From CBS News headquarters in New York, this is the CBS Evening News.

Good evening. I'm Maurice Dubois.

I'm John Dickerson.

What a U.S. Army helicopter and an American Airlines plane collided mid-air near Washington

in January, killing 67 people.

That was once too often. But after it almost happened

again, a close call Friday between an Air Force plane and a Delta jetliner near Reagan Airport,

we decided to investigate. So how often does it happen? A close call involving a military aircraft.

We found that over nearly four decades, it has happened more

than 2,000 times. Senior Transportation correspondent Chris Van Cleave is in Washington. Chris.

Tonight, the NTSB is investigating this latest incident near Washington's Reagan National Airport,

but our data analysis finds nationwide, the military appears to account for an

outsized number of what the FAA calls near mid-air collisions.

Delta Flight 2983 had just taken off for Minneapolis with 136 aboard when its pilots

got a collision avoidance alert calling for evasive maneuvers. The reason four Air Force T-38 jets were streaking towards a flyover at Arlington National

Cemetery at about 350 miles an hour.

There are actually about 500 feet below us as we came off of the D-J.

A CBS News data analysis found of the more than 8,000 near mid-air collisions voluntarily reported

to the FAA between 1987 and 2021, nearly one in four involved at least one military aircraft.

And when it comes to close calls between the military and commercial airliners, there were

258 reports. 34 deemed critically close to a collision.

That's despite military aircraft accounting for only about 2% of all miles flown annually.

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