03/29/2026: Inside the Tower, Unmanned, Wonder of the World

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0:37Sharyn Alfonsi:Last year's collision of a passenger jet and army helicopter in Washington, D.C. killed 67 people. For the first time, you will hear from an air traffic controller who worked inside the tower. Was there pressure to get more planes in and out? And what we discovered about continuing problems at that airport. Why do we always have to wait until people die to take action? Forget everything you think you know about warfare. The traditional front line in Ukraine has expanded to a 10-mile-wide swath where anyone spotted by a drone can be hunted down. Tonight, lessons from Ukraine's kill zone. Necessity is the mother of invention.

1:29Excellent, Scott. That's really good. Nothing could prepare us for the majesty of the largest cave passage on Earth. Skyscrapers would fit in here. A 747 could fly through. Maybe most remarkable, all of this was discovered only recently. And there aren't a lot of places on Earth that you can discover for the very first time. No, you have to look pretty hard for them. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper.

2:03Sharyn Alfonsi:I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories, and in our last minute, a Final Four legend has a game plan for America. Coach Mike Krzyzewski, tonight on 60 Minutes.

2:29Sharyn Alfonsi:It was a week of chaos at airports across the country. Gridlock in Washington left TSA workers without pay, triggering four-hour security lines in some of the nation's busiest airports. Last Sunday, a commercial jet crashed into a fire truck while landing on a runway at New York's LaGuardia Airport. Dozens were injured and two pilots were killed. Authorities are investigating, but the air traffic controller on duty said they were dealing with an earlier emergency, and soon after the accident said, I messed up. It is a chilling reminder of just how thin our aviation system is stretched. Last year, American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River near D.C.

3:17Sharyn Alfonsi:the deadliest aviation disaster in almost a quarter century. Tonight, you will hear from an air traffic controller who was inside the tower the day of that collision. She tells us why controllers at Washington's busiest airport have been warning of danger for years. It is a story of a system pushed to the breaking point and the shattered families left to pick up the pieces. In Southern Maryland, seven widows whose husbands were on flight 5342 agreed to share their story together for the first time. The men, all work buddies, met up with friends in Kansas for a week of duck hunting. The women shared these photos with us and the excitement their husbands felt leading up to the trip.

4:03Alex got home from work. He was like, before you say anything, it's already paid for. I was like, when do you leave? Like, there was no asking any more questions. He was so excited to go. Like, it literally looked like Christmas morning in his face, so.

4:17Sharyn Alfonsi:Kayla Huffman's husband, Alex, posed with the crew and their trophies. Bridget Johnson was married to Steve for 19 years. Kylie Pitcher's husband, Jesse, owned a plumbing company. Ashley Stovall's husband, Mikey, was a steam fitter. So was Charlie, Heather McDaniel's husband. I met Charlie on the softball field, And he basically from that day always said, you know, I knew I was going to marry that girl. Because you were that good of a softball player? Well, that too, yes. I gave him a run for his money. When the hunting and fun was over, the men headed to the airport. Sarah Boyd's husband, John, checked in from the plane.

4:53John had texted me when he first boarded and said, boarded bourbon in hand. And then right before they landed, he said, about to land this bird.

5:03Sharyn Alfonsi:Jill Claggett was tucked into bed with her young daughters, waiting for her husband Tommy when the phone rang. And then I kind of slid out of the bed not to wake them up. And I turned on the TV and I remember just seeing the explosion. Fire command, the accident happened in the river. Families raced to the airport as divers searched the icy Potomac. By morning, they were told the rescue mission was over. I literally screamed, what am I going to do? It got to the point where his friends were calling me at like 5 in the morning, and they were like, is he okay? Is he okay? I said, no, he's dead. He's gone.

5:44And it's no longer a rescue. It's a recovery, which means there's no survivors. None.

5:50Sharyn Alfonsi:As the wreckage was pulled from the river, federal investigators began a year-long forensic autopsy of the collision. Video shows the American Airlines jet, seen here on the right of your screen, pulled up just before it and the Army helicopter collided. There were obvious cracks in the system. There were obvious holes. Emily Hanoka says she saw those holes during her time as an air traffic controller at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, commonly known by its airport code, DCA. Her shift in the control tower ended a few hours before the fatal crash. She is speaking for the first time about the stress conditions that she believes set the stage for tragedy.

6:33You had frontline controllers ringing that bell for years and years saying, this is not safe. This cannot continue. Please change this. And that didn't happen.

