The victims’ families were worried. For months, they had waited for the House to pick up a bill to enact new rules on aircraft that officials have said might have prevented a midair collision over Washington last year that killed 67 people. But the chairman of the House committee overseeing aviation had made it clear he was not a fan of the legislation, called the ROTOR Act.
“Are you going to work to kill ROTOR?” Tim Lilley, the father of one of the airplane pilots, asked a senior panel aide during a virtual meeting between congressional staff members and the victims’ families, according to four people who recalled the conversation.
No, the staff member said. Representative Sam Graves, Republican of Missouri and the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, would promote his own alternate legislation, but not work to kill the ROTOR Act. The families left feeling confident that the bill would pass.
Less than a week later, the families watched in shock from the House gallery as Republican leaders tanked the legislation in open forum.
The photo-finish downfall of the ROTOR Act, which narrowly failed, stunned the families, who had taken days off work and traveled from as far as Colorado to watch what they believed would be the culmination of their 13-month lobbying effort for new aviation safety laws. Instead, their impassioned campaign ran headfirst into the meat grinder of congressional politics, which let them down at multiple junctures — and left the prospects of aviation safety legislation unclear.
“The whole thing felt like an exercise in bad faith,” said Rachel Feres, whose cousin, Peter Livingston; his wife, Donna; and their two daughters, Everly and Alydia, were passengers on American Airlines Flight 5342 when it was struck by an Army Black Hawk helicopter above Ronald Reagan National Airport. “It was all of the parts of D.C. that people find gross, and that was hard — and infuriating.”
Mr. Graves’s alternate bill, which he wrote with his panel’s top Democrat, Representative Rick Larsen of Washington, and the bipartisan leaders of the House Armed Services Committee, is now advancing apace. Next week, the transportation committee is expected to prepare the legislation, called the ALERT Act, for a House vote, which is likely to be held soon thereafter. But it is expected to get an icy reception in the Senate, where the authors of the ROTOR Act have vowed not to budge from their demands for specific technology and stringent limitations on the military.
The ROTOR Act would have forced nearly all aircraft to install advanced location tracking technology, called ADS-B In. The National Transportation Safety Board determined such technology would have given the pilots of the commercial jet and the military helicopter that collided near Washington last year nearly a minute to avoid each other. The ROTOR Act also would have sharply limited when military aircraft could turn off location broadcasting technology, known as ADS-B Out, in congested airspace.
The ALERT Act covers a wider range of aviation issues exposed by last year’s collision, adding requirements for new safety management systems, reviews of air traffic control staffing, and updates to post-accident drug and alcohol testing policies. But when it comes to the technology and military matters addressed under the ROTOR Act, the ALERT Act’s demands are less specific and less stringent.
It is unclear how the two camps, especially after the experience surrounding the ROTOR Act, can reach a middle ground.
The families were in some ways justified in their expectation that the ROTOR Act would pass. The bill had earned the unanimous backing of the Senate. The Pentagon endorsed it in December. And Republican leaders treated the measure as uncontroversial by putting it on the House’s suspension calendar, a special category for legislation expected to draw easy bipartisan support without amendments. Such bills need the support of two-thirds of the House to pass.
The plan to put the bill on the floor had been set in motion weeks before, in a handshake deal in late January between Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing aviation and the chief Republican author of the ROTOR Act.
Mr. Cruz had been pressing for ROTOR to be attached to must-pass legislation to fund parts of the federal government. When it was not, he threatened to hold up the Senate vote on the spending bill and pitch the government into a partial shutdown.
To placate Mr. Cruz, Mr. Johnson made an offer: Let the spending bill pass, and Mr. Johnson would soon put the ROTOR Act on the suspension calendar. Mr. Cruz accepted, and Mr. Johnson made good on his promise.
But the Republican chairs of the House committees overseeing aviation and the military were never included in — or on board with — the plan. And both objected to the bill.
