Air traffic controllers At the Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, it will be offered crisis advice and additional supervision after a fight in the tower and Another alarming near the lady Two months after a collision in the air between a passenger plane and an army helicopter killed 67 people.
He Federal Aviation Administration Said Wednesday that is also evaluating whether the current arrival rate in Reagan is too high. The agency said it would extend additional support to the controllers who direct flights around the occupied airport while the Congress and the National Transport Security Board continue to investigate the deadly accident of January.
Senator Ted Cruz, president of the Senate Committee of Commerce, said that worrying problems since the accident “underlines the precarious situation in the Airspace of the Nation.” Expressing frustration with the army’s refusal to deliver a memorandum that details its flight rules, Cruz said during a audience on Wednesday that any death resulting from another collision near Reagan “will be at the hands of the army.”
The FAA’s decision to bring crisis counselors followed the arrest on Thursday of a 39 -year -old employee from Maryland under suspicion of assault and aggression after the fight tower fight, confirmed the Washington airport metropolitan authority in a statement.
No details about the altercation were published. FAA said the employee was put on administrative license while investigating the fight.
The next day, a Passenger plane from Delta had to take evasive measures, since it took off from Reagan due to the proximity of a flight of four air force airplanes involved in an elevated step in the National Cemetery of Arlington. The incident continued a Close call pattern That the NTSB has said continued around the airport for years, since commercial flights became dangerously close to helicopters and other airplanes.
The FAA said Wednesday that he was reviewing the “current arrival rate of aircraft per hour, which is concentrated disproportionately in the last 30 minutes of each hour.”
After The clash, The arrival rate at the airport fell at 26 per hour, while the crews worked to recover the remains of the Black Hawk helicopter by American Airlines Jet and the Potomac River army. But the interim chief of the FAA said at an audience last week that the arrivals are now back to 30 per hour and could get 32. Now the agency is rethinking that.
To help with stress, FAA plans regular welfare controls of your staff in Reagan and also puts the counselors available. It was not clear immediately if the agency took that step just after the accident of January 29. The number of supervisors will increase from six to eight, and the agency will evaluate whether it has enough controllers that work in each shift.
The union that represents air traffic controllers in Reagan and airports throughout the country He declined to comment on the situation.
During the audience on Wednesday, Cruz threatened the army with a summons if he did not give the committee a copy of his memo that stops when his plane can fly without a key system that transmits its location to other activated airplanes.
The fact that the system was not activated in the Black Hawk that crashed with the passenger plane is a key concern that researchers have highlighted. With the location system off, the tower had to trust the radar for updates on the position of the helicopter that only arrived once every four seconds instead of every second before the accident.
“The question is raised, what does the army of the Congress or the American people want to know why they were flying partially blind to the other airplanes and the air traffic controllers near DCA (Reagan Airport)?” Said Cruz. “This is not acceptable.”
The army did not immediately respond to an investigation on Wednesday about the memorandum. The US Army Aviation Chief. UU., Brig. General Matthew Braman, told the Senate Committee of the Senate last week that he was not sure if he could provide the memorandum because it is part of the investigation, but the NTSB head assured him that he would be fine.
The January accident was the most deadly air accident in the nation Since November 2001. But a Other accidents and almost failure series In the months after the concerns fed on air trips, even though it remains safe in general.
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Associated Press Tara Copp and Lisa Leff’s writers contributed to this report.
