
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(Bloomberg staff writer Courtney McBride contributed to this story.)