UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — On Jan. 29, 2025, an airplane on landing approach at the Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) and a military helicopter collided, killing 67 people, including Penn State aerospace engineering alumnus Anthony Parente.
To help prevent similar tragedies, Congress has convened an ad hoc study committee, chartered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, of nine experts to study risks and protocols and to issue a report with key findings and recommendations. Among the nine experts named to the committee was Amy Pritchett, department head and professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State.
“I’ve been working on aviation safety for decades,” Pritchett said. “This is a time where one's attention is really sharpened by the tragedy that has occurred. Our hypothetical musings over a range of safety concerns all converged that night in that one accident.”
Pritchett noted that while assessing safety of the DCA airspace is one task the committee is tasked with, the group’s assessment will also extend to systemic concerns with Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Defense airspace operations.
“I hope that we'll move from not just analyzing this one airspace, or this one accident, but that we will also be looking at the broad viewpoint of how we regulate, manage and ensure the safety of what is arguably the world's safest system: air transport,” Pritchett said. “So, I do hope it can make a difference.”
The committee was convened in April and is meeting throughout the summer and into the early fall, at which point they will share their findings and recommendations.
Pritchett’s research and background are in aviation safety, including how the many layers of defense act together to create safe flying conditions. She was already a licensed pilot when she entered her undergraduate years to study collision avoidance technologies, giving her a unique and seasoned perspective for aviation safety and protocols.
“I started in the cockpit, but then I started asking as I researched collision avoidance technologies, ‘Why do most of the collision avoidance alerts happen at a few places in the nation?’ Oh, it's because of the routes! Why are there routes that way? And why are some of the pressure points or hot spots in the routes okay, and others not? It depends on how many aircraft are being pushed through them,” Pritchett said. “And so, my studies have gotten broader and broader.”
She said that the committee will look at what data can be gathered from real operations to highlight pain points through the system, and how to assess assumptions that, for example, the traffic flow will be even, and the routes are separated.
“That's where a lot of my most recent work has been: How do we assess if all these different layers of defense are in place and sufficient to make certain that two airplanes don't end up too close to each other,” she said.
The committee has also heard testimonies at their meetings from family members of the victims of the accident.
“The testimonies are heart-wrenching,” Pritchett said. “But they also reflect a lot of smart people from all walks of life who have combed through all of the National Transportation Safety Board investigation earnestly. They pointed out cases where there were reports of concerns that had not been acted upon, and I found this particularly heart-wrenching. The families reasonably raised the question, ‘Are these concerns being acted upon now?’ And that is something that merits a look.”
The loss of alumnus Anthony Parente, who graduated in 2012 and went on to work for Pratt & Whitney and, later, Deloitte, brings the tragedy especially close to home, Pritchett said. In honor of Parente’s life and legacy, his family established the Anthony Parente Academic Scholarship to support the next generation of Penn State aerospace engineers.
“I am so grateful to the Parente family that in the face of such a horrible, horrible tragedy, their impulse was to give back,” Pritchett said. “And I'm delighted to hear that when they chose to give back, the place that they thought was important to Anthony was Penn State aerospace. I know the scholarship itself will be great help to students, but also, I know that it becomes the avenue for me to remind all of our students, ‘Hey, your department head is a specialist in safety, and here's a very personable reason why, as engineers, as you develop, you need to understand not just how to make an airplane fly in theory, but the real safety concerns. This is real. This has happened to someone in our Penn State family. And we need to care about this.’”