I'm pretty sure Piedmont doesn't have any 1500hr captains running around, and I'm also pretty sure they're at least vaguely familiar with ops in the NE including DCA, so I wouldn't go hanging the crew for this one just yet. Its likely they missed a handoff or something and were temporarily NORDO inside the ADIZ prompting the response; in the grand scheme of things, that's not really that big a deal. Anybody remember the state of Kentucky's King Air 200 causing the Capitol to be evacuated during Reagan's funeral a few years ago? They lost their transponder enroute and the FAA allowed them to continue to landing at DCA, but FAA didn't talk to NORAD about it and well, the rest was breaking news.

If this crew *did* enter P56 then yeah, that sucks...but I'm pretty sure every airline that flies in and out of DCA has at least one occurance every year, some airlines multiple occurrences.

I've seen Dashes come down the Anacostia on the east side of P56 more than once; dunno if that is what happened here but that's just different enough from normal ops to make me as a pilot nervous.