A United Airlines Boeing 737 carrying 162 passengers came dangerously close to a Black Hawk military helicopter Tuesday night while on final approach to John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California, and the air traffic controller on duty made no effort to sugarcoat what happened.
"We're gonna be addressing that because that was not good," the controller said, according to air traffic control audio obtained by the New York Post.
The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed Thursday it is investigating the close call, which occurred at about 8:40 p.m. when a Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter crossed directly in front of United Flight 589's flight path. The incident comes just weeks after the FAA announced a new safety measure designed to prevent exactly this kind of encounter, and the agency now says it is looking into whether that measure was even applied.
United Airlines told Fox News Digital that its pilots had been warned to "watch for a military helicopter flying near the airport." The crew spotted the helicopter and received a traffic collision avoidance system alert, known as a resolution advisory, prompting them to level the aircraft to avoid the Black Hawk.
A United spokesperson stated:
"They saw the helicopter and also received a traffic alert, which they responded to by leveling the aircraft. The United flight then landed safely."
All 162 passengers and six crew members aboard the Boeing 737-800 were unharmed. But the recorded exchange between the controller and the cockpit tells a sharper story than the airline's measured statement.
The controller reportedly asked the crew:
"United 589, just want to clarify here, did you get, uh... just a traffic call reference to the helicopter or did they restrict your altitude or anything."
A pilot replied simply: "We had a resolution advisory for United 589, RA." A resolution advisory is the most urgent level of alert from the onboard collision avoidance system. It means the system determined a collision threat was imminent enough to command the pilots to change altitude.
The controller's blunt assessment, "that was not good", suggests the separation between the two aircraft fell well below what anyone in the tower considered acceptable. The FAA has not released specific altitude or distance figures.
What makes this incident more than a routine near miss is the timing. On March 18, the FAA announced a general notice, known as a GENOT, that changed how controllers handle traffic between airplanes and helicopters. The measure was enacted after a review triggered by the catastrophic midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on January 29, 2025, when an Army Black Hawk helicopter struck an American Airlines regional jet, killing all 64 people aboard the commercial flight and three soldiers in the helicopter.
The FAA described the new policy on its website:
"The general notice (GENOT), which suspends the use of visual separation between airplanes and helicopters, now mandates that air traffic controllers will instead use radar to actively manage these aircraft to keep them separated at specific lateral or vertical distances."
In plain terms: controllers can no longer rely on pilots simply seeing and avoiding helicopters. They must use radar to maintain defined separation. The FAA said Thursday it is now investigating whether this new mandate was properly applied during Tuesday's encounter at John Wayne Airport.
That is a question worth pressing hard. The entire point of the GENOT was to prevent another close call between a commercial jet and a military helicopter. If the measure failed its first real-world test barely a month after it was announced, the FAA owes the flying public a clear accounting of what went wrong.
Tuesday's scare at John Wayne Airport did not happen in a vacuum. It arrived just days after an Air Canada jet collided with a fire truck on a runway at New York City's LaGuardia Airport, killing both pilots on board. That incident raised its own grave questions about how an air traffic controller cleared both the plane and the fire truck onto the same runway.
And before LaGuardia, at least one pilot had warned months earlier that conditions at that airport were becoming dangerous. The warning went unheeded. Two people died.
The January crash near Reagan National was the deadliest U.S. commercial aviation disaster in years. Sixty-seven people lost their lives. The review it triggered produced the GENOT. The GENOT was supposed to fix the problem. Now, weeks later, a United crew had to execute an emergency avoidance maneuver because a Black Hawk helicopter crossed their flight path on final approach.
The U.S. Army, which operates Black Hawk helicopters, did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's inquiries about Tuesday's incident. Key questions remain unanswered: What unit was the helicopter assigned to? What was its mission? Who authorized its flight path near an active commercial airport approach corridor? And did the tower have radar separation in place, as the new FAA mandate requires?
The FAA's post-Reagan-National review produced a policy change. That is what agencies do after disasters, they review, they announce, they publish new rules. The harder question is always whether those rules translate into real-world safety or remain words on a website.
Tuesday night at John Wayne Airport, 168 people aboard United Flight 589 came close enough to a military helicopter that the plane's own collision avoidance system commanded an emergency maneuver. The controller on duty called it what it was. The FAA is now investigating whether its own new rule was followed.
The details of the LaGuardia collision aftermath are still fresh, wreckage, fatalities, and questions about controller decisions. The Reagan National crash before that killed sixty-seven. The American public boards commercial flights trusting that the system separating them from disaster actually works.
When the FAA publishes a safety mandate and then has to investigate whether anyone followed it a month later, that trust is not being earned. It is being tested.
Policies that exist only on paper protect no one at 8:40 on a Tuesday night.
