The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday released its final report on the midair collision near Ronald Reagan National Airport last year that killed 67 people, as the House announced plans to vote next week on legislation to address some of the institutional failures that investigators said led to the accident.
The 419-page document, which brings the board’s intense scrutiny of the accident to a close, did not contain any bombshell revelations, as the board detailed its findings and recommendations late last month. But its presentation of how missed warnings, institutional failures and human errors serve as a detailed and at times devastating account of the episode, which the safety board’s chairwoman, Jennifer Homendy, has said was “100 percent preventable.”
The report’s recommendations also serve as a list of action items for aviation safety advocates, who have been pushing for some of the advised changes since long before the crash. But it will be up to Congress and federal agencies whether to implement any of the recommendations.
In Congress, the Senate has passed a bipartisan bill to compel the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct safety reviews of airports, and require planes flying through busy airspace to have advanced location tracking technology.
That would address two of the key factors that the N.T.S.B. identified in its findings about what caused an Army Black Hawk helicopter to fly into American Airlines Flight 5342 on the night of Jan. 29, without any of the pilots realizing they were on a collision course until barely more than a second before they crashed.
But in the House, Representative Sam Graves of Missouri, the Republican chairman of that chamber’s transportation committee, has resisted pressure to advance the legislation.
Justin Harclerode, a spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday that the Republican and Democratic leaders of that panel and the one overseeing armed services were “working expeditiously on a comprehensive bill to address the range of issues identified by the N.T.S.B.’s now complete investigation,” He added that the House would soon move forward with its own legislation.
Nonetheless, on Tuesday afternoon, following the release of the N.T.S.B. report, House leaders announced plans to put the legislation passed by the Senate to a vote as soon as Monday, with no changes. Two-thirds of the House will have to support the legislation in order for it to pass.
During a hearing last week to review the N.T.S.B.’s findings, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing transportation, maintained that the bill would “begin to protect the flying public now, which is why the House should pass it and put it on the president’s desk.”
The F.A.A. and the Army have so far not committed to implementing extensive new recommendations the N.T.S.B. approved late last month. Last year, however, the F.A.A. did heed the N.T.S.B.’s recommendations to redirect helicopter traffic around the airport and drastically limit the number of aircraft allowed to pass through the airspace without broadcasting their location to other planes. It implemented the changes just days after the board requested them.
“Since Secretary Duffy took office, he and the F.A.A. have taken decisive steps to correct past failures, strengthen accountability and modernize” the national airspace, the F.A.A. said in a statement, referring to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. “Today, we are acting proactively to mitigate risks before they affect the traveling public.”
The Army did not respond to a request for comment.
The relationship between the F.A.A. and Army has been strained as the aviation safety agency tries to regulate the movements of military aircraft through busy airspace and the military presses to relax the restrictions. In the last week, those tensions were exacerbated by a standoff in El Paso. The F.A.A. temporarily restricted all flights under 18,000 feet there after U.S. Customs and Border Protection, using a high-energy counter-drone laser on loan from the Pentagon, shot down a metallic balloon. The F.A.A. had not yet approved plans to deploy the technology, permission that is required by law.
In its final report, the N.T.S.B. issued eight recommendations to the Army. Most of them were directed at training military aviators about the challenges of flying near Reagan National, the limitations of the equipment on board their aircraft, and the collection and assessment of flight safety data.
But the bulk of the N.T.S.B.’s new recommendations — 33 of them — were directed at the F.A.A., which board members faulted for poor airport design at Reagan National, ignoring multiple warnings about the potential for collisions. The board also described a culture within the F.A.A. that caused controllers to become accustomed to overwork that sometimes detracted from their ability to closely monitor flights coming dangerously close to one another.
On the night of the accident on Jan. 29, 2025, one controller was handling both airplane and helicopter traffic — a double load that the N.T.S.B. found was unnecessary because the control tower at Reagan National had enough staff on hand to avoid it. The board also determined that the controller gave the helicopter pilots too much latitude to manage their own flight through the congested airspace around Reagan National, and never warned the commercial jet pilots to keep an eye out for the Army Black Hawk headed their way.
The board also stressed that mandating the use of more advanced location tracking technology — a recommendation it has made as part of multiple aviation accident investigations — could have given the pilots a chance to avoid hitting each other in the contorted airspace around Reagan National, even without the guidance of a controller.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
The post House Plans to Vote on Air Safety Bill After Report on Deadly D.C. Crash appeared first on New York Times.