6:44Sharyn Alfonsi:For more than a decade, air traffic controllers warned the Federal Aviation Administration that the tempo of passenger jets and beehive of army, police and hospital helicopters near DCA was a recipe for disaster. The NTSB confirms between 2021 and 2024, 85 near-mid-air collisions between helicopters and commercial aircraft at DCA were reported to the FAA. And 60 Minutes has obtained documents that reveal just one day before last year's fatal crash, two separate passenger jets had to take sudden action to avoid colliding with Army helicopters. The warning signs were all there. Controllers formed local safety councils, and every time that a controller made these safety reports, another controller was compiling data to back up the recommendation.

7:38And many recommendations were made, and they never went too far.

7:43Sharyn Alfonsi:DCA is unique. It's owned by the federal government, and the number of daily flights is ultimately determined by Congress. Since 2000, lawmakers added at least 50 flights to the already congested airport and approved another 10 in 2024. Some hours are overloaded to the point where it's over the capacity that the airport can handle. Was there pressure to get more planes in and out? Yeah, there was definitely a pressure. If you do not move planes, you will gridlock the airport. DCA moves 25 million passengers a year, 10 million more than its intended capacity. Its location near the heart of D.C.

8:25Sharyn Alfonsi:makes it popular, but also problematic. Restricted airspace near the airport shields the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and other government buildings. For years, funneling planes and helicopters into the same narrow corridor over the Potomac. And Hanoka showed us on her map of the airspace why the tarmac is just as tricky. There are only three short runways at DCA, and none are parallel. And so if a plane's coming in, because these runways intersect, everything is connected. Everything is connected. There is no independent operation at DCA. DCA's main runway, Runway 1, is the busiest in the country, with over 800 flights a day, roughly one every minute.

9:13Sharyn Alfonsi:To make it work, Hanoka says, air traffic controllers often relied on what they called a squeeze play. A squeeze play is when everything is dependent on an aircraft rolling, an aircraft slowing, and you know it's going to be a very close operation. So they're really just ones going up and ones going in at the same time? And that is a really common operation. Two airplanes on one runway within seconds of each other. Is that normal at other airports? No. So you'll get new controllers come in, so they've transferred from other facilities, and they'll look at the operation and say, absolutely not.

9:51And they'll withdraw from training. And that, when I was there, it was about 50%. 50 %? About half of the people that walked in the building to train would say, absolutely not.

10:00Sharyn Alfonsi:A year after the crash, nearly one-third of the controller positions in the DCA tower are unfilled. It was surprising walking into that work environment how close the aircraft were. Is it just kind of accepted there? Yeah. This is what has to happen in order to make this airspace work. And it did work. It worked until it didn't. In January, the NTSB determined the midair collision of Flight 5342 and the Blackhawk helicopter was preventable. In its 388-page report, investigators didn't identify a single cause of the accident. Rather, they called out systemic failures, including ignored warning signs about risks and a helicopter route that was designed so poorly that in some parts of the sky, it allowed for just 75 feet of vertical separation between helicopters and passenger jets.

10:56I flew these routes hundreds of times.

10:59Sharyn Alfonsi:During his 20 years in the Army, Tim Lilly flew Black Hawk helicopters, often down the Potomac River near DCA. The night of the crash, investigators say, the Black Hawk crew was relying on what's called visual separation, literally just looking out the window to avoid nearby passenger jets. To apply visual separation, the pilot has to positively identify the other aircraft. And say that's the plane you're talking about? That's the plane, and he has to maintain constant surveillance on that aircraft, which is impossible under these conditions. Impossible, he says, because the crew was likely wearing night vision goggles, which Lilly says limit what a pilot can see.

11:42Sharyn Alfonsi:Help people out with this at home because I think we've all watched enough movies where you see somebody put on night vision goggles and they can see everything. But that's not the case. Especially under these conditions, that's not the case. So when you have a lot of bright lights like you do in Washington, D.C. area, everything gets washed out through the goggles.

12:04Sharyn Alfonsi:The NTSB built this simulation to show what those Black Hawk pilots saw, or rather, what they couldn't see. That green circle indicates the pilot's view wearing night vision goggles. That purple circle is the American Airlines jet they were supposed to be looking out for. You can see how it's hard to distinguish between an airliner and ground lights. Night vision goggles also limit peripheral vision, so the crew on a training mission didn't see Flight 5342 until it was too late. The proper way to fly that is constantly scanning, always moving your head side to side because your field of view is limited with goggles.

12:45Sharyn Alfonsi:But why is that kind of training happening in this airspace where it's so busy? The military would say, this is where our mission is, this is where we need to train. And to some degree, I agree with that. But those training environments, they should be nowhere near commercial airliners. Tim Lilly is now advocating for changes to make the sky safer. His son, Sam, shared his love of aviation. And in the cruelest twist of fate, was the first officer on American Airlines Flight 5342, one of the 67 killed in the crash. And I never thought to warn him about the helicopters because I just didn't realize how far the safety margins had slipped since I had flown those routes.

