Marine One's Three-Minute Call Never Reached the DCA Tower, NTSB Says

WASHINGTON — Two letters of agreement govern what happens when the presidential helicopter lifts near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), and the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report into investigation OPS26LA063 sets out both. One requires the crew to call the tower on 134.35 MHz three minutes before departure. The other requires the airport to stop all departures once that call is received.

On August 4 the crew attempted the call at least twice and it never got through. With no three-minute call, the local controller cleared Envoy Air (MQ) Flight 3742 for takeoff from runway 1, and the Embraer E175 was becoming airborne at the moment Marine One finally reached the tower.

The two aircraft came closest about two miles north of the airport at roughly 1434 eastern daylight time. Nobody was hurt. Neither aircraft was damaged. The report describes Marine One as a Sikorsky VH-3D on a military presidential transport flight, and Reuters reported that President Donald Trump was aboard. The helicopter completed its local flight; Flight 3742 continued to Pensacola International Airport (PNS).

Two Frequencies, One Trigger

The report is precise about a detail that explains most of the sequence. Helicopter Control and Local Control at DCA work on different frequencies, and crews and controllers hear only the frequency they are using. Marine One was on Helicopter Control. Flight 3742 was on Local Control. Nothing said on one was audible on the other.

That separation of frequencies is why the three-minute call carries so much weight. It is not advisory traffic information passed between crews. It is the single input that starts the departure stop, and the letter of agreement between DCA and Potomac Consolidated TRACON makes the stop conditional on receiving it.

The movement was not a surprise to everyone in the cab. At 1411:38, during a passdown relief briefing at the Helicopter Control position, the controller being relieved told the incoming controller of a pending VIP movement occurring soon. The report does not say what the Local Control position knew. What nobody got was the call that would have converted awareness into a departure hold.

The Timeline

At 1431:00 the Marine One crew attempted to advise Helicopter Control that they were three minutes from liftoff. At 1431:43 they tried again, asking whether the controller had copied the first call.

Both entries appear in the report in red italics, and the NTSB is careful about why. Neither was sourced from certified FAA audio. Both came from a third-party application whose recordings, per its own disclaimer, originate with a company building AI systems for transcribing air traffic communications and are processed with a machine-learning model. The board states that the transmissions were not received by FAA radio receivers and could not be heard by the Helicopter Control or Local Control positions.

What the certified recordings do contain, at 1431:43, is an unintelligible transmission on the Helicopter Control frequency, followed by the controller broadcasting that the transmission was broken and unreadable.

The departure sequence then proceeded normally, because from Local Control's perspective nothing had happened. At 1432:47 Flight 3742 was instructed to line up and wait on runway 1, with traffic on approach to the same runway about 4.5 miles out. At 1433:57 it was cleared for takeoff, the controller advising that the approach traffic was now 2.25 miles out.

Marine One reached the tower at 1434:03, once the helicopter had climbed high enough for the radio to work, and reported proceeding as briefed. At 1434:20 the Helicopter Control controller acknowledged, passed an altimeter setting of 30.07, and said: "okay, no three minutes roger, proceed as requested."

Fourteen seconds later the controller advised Marine One of traffic departing runway 1. The crew reported the traffic in sight.

At 1434:57 Local Control instructed the arrival behind Flight 3742 to go around, climb and maintain 3,000 ft, and turn left onto heading 270°. Reuters identified that aircraft as Republic Airways (YX) Flight 4700, three miles from the airport and rerouted out of caution. The preliminary report does not name it.

What the Envoy Crew Saw

The first officer was flying, the captain monitoring. Climbing and accelerating after takeoff, they got a TCAS traffic advisory, the "Traffic, Traffic" annunciation.

Neither pilot ever visually acquired the target. On the display it stayed to the right of and below their own-ship symbol throughout, and both recalled seeing 600 feet of vertical separation as the target passed behind the right wing of the own-ship symbol. The captain told investigators that no resolution advisory was displayed, announced, or commanded.

What the Separation Numbers Actually Show

The FAA's preliminary estimate puts the aircraft about 0.82 nautical miles apart laterally and about 700 feet vertically.

