The House fell short of the support needed on Tuesday to pass aviation safety legislation to require planes to carry advanced location tracking technology that federal investigators determined could have helped avoid a midair collision over the Potomac River last year that killed 67.
The bipartisan legislation, known as the ROTOR Act, passed the Senate unanimously in December, after the Pentagon threw its support behind the measure. But in a surprise about-face, the Defense Department withdrew its support over national security and cost concerns.
The 264-to-133 vote was only one vote shy of the two-thirds of the House lawmakers needed to send the legislation to President Trump’s desk. The bill’s failure also upends the debate around how to respond to last year’s fatal crash between a military helicopter and a commercial jet, as the Senate-backed initiative clashes with competing legislation championed by House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee leaders.
“How many more people need to die for us to decide that action needs to be taken?” Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the N.T.S.B., told reporters shortly before the vote, arguing that an alternative bill largely “doesn’t implement the N.T.S.B. recommendations.”
The ROTOR Act was the product of intense negotiations between Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, who settled on their bipartisan compromise last fall. It would have required the F.A.A. to conduct a safety review of the flight routes at all large and midsize airports. It would have limited what military aircraft can turn off advanced location broadcasting technology when flying through congested airspace. And it would have forced nearly all aircraft to install advanced location tracking technology by the end of 2031, in an attempt to help pilots better see one another’s locations.
The N.T.S.B. determined that the tracking technology, known as ADS-B In, could have given the pilots of the Army Black Hawk helicopter and commercial jet that collided on the night of Jan. 29, 2025, almost a minute’s warning that they were on a collision course, had it been installed. Instead, the pilots realized they were about to crash only a little more than a second before impact.
The alternative bill, called the ALERT Act, requires aircraft to be equipped with technology that can receive ADS-B In alerts, but does not specify what that technology must be — or when it must be operational. It also includes detailed carve-outs for certain types of aircraft.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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