A deadly crash involving a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines flight claimed the lives of 67 people near Reagan National Airport. “You get that sick feeling in your stomach as you watch it happen,” said Jim Cardozo, a former Air Force pilot who is now the senior director of the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida. We asked him how this crash could have happened. “Well, that's what they're going to find out, because the National Capital Region, D.C., it's a very busy airspace, but there are procedures set in place to deconflict traffic just like that, so that aircraft can be landing [at] Reagan National Airport and helicopters can be navigating along the Potomac River. It's set up to enable that. So the investigation is going to look into what happened that had these two aircraft meeting each other in the sky,” Cardozo said. Being a pilot himself, we asked him how MacDill Air Force Base works within Tampa’s airspace during its training missions. “The Tampa [air traffic] approach is aware of that flight plan, the aircraft that MacDill will call for their flight plan clearance. And we'll get that clearance. That clearance is given by Tampa approach control because they know that that aircraft sitting on the ground and MacDill is soon going to fly into Tampa airspace. So they're the ones that actually provide that clearance,” Cardozo explained. He says training missions at MacDill happen regularly. “Their training missions, they tend to take off from here and go out and do air refueling for other aircraft, and so they're gone for several hours doing that. They're not normally just in the pattern a lot,” Cardozo added. “They are happening frequently. But again, like I said, the procedures they have are very solid to keep them deconflicted." Even so, he believes that leaders at the base will be going back and reviewing all protocols to make sure nothing like the tragedy that happened in D.C. happens again. MORE: https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/investigations/10-investigates/dc-plane-crash-tampa-macdill-afb/67-b01bafac-c42d-490a-8f96-5159f6bc5e86