Did China Sabotage a Black Hawk Helicopter, Rehearsing for a Future Assassination?

The deadliest air crash in United States history happened on January 29, 2025.

Sixty passengers and four crew members were on American Eagle flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas. Their destination was Reagan National Airport.

They’d travelled over a thousand miles and were descending to their destination, only a half mile away from the runway where the landing gear would touch ground. Just another ordinary flight landing under clear winter skies in Washington D.C.

Of course, that landing never happened. As the flight descended to 325 feet, a United States Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter with three crew members flew straight into it. No one survived the collision.

If that sounds surreal — a lethal military helicopter flying in the same space as a commercial flight from Wichita — it’s actually common at Reagan National Airport.

Other airports are busier in terms of total flights, but no airport in the nation has the combination of high traffic, security concerns, and constrained airspace you find over Reagan National.

In fact, the Black Hawk crew had flown this exact route before. “Route 4,” as they called it, was part of a standard training mission. And the crew knew the altitude restriction: fly under 200 feet and you’re good.

This brings us to the first strange fact still haunting investigators:  on this night, they didn’t fly under 200 feet. For some reason the helicopter ascended to over 300 feet — directly in the path of the passenger plane.

It strains belief to think the Black Hawk crew made this kind of mistake. Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Eaves had flown that route along the Potomac hundreds of times, according to a friend. A senior advisory pilot called the Black Hawk crew “stellar when it comes to aviation”. Yet, that is exactly what happened.

Was the Black Hawk somehow sabotaged to put it in harms way?

This too, strains belief. After all, even if the helicopter was somehow made to change altitude without the crew realizing, they would still be warned about the coming danger.

The helicopter was equipped with an Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) which gives warnings about the civilian airplane’s location. The ADS-B also transmits the Black Hawk’s location to nearby commercial airplanes.

There would be time for both plane and helicopter to get out of the way. Except for one thing.

The ADS-B was off.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was among many mystified by this fact. National Transportation Safety Board officials told Mr. Cruz the helicopter's ADS-B was not active. “The reason for turning it off does not seem justified," Cruz said. "And in this instance, this was a training mission, so there was no compelling national security reason for ADS-B to be turned off.”

Why was their main source of location data turned off?

Was the Black Hawk hacked by an enemy nation, looking for ways to turn the helicopter into a weapon? Actually, that’s impossible. No part of the Black Hawk’s systems are connected to the internet at any time.

The onboard computers are a secure, closed-loop system. Encrypted data links over satellite are used for real-time communication and data exchange. There’s no path for a hacker to access the system. If, for example, the Chinese wanted to alter the Black Hawk’s computers, they’d have to get their hands on a physical copy.

And back in 2013, they did just that.

In May of that year, U.S. Intelligence Officials noticed something odd about a photograph they intercepted. It showed a new helicopter model on display at the China Helicopter Research and Development Institute in East China.

The model — called the Z-20, a so-called “new” type of helicopter for the Chinese military — was strikingly similar to another iconic aircraft: the U.S. Military’s Black Hawk. Even stranger, the Chinese model had features that mirrored customizations made to Black Hawk helicopters, used to infiltrate the Al Qaeda compound harboring terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden.

These alterations reduced the helicopter’s radar signature, allowing the Black Hawks to avoid detection when they transported special forces to eliminate Bin Laden.

One of these custom “stealth Black Hawks” crashed in the raid. And it turns out, before the U.S. recovered the wreckage and brought it safely home, Pakistan allowed experts from China to examine the craft.

Reports from the time claimed Chinese officials took photographs and samples of the materials used on the stealth Black Hawk.

How much help was this wreckage to China’s helicopter development? One expert estimated their knowledge of advanced helicopter design jumped 10 years into the future. Simply by examining the materials and designs from the U.S. Black Hawk, the Chinese were able to clone it for their military.

Pakistani intelligence denies to this day they allowed the Chinese military access to the Black Hawk wreckage. But the photograph of the Chinese Z-20 - a clear copy of the Black Hawk — was proof enough.

Were they able to clone the systems of the Black Hawk and sabotage active missions? And why all that trouble for this particular mission? What’s so special about a Black Hawk on Route 4, that a hostile government would target it for attack?

It might have something to do with the mission. The Black Hawk crew was training for an evacuation, in a crisis where continuity of government was the big concern. In other words, if this were a real emergency, that Black Hawk would be carrying government officials key to our survival as a nation. Prime targets indeed.

More to come.

SOURCES:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/30/us/washington-dc-plane-crash-helicopter-maps-photos.html?searchResultPosition=3

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/plane-crash-dc-helicopter-reagan-airport.html?searchResultPosition=2 

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/02/07/black-hawk-deadly-collision-may-have-turned-off-location-monitor-trump-blames-air-traffic-control.html

https://thediplomat.com/2013/12/did-china-just-clone-a-black-hawk-helicopter/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/us/politics/black-hawk-helicopter-crew-dc-crash-families.html?searchResultPosition=1

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2025/01/30/passenger-jet-collides-with-army-helicopter-at-reagan-airport/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/15/us-helicopter-pakistan-china-wreckage

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/02/helicopter-airplane-collision-dc-updates/78154023007/

https://thediplomat.com/2013/12/did-china-just-clone-a-black-hawk-helicopter/

https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2021/06/01/how-pakistan-gave-china-military-tech-used-by-us-in-attacks-on-bin-laden.html