13:31This was a system that failed the people on the aircraft, on the helicopter, in the air traffic control tower.

13:42Sharyn Alfonsi:Jennifer Homendy is the chairwoman of the NTSB. After a year-long investigation, the agency suggested 50 safety recommendations to prevent similar accidents. If everybody knows those close calls are dangerous, then why didn't anybody step in and say, we have to lighten the load here? The air traffic control tower the entire time was saying, we have a real safety problem here and nobody was listening. It was like somebody was asleep at the switch or didn't want to act. It is a bureaucratic nightmare. Immediately after the accident, the FAA moved some helicopter routes away from DCA and ended the use of visual separation.

14:25Sharyn Alfonsi:Earlier this month, it expanded that ban to busy airports across the country. In a statement to 60 Minutes, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he's helped secure more than$12 billion to, quote, aggressively overhaul our air traffic control system. But the problems at DCA continue. Since the crash, 60 Minutes has learned at least four times aircraft and helicopters have gotten too close, triggering safety reports. It is unconscionable that we are having to be here right now. Some of the families of Flight 5342 are now fixtures on Capitol Hill, advocating for aircraft surveillance technology that might have saved their loved ones.

15:09Sharyn Alfonsi:Jennifer Homendy says if the FAA and lawmakers don't move quickly on safety legislation, they are clearing the path for another disaster. I imagine most of them fly in and out of DCA. They do. So what would you say if they were listening? I'd say, why do we always have to wait until people die to take action?

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16:41Sharyn Alfonsi:Now, Holly Williams on assignment for 60 Minutes. When America went to war with Iran last month, the US military faced an enemy using mass-produced drones to deadly effect. The same weapons have been used for years in Ukraine, some of them supplied by Iran to Russia. Unmanned and remotely controlled, drones have transformed the Ukrainian battlefield. They're estimated to inflict around 80 % of combat casualties on both sides. The technology is nothing short of revolutionary, and it's evolving rapidly. As we discovered, to adapt to the new era, the US military is learning lessons from Ukraine.

17:36Forget everything you think you know about warfare.

17:43The traditional front line in Ukraine has expanded to a roughly 10-mile-wide strip called the Kill Zone.

17:54Anyone who sets foot there can be spotted by a drone operator and hunted down.

18:04This was a narrow escape for some Ukrainian soldiers. They call these Frankenstein tanks, retrofitted with cages and mesh to deflect drone strikes. Netting covers roads close to the front, designed to catch them before they hit their target. To evade interference from electronic jammers, as both militaries launch drones attached to miles-long spools of fibre-optic wire, leaving behind a digital spider's web. But the drones are not just in the air. Continuously innovating. Yes. Beside a frozen lake, Ukraine's security service took us to see one of their most treasured weapons. I mean, it looks a bit like a fishing boat, Scout.

18:56That's an outboard motor? Yeah, yeah. It's a C-drone, developed in Ukraine, called C-Baby. We're protecting this operator's identity because he's a target for Russian assassination. What's the payload on this? It can really take 2 ,000 kilograms. 2 ,000 kilos of explosives. Is that enough to take out a Russian warship? Yes. Produced for around$300 ,000, Ukrainian sea drones have destroyed warships that cost tens of millions. Ukraine says it's used them to sink or disable 11 Russian vessels. Which one is more useful, a warship or a sea drone like the Sea Baby? Sea drone, I think it's really hard to destroy these drones because they are smaller.

19:46That's why to have like 10 ships like this is much better than having one big one. Wow. To be clear, you're saying you'd rather have 10 sea drones than a warship. Yeah. Necessity is the mother of invention. Oleksandr Commission started out the war as the CEO of Ukraine's railways. He was so good at his job, helping millions of Ukrainians to evacuate, that President Vladimir Zelensky recruited him to become the architect of Ukraine's drone program. Cheap, fast, efficient. Commission told us he helped boost Ukraine's production from 2 ,000 drones a year to 4 million. For the outnumbered Ukrainians, the inexpensive new technology has allowed them to level the battlefield.

20:37It's a data-driven war. We speak numbers. It's a numbers game. What do you mean by a numbers game? We have to count everything. We have to count number of drones we use, efficiency of each of them, cost to kill for every Russian. And what is the cost of killing every Russian? You would be surprised, but the cost of killing every Russian is less than$1 ,000 now. That's why they send so many people to die on the front line. They don't count them. They don't value them. Would you want to be in Vladimir Putin's shoes right now? No. Strategically, he lost. He wanted us to become weaker, became much stronger.