Three days of hearings this week showed no shortage of recriminations between federal officials as the government investigates the fatal crash by Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in January that killed 67 people.
Tensions were high during the National Transportation Safety Board’s series of investigative hearings, as the panel grilled Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Army officials about the collision between a military Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger.
FAA officials reportedly tried to blame the crash on NTSB’s “bureaucratic process.”
The NTSB chair, Jennifer Homendy, did not take kindly to the accusation.
“I don’t get it, every sign was there that there was a safety risk, and the tower was telling you that,” Homendy said. “What you did was you transferred people out instead of taking ownership over the fact that everybody in the FAA in the tower was saying there was a problem. But you guys were pointing out, ‘Welp, our bureaucratic process. Somebody should have brought it up at some other symposium.’ Are you kidding me? Sixty-seven people are dead. How do you explain that?”
At another point, the panel questioned the FAA’s transparency with data.
Later during the hearing, when NTSB member J. Todd Inman asked Nick Fuller, the FAA’s acting deputy chief operating officer of operations, whether the agency has been “transparent and forthcoming” with information, Fuller defended the data that the agency provided as the “latest and greatest.”
“I’m sorry, can you yield for one minute,” Homendy said, interrupting Inman. “It’s ‘the latest and the greatest?’ Taking six months to give us who was finally on duty on January 29 of 2025, because over six months the numbers kept changing on who was on duty.”
Throughout the hearings, trust appeared to be severely lacking between the FAA officials and the investigatory panel.
On Thursday, Homendy told the officials that she would change the seating order after a supervisor “had elbowed an FAA employee mid-sentence” and “that person had stopped speaking as a result.”
“We want people to be fully transparent and feel safe in providing us answers,” Homendy said.
The NTSB released new information about the moments before the collision during the hearings. Investigators said that because of faulty altimeters in the helicopter, Black Hawk pilots likely did not know how high they were flying. The instructor inside the Black Hawk told the pilot to come down prior to the crash.
“You’re at 300 feet. Come down for me,” the transcript of the cockpit voice recorders read.
The pilots also never heard instructions from air traffic controllers to fly behind the plane because the crew had pressed its microphone at the same time, canceling out the message. While the helicopter pilots likely did not know that they were going to crash, the plane’s crew saw the helicopter seconds before the collision and tried to pull up to avert it.
The crash especially hit home for Inman, who said during the hearing that he lived in a neighborhood overlooking the Pentagon at the time of the crash. He’s since moved.
Inman questioned army officials about the use of the “Lima” mode helicopter, which came into service in 1989 and is still in use today. He also grilled Army and FAA officials about whether the helicopter met the requirements to fly through national airspace and the process of phasing out the model.
“How much tolerance should we have for aviation safety whenever civilian lives are at risk,” Inman told officials.
“I used to live at 400 Army Navy Drive when this crash occurred,” Inman said. “I looked out over the Pentagon DCA … I stood on runway 33 the night that this accident happened. I moved to McLean specifically so … that my wife wouldn’t have to see me wake up in the middle of the night. Though I found out after being there the last two weeks, I’m on one of your flight paths over 495. Last weekend, five of those Limas flew behind my house. And you’re telling me it’s going to be two months before you tell them [Army aviators] that there’s a discrepancy in their altitude. Could you hurry it up?”
In previous NTSB reports, the agency documented more than 15,000 close proximity events between October 2021 to December 2024 involving commercial aircraft and helicopters at DCA.
James Jarvis, who previously visited DCA as a part of the FAA’s Eastern Service Quality Control Group, told NTSB members that the certified professional controllers had always been on the “lower number of staffing.” However, he said it was the airport’s administrative staff that was his “biggest concern,” adding that the lack of a second operations manager affected training at the facility.
“There was not enough folks to manage the training that needed to take place,” Jarvis said. “Anytime a training package needed to be prepared, a support manager, they had to do all that work with the help sometimes of the operations manager. And not only would they put it together, they’d have to brief it, and then they’d have to document that the training occurred.”
Since the crash, reform regarding air safety has been a consistent topic on the Hill. Both Democrats and Republicans agree that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s proposal to raise the air traffic controller age past 56 is worth some consideration. Lawmakers were left looking for additional clarification after the FAA laid off several hundred of the workforce’s 45,000 employees at the Trump administration’s direction in February.
In March, Duffy pledged to overhaul the U.S. air traffic control system. And last month, Duffy told House members that the new system would cost $31.5 billion.
Earlier this week, Sen. Ted Cruz introduced legislation that would require all aircrafts to transmit Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, a system to enhance travel safety by sharing an aircraft’s location with controllers and other aircrafts in the area. Military aircrafts were previously excluded from this rule due to security reasons.