If investigators were able to quickly find alarming data about the number of close calls in the years before the midair collision over the nation’s capital that killed 67 people in January, then aviation safety regulators should have seen the problem, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board told Congress on Thursday.
NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said there clearly was an issue with identifying trends in the data the Federal Aviation Administration collects.
Congress delved deeper into the deadly crash during a Senate committee hearing that was underway Thursday morning.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said he found it “deeply disturbing” to learn the Secret Service and U.S. Navy triggered a rash of collision alarms in planes around Ronald Reagan National Airport on March 1 because they were 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 Federal Aviation Administration against doing it.
The FAA’s acting administrator told the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that he knows the agency must make improvements to ensure flying remains the safest form of transportation.
“The professionals at the FAA take their jobs seriously and strive to ensure safety every day. But the fact of the matter is that we have to do better,” Chris 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.”
Investigators have highlighted 85 close calls around Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington D.C. in the three years before the crash that should have signaled a growing safety problem.
The FAA already has pledged to use artificial intelligence to dig into the millions of reports it collects to see if there are similar safety risks in other cities with heavy helicopter traffic that rival the concerns the National Transportation Safety Board has identified around Washington. Rocheleau said he expects that review to be completed in the next few weeks.
Helicopter traffic around Reagan National has been restricted since January any time planes are using 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 U.S. Army’s head of aviation Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman acknowledged that helicopters are still flying over the nation’s capital with a key system broadcasting their locations turned off during missions. The “ADS-B out data” is designed to let air traffic controllers track a helicopter’s location.
Cruz said this is “shocking and unacceptable.”
The Army says the helicopters’ highest-priority mission is evacuating top government officials in the event of an attack. Braman said the military has changed its policies governing when aircraft must transmit their location, but many helicopters still fly without the system on.
There were exceptions in the airspace above Washington that 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.
Rocheleau said FAA plans to now require all aircraft flying immediately around Reagan National to broadcast their locations.
Braman also said the policies governing those different transmission modes — and the level of seniority needed in the Army to waive the transmissions — has since been elevated.
The collision over the Potomac River was the deadliest plane crash in the U.S. since 2001, when a jet slammed into a New York City neighborhood just after takeoff, killing all 260 people on board and five more on the ground.
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Associated Press writer Tara Copp contributed to this report from Washington D.C.
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