Babies’ first words are often similar, one of a fairly common, monosyllabic collection. Our daughter’s first was either “duck” or “bye bye,” depending on how generous your interpretation of what she understood when she said them. Both are on, if not the shortlist, at least the medium list of most popular first words. Many of her first few dozen articulations are similarly simple and patterned. Short, comprised of consonants she can pronounce; generally commonplace items around the house, animals she’s seen in a book, or daily clothing items she wears. But one word stands out.
We weren’t quite sure what she was saying at first, but the first iteration came out sounding like a vulgarity. She later added a second syllable, and it started to take shape, especially as she’d only say it when she heard a low, thrumming rotor, pointing to the sky when she spoke. It comes out now as “cocker,” but considering our very specific predicament — living not just in the nation’s capital, but near a trio of hospitals with helipads, and seemingly along the flight path from Joint Base Andrews to the places our nation’s highest office-holders frequently need to be — we live underneath the traffic of a particularly high volume of helicopters.
Just as my wife was going to bed Wednesday night, she got an alert that DCA, the airport along the Potomac River, just across the water from Washington, was closed. We get plenty of normal alerts that would seem odd elsewhere: massive street closures for events or organized protests; warnings ahead of loud military flyovers. But this one felt different. I checked social media and quickly saw the emerging tragedy starting to unfold. That a helicopter — one of those helicopters — had hit a passenger plane. That, while it would have been much worse for those on the ground had the collision happened a few hundred feet east or west, over The Wharf or Crystal City, both craft were in the water.
Given the geography of the river, the circumstances of both the time of day and of year, and the history of such events, I had very little hope of any good news. None came.
Wednesday was my first bike commute of the new year, and my first to my new office. We’ve been under an extended cold snap in Washington, one which followed two snowstorms, events we are notoriously poor at extracting ourselves from as a city. Our general policy is to plow the roads and just wait for a warm day or two to do the rest. But we’ve barely cracked 40 degrees and only on occasion for weeks, so piles of increasingly discolored ice still sits on sidewalks and in bike lanes, while the salt-stained streets are becoming semi-permanent urban art installations. Cold aside, it’s generally not worth the risk and wear on your bike from riding it through those elements.
It ended up being a brutal day to bike, as the wind came out of the south in the morning, right into my face the whole ride.
When I finally did make the trek through downtown D.C., across the 14th Street Bridge, and down onto the Mount Vernon Trail, I was immediately greeted with ice. A giant patch still covering a busy spot on the trail, but also big slabs in the river, under the bridge, where the sun hadn’t been able to melt it away. The river temperature was reported to be just 35 degrees.
From my office, I have a fantastic view of the river, along with the edge of DCA, where planes take off or land, depending on the wind patterns, every few minutes. I stood there at one point Wednesday, looking out into the blue, catching up with a coworker between meetings. At the end of the day, I packed up and rode back home, up the trail around the airport, back to the city, adjusting to my new normal.
(Video: Marine One and escort, shot from a rooftop on H St. NE, from February, 2017)
DCA was America’s 28th-busiest airport in 2023. That may not seem that high — Baltimore was just above it at 27th, Dulles not far behind at 30th. But consider the fact that National only has 59 gates, while BWI has 73 and Dulles has more than twice as many at 139. Between 2013-23, the number of enplaned passengers at DCA grew 41.5% (18.4% at BWI over the same time; 7.1% at Dulles). Even still, Congress recently successfully pushed to expand flight capacity by five more round trips per day, many to the homes of those various congresspeople. Notable opponents to the bill included both sets of Virginia and Maryland senators.
We’re as guilty as anyone of trying to fly out of that airport over its neighborly alternatives as much as we can. It’s quickly Metro accessible, and a shorter commute no matter your method of transportation. Like so many other things, it’s a matter of convenience, one that we — the greater, societal we — have embraced at the cost of safety, time and time again.
Unlike other major city airports, nearly all commercial traffic at DCA operates off the same primary air strip: Runway 1. It’s notable that the ill-fated American Airlines Flight 5342 from Wichita to Washington Wednesday night was, in fact, asked to divert to the much more seldomly used Runway 33, pushing its approach further to the east, out over the middle of the river.
(Video: A plane crossing the 14th St. Bridge, preparing to land at DCA, from a Metro car. Shot Monday, Jan. 27.)
On Thursday morning, I didn’t know what to do. Metro lines were open, but I’d still have to bike to get to the station. I didn’t want to deal with the hassles of driving to work. I decided, at the last moment, to ride my bike in again, along the same route as the day before, even if nothing else was the same. Opening my front door, a helicopter thundered overhead.
Other than the trail’s general emptiness, there was no sign of what had transpired 12 hours earlier. Not until I reached Gravelly Point, where it’s a local rite of passage to watch planes take off and land, and saw one professional photographer sitting on a park bench. Not until I rounded the bend and saw the makeshift response area in the parking lot, the yellow police tape blowing from the wind into the trail.
Not until I reached the hill on the north side of the airport that lifts you up above the fence line, at which point I noticed something different and awful. It was a smell I’d never smelled before, an experience I haven’t had in a long time. It wasn’t quite the singe of something burning, or the churn of something rotting, but somewhere in between, with a strong suggestion of something non-organic. I’d never considered what a plane crash might smell like. I don’t recommend it.
Closer to work, there were some gawkers, people out with their cell phones, documenting whatever they could of the aftermath. A motorcade passed by silently out of one of the airport parking lots. With the airport closed until 11 a.m., everything was eerily quiet, except for the distant sound of the rescue helicopters, still combing the other side of the river in vain.
On Friday, the FAA announced they were restricting helicopter routes around DCA. But only, actually, the ones between the Woodrow Wilson Bridge to the south and the Memorial Bridge to the north. Like the spice, the air traffic must flow.
When I tried to make my way home Thursday, the section of the Mount Vernon Trail between Gravelly Point and the north end of the airport — the spot where the smell had hit me in the morning — had been shut down by police. With nowhere to go, squeezed between the George Washington Parkway and the secure wall and fencing along DCA, I had to backtrack to Crystal City and skirt through the Pentagon dropoff lot to find a way to a bridge.
I finally made my way to the first available crossing, the Memorial Bridge, the site of another recent tragedy. A couple weeks ago, a truck rear-ended a car in the icy conditions and swerved hard to the left, across traffic, through the barricades and down into the frozen river below. If you don’t live here, you probably didn’t hear about it. But it’s the kind of thing that feels like a far more present and likely danger around Washington than a plane or helicopter crash, despite our excess air traffic.
I thought about that as I churned my way across the bridge. Higher up the river there, the top of the water was still completely frozen over. Just as I reached about the midpoint of the bridge, a familiar roar approached. I looked up to watch an American Airlines plane fly directly overhead, making its final descent into DCA.
Good work capturing a largely hidden moment - probably one of many - but that is part of what art is
I appreciate your contextualization. As we (the collective "We") hear about tragic events, they largely go uncontextualized as the news cycle churns to the next tragedy. I don't live in or near DC. The experiences of communities there are going to be different than where I am. It's so easy to have thoughts about an experience that happens only on paper to those of us who don't live there.