Flights briefly paused at DC airport as unauthorized drone appears over runway
(CNN) — Flights at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were stopped for about 20 minutes on Wednesday night after two pilots spotted a drone flying over the active runway, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
“We saw, like, a drone or something that went flying by, probably halfway down the runway,” the pilot of an American Airlines regional jet, landing from Tulsa, radioed the control tower, according to audio captured by the app ATC.com.
“I saw a light that I thought might have been a drone too,” a charter pilot waiting to take off for New Jersey added.
The air traffic controller warned other pilots about the “unauthorized UAS (unmanned aerial system) activity reported in the vicinity of DCA, type and color unknown,” and flights were halted.
“It definitely wasn’t nothing,” he told the pilot who made the first report.
Airport operations workers searched for the drone, but did not find it.
Local and federal authorities were notified of the incident, the FAA said in a statement.
The FBI investigates illegal drone activity and federal charges can result in a year in jail and fines up to $100,000.
Unmanned aircraft are prohibited in much of the airspace around Washington, DC. Reagan National Airport is only a few miles from the White House, the Capitol and next door to the Pentagon.
The area around airports is also off limits for drones, due to the danger of colliding with aircraft with people onboard.
In January 2025, Reagan National Airport was the site of the deadliest aircraft accident in the United States in more than two decades when a manned US Army Blackhawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines regional jet. Sixty-seven people were killed.
In the resulting investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board later uncovered 15,214 “near miss events” at the airport between 2021 and 2024, where aircraft were within one nautical mile of each other, with a vertical separation of less than 400 feet.
The “overburdened” Reagan National Airport, which sits on a relatively small area of 860 acres, has long been one of the nation’s busiest airports, according to the Coalition to Protect America’s Regional Airports. Its main runway is the busiest in the country, with over 800 daily takeoffs and landings, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority.
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CNN’s Alexandra Skores and Pete Muntean contributed to this report.
