Clark Allen, the operations manager at Reagan National the night of the crash, in an interview transcript said “everyone’s just trying to constantly make it work, make it work, make it work.”

Prior to the crash, air traffic controllers had asked their superiors to reduce the pace of flights at Reagan National. But that recommendation never went anywhere. On Thursday, some FAA officials involved with air traffic management said some of the problem isn’t the sheer number of flights, but that some airlines schedule them stacked up around certain times of the day. They recommended a flight limit cut into 30-minute chunks, rather than the current one hour, similar to procedures in place at LaGuardia International Airport in New York.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5757355&forum_id=2:#49150488)