While Congress advanced last year by adding 10 new daily flights to Washington, the Reagan National Airport of DC, many considered concerns about dangers in congested skies over the country’s capital.
Appreciating in more flights would only increase the risks, said the two senators of Virginia, who called a nearby foul between two planes on a track last April an “intermittent red warning light.”
What was not known publicly at that time, and did not appear until this week during research on the Collision in January air Between a plane and a military helicopter that killed 67 people, it was that the nearby calls at the airport were much more frequent than travelers and aviation experts knew.
Now, security and family experts who Lost loved ones In the January 29 clash, he wonders why no one acted against what seemed to be an imminent disaster.
He National Transport Security Board Said aircraft pilots were alerted to take evasive measures to avoid hitting helicopters at least once a month from 2011 to 2024, citing data compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration, and that there were 85 failures near that the planes were a few hundred feet (meters) together in recent years.
“How does that happen today and someone does not do something about it?” Doug Lane asked, whose wife, Christine Conrad Lane, and her 16 -year -old son, Spencer, died in the accident.
The pilots have long worried about the congestive and complex airspace Around the airport, near the heart of the capital, where flights must maneuver around military aircraft and restricted areas. It was no secret that there were previous close calls, but the numbers found by the NTSB were alarming.
“Why someone was not paying attention to those numbers and those events are still questions to answer,” said James Hall, a former NTSB president during Clinton’s administration.
“What you should not do is ignore that many incidents,” he said.
FAA officials have not yet approached if they knew there were so many meetings between airplanes and helicopters in Reagan National. The messages that were looking for comments were not immediately returned on Thursday.
The current president of the NTSB, Jennifer Homendy and the Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, who supervises the FAA, both said they were angry because the FAA was not previously recognized by the FAA.
“If someone were paying attention, someone was at work, I would have seen this,” Duffy said. He also announced that he will advance with the prohibition of some helicopter flights around the airport, A movement that was temporarily After the accident.
The Security Ombudsman Mary Schiavo, former inspector General of the Department of Transportation of the United States, said that although there was a lot of guilt for the collision in the air, the FAA was surprisingly complacent.
“Literally expect a disaster,” he said. “I can’t even understand how the families of the lost in this clash can even deal with this. I mean that this would be so crazy to listen.”
The airspace full of people around Washington caught attention last year when Congress He debated an aviation security bill That allowed 10 further flights in Reagan National, despite the strong objections of the Democratic senators of Virginia, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.
Kaine, during a speech on the Senate floor, did not mention specific concerns about the meetings between airplanes and helicopters or appointment of no statistics, but said that congestion was “a problem that expected to happen.”
While the Congress did the additional flights well, they had not begun from the January deadly collision.
FAA limits the arrival and exit slots in three of the most busy airports in the country, Where demand exceeds the ability of the airport: Reagan National and international airports Laguardia de Laguardia and John F. Kennedy.
But Congress has a history of directing FAA to add spaces to Reagan, despite the fact that the other Washington International Airport, Dulles, has the capacity to handle them. Reagan is closer to the capital and most federal departments and, therefore, more convenient, particularly for legislators.
Mike McCormick, coordinator of the air traffic management program at the Embry-Riddle University, said the congestion in Reagan National clearly contributed to the collision in the air because the Jetliner Airlines, which was on a recently added route from Wichita, Kansas, deviated to a different race to Helicopter flights.
“In this case, the only reason to do it was because they were too busy,” said McCormick. “This is something that the controller has probably done thousands of times.”
Wichite’s flight to Washington began operating in early 2024, with the support of Kansas legislators who He said it was a “vital” To link the capital of the nation with the city, which has A long history as a aircraft manufacturing center.
The American representative, Sharice Davids, a Kansas Democrat who serves in an aviation subcommittee, said the cause of the accident and the congestion in Reagan National are for now, “two different conversations.”
“I understand, the desire that we can all connect these points,” he said. “At this time, that is not a connection that has made the NTSB.”
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Associated Press Reporters Michael Casey in Boston; Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas; and Maryclaire dale in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
