FAA chief: Bad airspace design led to D.C. airliner-Black Hawk crash
WASHINGTON, May 19 (UPI) -- The administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration told senators in a hearing Tuesday that "bad design" of the airspace above Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport caused an American Eagle commuter flight and a Black Hawk Army helicopter to collide and crash into the Potomac River last year, killing 67 people.
The hearing by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Aviation, Space and Innovation was held to review the FAA's progress in implementing 35 safety recommendations from the National Transportation Safety Board after the crash.
The recommendations came in the wake of the board's Jan. 28 finding that "systemic failures" by the agency and the U.S. Army caused the crash 1/2-mile southeast of the Arlington, Va., airport on the evening of Jan. 29, 2025.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford testified that he "concurred" with the NTSB findings in response to a question from Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., about the conclusions of the investigation.
"It was a bad plan in the Capitol region, it was a bad design," Bedford said. "There was absolutely data telling us it was a bad design, and we should have done something about it."
However, some subcommittee members like Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot, criticized the FAA's response to the crash and the NTSB recommendations.
"What we have seen over the past year is deeply troubling," Duckworth said during the hearing. She called it "a continued culture of complacency at the FAA and an institutional belief that the FAA can continue to do the bare minimum, work to address a few of the NTSB recommendations and call it progress. Well, I call it b-------.."
Bedford told Duckworth that the FAA "will continue to implement and evaluate all of the recommendations from the NTSB."
According to a 2023 report from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, an independent public agency that manages and operates the major airports serving the national capital area, the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport's main runway was the busiest in the country.
Experts like Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, said the number of military helicopters operating in the nearby airspace and the number of exemptions from daily flight limits issued by Congress created the airport's unique congestion.
"The dirty little secret is the reason [Reagan airport] is so busy is it is heavily constrained," Scribner said in an interview with Medill News Service, in which he agreed with Bedford's assessment of the crash.
"But Congress keeps exempting certain flights from the slot controls -- the limit on the number of flights you can have per day. They keep exempting [Reagan airport] from that, so they can be sure to get their flight home on Thursday or Friday from the airport closest to the capital. So that certainly doesn't help."
The National Transportation Safety Board's crash investigation found that a contributing factor in the collision "an unsustainable airport arrival rate, increasing traffic volume with a changing fleet mix and airline scheduling practices at [Reagan], which regularly strained the ... air traffic control tower workforce and degraded safety over time."
Scribner said that military evacuation plans are important and require the airport to be available to members of Congress, but everyday exceptions hurt safety.
"I understand, you need to have contingency plans in place in order to evacuate senior government officials in the event of, say, a nuclear strike or something. But you shouldn't be endangering the traveling public near a commercial service airport to do that," he said.
Throughout the hearing, Bedford told subcommittee members that the FAA already implemented a majority of the safety recommendations found in the NTSB report. Specifically, he told Sen. Jerry Moran , R-Kan., that 19 of the 35 recommended changes to FAA safety procedures are classified as "in progress" and some are awaiting final approval from the NTSB.
Despite the criticisms, Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., defended America's air safety during that hearing.
"Despite terrible accidents like we had last year, we still have the safest airspace in the world," he said. " We have the safest aviation operations and the most complex, so I think it's important that we remember that."
Scribner, the senior transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, agreed with Sheehy, but stressed that U.S. airports should adopt updated safety technologies used elsewhere in the world.
"People shouldn't be afraid to fly on commercial airlines," he said. "That being said, our system could be much better if we adopted some of the reforms that are increasingly mainstream around the world, and that would help deliver us better management practices, but also better technology."
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This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 4:19 PM.