Mr. Graves, the transportation committee chairman, contended that the ROTOR Act was a premature and “emotional” overreach motivated by a desire to respond to the D.C. tragedy. There were also concerns, shared by Republicans and Democrats on the panel, that implementing the bill’s technology mandates might be complicated for commercial aircraft.
On Monday afternoon, in a surprise statement, the Pentagon withdrew its endorsement of the ROTOR Act, citing budgetary and national security concerns. That emboldened the opposition of Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama and the chairman of the armed services panel, who argued on the House floor hours later that the legislation posed a threat to national security.
“Requiring our fighters and bombers and highly classified assets to regularly broadcast their locations puts our men and women in uniform at risk by exposure,” he said, calling the ROTOR Act “a flawed response to last year’s tragic midair collision at Reagan National.”
The bill exempts “sensitive government missions” from its location broadcasting requirements, but prevents the military from exempting routine flights, training flights, nonclassified missions or flights to transport anyone below the rank of a cabinet secretary.
By Tuesday morning, the chairmen’s concerns, and the national security argument in particular, had reached their intended audience. As House Republican lawmakers huddled behind closed doors for a regular weekly meeting, the escalating dispute over the ROTOR Act vote — set for that afternoon — was front of mind.
Mr. Johnson, despite having treated the bill procedurally as a noncontroversial measure, did not defend it, according to three people at the meeting. Instead, he told his members to vote their conscience. When the time came to vote that afternoon, however, it seemed to many that the G.O.P.’s leaders were not content to leave the bill’s outcome to fate.
As the leaders worked the floor during the vote, at least six Republicans who had cast a vote in favor of the ROTOR Act switched their votes. Mr. Cruz, in a rare move, was also in the House chamber for the vote, speaking with Mr. Johnson and other members as he tried to salvage support for the bill.
The tally in favor of the legislation was still ticking up when the vote was abruptly gaveled to a close.
“There was one member on the floor that was dithering, and I could have convinced him to vote yes,” recalled Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who voted in favor of the bill. “But I felt certain if I had, they would just find another ‘no.’”
Mr. Graves, in keeping with the promise his staff member had made the victims’ families, did not appear to be working the floor to turn votes against the measure. And while the Democratic co-authors of the ALERT Act voted in favor of the ROTOR Act, the entire Republican leadership team voted against it.
Several New England Democrats who supported the legislation, including some with constituents whose relatives died during the midair collision, missed the vote when their flights were delayed after a snowstorm. The one Democrat who voted against the bill, Representative Lizzie Fletcher of Texas, said on social media on Tuesday that she has a policy of voting against all bills brought up under suspension of the rules, regardless of their content.
“I hope you find comfort in this principled position the next time a mid-air collision takes lives, as happened to my wife and son,” replied Doug Lane, whose wife, Christine, and son Spencer were on American Airlines Flight 5342. “You could have saved lives today by voting yes for the ROTOR Act, which was defeated by one vote.”
On the morning after the vote, after digesting their anger and wiping away their tears, some of the victims’ families met with staff members for Mr. Johnson — the first time any of them had an in-person audience with the speaker’s office. The speaker’s team wanted to discuss the way forward, now that the ROTOR Act was in the rearview mirror and the ALERT Act was poised for consideration.
There was no daylight, the families told the speaker’s staff, between them, Mr. Cruz’s bill and the N.T.S.B. recommendations. They wanted to see the ROTOR Act’s technology mandates and its restrictions on the military put in place, and that was their bottom line.
Though the N.T.S.B.’s investigative report largely absolved the Army Black Hawk pilots of personal culpability, many of the victims’ families still feel that more restrictions on military aircraft might have spared their loved ones aboard American Airlines Flight 5342.
“The military killed my family,” one of the relatives told the speaker’s staff, according to three people familiar with the exchange, who declined to identify the family member. “And you just enabled the military to kill the bill that would have saved their lives.”
Robert Jimison and Kate Kelly contributed reporting.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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