By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, May 18 (Reuters) – The head of the Federal Aviation Administration will tell Congress on Tuesday the agency failed to act on warnings prior to the January 2025 fatal collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army helicopter that killed 67 people near Reagan Washington National Airport.
In January, the National Transportation Safety Board said a series of systemic failures by the Federal Aviation Administration led to a devastating mid-air collision that was the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in more than two decades.
“Our airspace system was providing warning signals prior to that tragic evening. The issue was not a lack of data — it was a failure to translate that data into action,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford will tell a U.S. Senate Commerce subcommittee in written testimony. “That is the gap we are urgently closing.”
Bedford noted the FAA has taken a series of steps to improve safety, including in March suspending use of visual separation between airplanes and helicopters at major airports.
The FAA in March cited two recent incidents in issuing the new rules including a near miss involving an American Airlines flight and police helicopter near the San Antonio airport.
He said there is an ongoing strategic sweeping reorganization of the FAA “that includes streamlining leadership roles (and) eliminating silos which hinder transparency and information sharing.”
The NTSB determined the collision was caused by the FAA’s decision to allow helicopters to travel close to the airport without safeguards to separate them from airplanes, and its failure to review data and act on recommendations to move helicopter traffic away from the airport.
Since 2021, there have been 15,200 air separation incidents near Reagan airport between commercial airplanes and helicopters, including 85 close-call events.
After the 2025 collision, the FAA restricted helicopter traffic around Reagan Airport and imposed restrictions at other airports including Baltimore, Las Vegas and Washington Dulles. It also reduced the arrival rate for planes at Reagan.
Separately, the U.S. Department of Transportation has urged Congress to approve another $10 billion to continue an air traffic control overhaul after awarding $12.5 billion last year.
“With more than 18,000,000 flights managed and over one billion passenger movements traveling across our skies annually, our current system has reached its limits,” Bedford said.
(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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