The Reuters account, carried widely, set those figures against a rule requiring aircraft to "remain separated by at least 1.5 miles (2.4 km) horizontally and 500 feet (152 m) vertically around airports." Placed side by side that way, the estimate reads as a double breach. The report frames it differently. It states that the estimate "would meet the required minimum radar separation" under FAA Order JO 7110.65BB paragraph 7-9-4, which requires 1.5 nm lateral or 500 feet vertical separation within Class B airspace between a VFR aircraft and any aircraft over 19,000 pounds or any turbojet. The standard is disjunctive. The vertical figure satisfies it.

The section of the report that carries that finding is nonetheless headed "Loss of Standard Separation," and the board notes it is still reviewing all sources of surveillance data to calculate and confirm closest proximity. The figures may move.

Both statements sit in the same document. On the preliminary figures the radar minimum would be met by the vertical margin, and the procedure that exists at DCA so that no controller has to rely on that margin during a presidential movement did not run.

The Airplane Was an E175

One further correction. The report's narrative sentence calls the airplane "an Embraer E-170," and that is the description that has travelled through the coverage.

The aircraft data block in the same document records registration N307LH, model and series ERJ 170-200 LR. The FAA registry confirms it: serial 17000873, built 2021, registered to American Airlines Inc. The ERJ 170-200 is the Embraer E175; the E170 is the ERJ 170-100.

Two Records of the Same Frequency

The report also documents what each side knew about the frequency before August 4.

DCA tower staff and personnel from Marine Helicopter Squadron One met on July 30, five days before the incident. It was not a scheduled meeting. HMX-1 had asked for it, wanting to discuss local operations and to press for more training flights inside DCA Class B airspace. Controllers used it to raise something of their own: they had not been receiving the required three-minute-to-liftoff calls. HMX-1 said communications "had been spotty," and thought that was the reason.

The two sides agreed that when the direct call failed, the crews would try other means, such as relaying through another aircraft. On August 4 they did exactly that, attempting to pass the three-minute call through the helicopter facility at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. That was also unsuccessful.

The technical record reads differently. FAA technical operations personnel responsible for the DCA radios told investigators there was no documented history of reported problems with the Helicopter Control frequency, and no report on the day of the incident until after it happened. The airport's air traffic manager said the same from the ATC side. The frequency had been working normally.

The two records do not match, and on the evidence in the report the July 30 conversation never became a trouble report.

Once the FAA became aware of the missed transmissions, it moved immediately. FAA technicians from Spectrum Engineering ran a coverage analysis and found there was not adequate line-of-sight between the radio transmitter/receiver site and The Ellipse, the temporary pad Marine One was using while construction continued at the White House. The radios serving that frequency sat in a nearby residential neighborhood. The FAA moved them to the top of the DCA tower. Controllers then ran radio checks with two separate HMX-1 aircraft located at The Ellipse and in the local vicinity, and found no deficiencies. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said on August 25 that he was confident the communication issue had been resolved.

White House spokesman Kush Desai told Fox News Digital that 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."

Why This Lands Harder at DCA

Reagan National is where helicopter deconfliction has been rebuilt from the ground up since January 29, 2025, when a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk and a PSA Airlines CRJ700 collided over the Potomac and 67 people were killed.

The NTSB urgently recommended in March 2025 that the FAA permanently prohibit helicopter operations on the Route 4 corridor when runways 15 and 33 are in use, having found that a helicopter at the maximum authorized 200 ft had roughly 75 ft of vertical separation from an aircraft on approach to runway 33. In January 2026 the FAA converted the emergency restrictions around the airport into an interim final rule, closing Route 4 between Hains Point and the Wilson Bridge and barring most non-essential helicopter operations near the field. In March 2026 it suspended visual separation for airplane-helicopter conflicts at more than 150 airports and required radar separation instead.

Presidential movements continue through that airspace, and the report sets out how they are kept apart from airline traffic: HMX-1 crews call the tower three minutes before lifting, and DCA stops departures once the call arrives. On August 4 the call did not arrive.

What Happens Next

OPS26LA063 remains open. It is a Class 3 investigation and the NTSB did not travel to the scene. The FAA, the Department of the Navy, and Envoy Air are parties, and Brazil's CENIPA was notified under ICAO Annex 13 as State of Design for the Embraer 170 airplane.

A preliminary report establishes sequence, not cause. The NTSB told Fox News Digital that the document "is intended to present the factual information developed to date" and contains no analysis or conclusions, and the board has issued no findings or recommendations from this event. The radio has been moved. What the report sets down without joining is a July 30 meeting at which HMX-1 called the frequency spotty, and a maintenance record in which that frequency had never been reported as a problem.