The head of the Federal Aviation Administration told Congress during a hearing Thursday about a midair collision over Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people that the agency must do more to ensure flying remains safe.
The FAA’s artificial intelligence-led review aimed at identifying safety threats at other airports with similar helicopter-airplane congestion should be finished in a couple weeks, said Chris Rocheleau, the agency’s acting administrator.
During the hearing, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board and members of Congress again questioned how the FAA hadn’t noticed an alarming number of close calls near Ronald Reagan National Airport and addressed the problem before the January collision between an Army helicopter and a jetliner. The collision over the Potomac River was the nation’s deadliest plane crash since November 2001.
“We have to do better,” Rocheleau said. “We have to identify trends, we have to get smarter about how we use data, and when we put corrective actions in place, we must execute them.”
How the FAA is using AI
The FAA is using AI to dig into the millions of reports it collects to assess other places with busy helicopter traffic including: Boston, New York, Baltimore-Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and along the Gulf Coast. Rocheleau promised to take immediate action if risks are found.
Investigators have highlighted 85 close calls around Reagan airport in the three years before the crash that should have signaled a growing safety problem. Rocheleau told the aviation subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that every close call is investigated and all the data was reviewed before, but this alarming trend was missed.
NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said there clearly was an issue with identifying trends in the data the FAA collects.
Dailey Crofton, whose brother Casey Crofton died in the collision, attended the hearing.
“I was surprised at the lapses of safety protocols that led to this crash,” he said in a statement afterward.
Collision alarms keep going off
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said he learned that the Secret Service and U.S. Navy triggered a rash of collision alarms in planes around Reagan Airport on March 1 while testing anti-drone technology that used a similar frequency to the one used by planes’ warning systems. Cruz said that happened despite a warning from the FAA against doing it.
“This is deeply disturbing that just a month after 67 people died while on approach to DCA (Reagan Airport), that the Secret Service and Pentagon would inadvertently cause multiple flights to receive urgent cockpit alerts recommending evasive action,” Cruz said.
Helicopter traffic around Reagan National has been restricted since January any time planes use the same runway the American Airlines plane that crashed was approaching when it collided with the helicopter. At the NTSB’s urging, the FAA permanently banned that particular helicopter route under most circumstances. If a helicopter does use the route, planes are prohibited from taking off or landing on that runway.
The Army still wasn’t broadcasting helicopter locations
The U.S. Army’s head of aviation Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman acknowledged that as of Thursday morning helicopters were still flying over the nation’s capital with a key system broadcasting their locations turned off during most missions because it deemed them sensitive.
Cruz called this “shocking and deeply unacceptable.”
Rocheleau then said the FAA will immediately require all aircraft flying near Reagan National to broadcast their locations. The “ADS-B out data” is designed to help air traffic controllers better track an aircraft’s location with position updates every second..
Before that announcement, exceptions in the airspace above Washington allowed Army and other government aircraft to fly without transmitting, or fly in a mode that allowed less information to be transmitted to avoid broadcasting potentially sensitive missions to the public.
Former Black Hawk pilot Tim Lilley, father of airliner copilot Sam Lilley, said he’s disappointed that the Army has not taken simple steps to improve safety he recommended in a meeting with Braman, including turning on the locator systems, adding a fourth crew member or barring the use of older Black Hawks on routes around Washington.
“I was frustrated with the lack of accountability. The Army still doesn’t want to say that they did anything wrong,” said Lilley, who flew helicopter routes around the capital for four years in the 1990s as part of a 20-year Army career and now flies private jets.
Are the systems even working?
Homendy also noted that it is important to inspect the transmission equipment to make sure it actually works. The helicopter involved in this collision had not transmitted any location data for 730 days. When the NTSB checked the rest of the unit’s helicopters after the crash, it found eight of them that hadn’t transmitted since 2023.
Plus, Homendy said she’s not sure what the Army was doing with any close call reports it received or how closely it was monitoring whether its helicopters violated altitude limits during their flights like the one that collided with the jetliner did. She said most of the safety conversations at the battalion level were focused on “OSHA slips, trips and falls.”
