Washington Concerns have been raised by a number of Congressmen regarding the air congestion in the vicinity of Wednesday night’s collision between a military helicopter and a commercial passenger flight over the Potomac River.
Lawmakers stated they trusted the National Transportation Safety Board to conduct a thorough, protracted inquiry and did not assign responsibility for the disaster. However, they claimed the fatal collision heightened concerns about traffic in a busy transit corridor where passenger jets entering and leaving Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) share airspace with military and other helicopters.
This has caused me a great deal of worry for a long time and still does. I am confident that the National Transportation Safety Board will conduct an investigation into this. I won’t speculate as to what caused this terrible catastrophe; they will investigate. They will complete the task. They do it well. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., assured reporters Thursday that they would provide us with answers.
However, I have been quite concerned about this extremely complicated commercial and military airspace as well as the way that it is severely restricted due to the security requirements of being the nation’s capital. “And I’m quite concerned about that,” he added.
Kaine stated, “I’ve been praying that there won’t be anything like last night, but I kind of dread that there would be.”
The American Eagle jet was traveling from Wichita, Kansas, to DCA, which is located on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, with 60 passengers and four crew members. The Army Black Hawk helicopter had three passengers. There were no survivors in the incident, according to President Donald Trump during a White House briefing.
There are several reasons why the airspace over Washington is complicated. With hundreds of planes arriving and departing daily, DCA is among the busiest airports in the nation. In 2023, the airport handled a record 25.5 million passengers.
Due to security concerns, certain airspace is prohibited above Washington. Additionally, because the District of Columbia is the nation’s capital and is situated between Maryland and Virginia, a large number of other aircraft, including those from the National Park Service, the Metropolitan Police Department, the military, and Marine One, use the area. DCA is located directly across the Potomac from Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.
According to Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and a former member of the Armed Services Committee for 20 years, he has flown out of DCA innumerable times and has never before been concerned about traffic there.
However, he stated in a phone conversation on Thursday that the volume of traffic in that region definitely worries me in light of this tragedy. Larsen went on to say that the victims, their loved ones, and the emergency personnel who raced to the scene on Wednesday night should now be the main emphasis.
40 investigators and personnel were assigned to the disaster by the NTSB, he said, and their investigation might take over a year.
The laborious process of determining the underlying reason starts. Thus, the chronology is the chronology. In a few weeks, I anticipate a preliminary report, Larsen stated. However, it will take a long time to complete the inquiry. It might take eighteen months.
The nonstop trip between Wichita and DCA has been operating for about a year, and Kansas officials, including Republican Senator Jerry Moran, had pushed American Airlines to add it. “I’ve taken that flight a lot,” Moran added.
Republican Roger Marshall, the other senator from Kansas, informed reporters Thursday that he anticipated meeting with victims’ families in Washington later that afternoon and getting a briefing from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.
There was a lot of culpability to share, he continued, adding that the helicopter pilot should have seen several flights landing at DCA and that the air traffic controller should have had the jet and helicopter flying at different levels.
This was obviously a combination of mistakes. Marshall stated that it is unacceptable and that he appreciates President Trump and his team acknowledging that there are issues and challenges and that they would be fixed.
Marshall responded, “Certainly that’s what it looks like to me,” when asked if he was worried about the region’s air congestion. I am aware that it frequently occurs for military aircraft to share airspace with civilian planes. But is that really necessary? Are we merely inviting catastrophe? And I believe I also desire an answer to that question.
In recent years, the skies over Washington have become increasingly congested. In addition to increasing air traffic controller staffing, the FAA reauthorization act signed into law by President Joe Biden last April after being ratified by Congress also added five more longer-distance, round-trip flights out of DCA.
The agreement was negotiated by Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee leaders Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Maria Cantwell, D-Washington. However, the four Democratic senators from Maryland and Virginia opposed the additional flights, claiming that they would increase traffic and perhaps cause an accident.
The senator from Virginia, Kaine, brought up a recent near-collision between a Southwest Airlines and a JetBlue Airways aircraft on a DCA runway in a floor statement during the FAA discussion in May.
According to Kaine, there are safety dangers associated with congestion.
Cruz, who now serves as the chair of the commerce committee that oversees aviation matters, stated that his own panel will also conduct an investigation and that the FAA and NTSB would meet with the members of his panel later Thursday to discuss the crash’s current status.
“I intend to have a bipartisan member-level briefing with important federal officials as soon as possible, and I’ve instructed the Commerce Committee to actively gather information about what went wrong,” he wrote on X.
Since it’s too early to determine the cause, some senators were reluctant about attributing the accident to traffic.
Although he didn’t think the extra slots or flights were operational yet, Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, claimed that the FAA law from the previous year disregarded the concerns of regional leaders like himself.
Speaking on the Senate floor just hours before the disaster, he stated that the lack of air traffic controllers keeping an eye on the country’s sky is a greater problem.
The irony is that last night at around six o’clock, I made a speech on the floor that no one paid attention to, in which I clearly mentioned that we are short 2,000 air traffic controllers. Warner, who claimed to have driven by the crash location soon after it occurred, asked what would happen to the safety of our air spaces if a few thousand more people accepted this buyout.
He went on to say, “There will be time to go through the causality on this. “Today, we give our thoughts with those families who are getting this awful, awful news.”
Another member of the commerce panel, freshman Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, stated that the accident on Wednesday highlights the necessity for the upper chamber to expeditiously confirm Trump’s nominees.
Only a day before the tragedy, the Senate confirmed Sean Duffy as secretary of transportation. Speaking from the White House briefing room on Thursday, Trump announced the appointment of Chris Rocheleau, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force who spent more than 20 years at the FAA, as the agency’s next acting administrator.
“Just consider how we managed to get Sean Duffy to the finish line. In an interview, Moreno stated, “It demonstrates the significance of expeditiously completing these cabinet nominations.” “What if Sean Duffy hadn’t been verified? No one would be in charge of DOT. The lesson, in my opinion, is that it is crucial to complete these nominations.