Lawmakers express worries about ‘complex airspace’ after deadly D.C. midair collision

WASHINGTON — Several members of Congress are expressing concerns about the air congestion in the area where a commercial passenger jet collided with a military helicopter over the Potomac River on Wednesday night. 

Lawmakers didn’t ascribe any blame for the accident and said they trusted the National Transportation Safety Board would do a lengthy, in-depth investigation. But they said the deadly crash reinforced worries about traffic in a busy transportation corridor where military and other helicopters are sharing airspace with passenger jets flying in and out of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, known as DCA.

“I’ve been very worried about this for a long time, and I continue to be worried about it. The National Transportation Safety Board will do an investigation of this, and I have high confidence in them. They’ll look and see what was the cause of this devastating tragedy, and I’m not going to speculate. They’ll do the work. They’re good at it. They’ll give us answers,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told reporters Thursday.

“But yeah, I’ve been very, very concerned about this very complex airspace — commercial, military — and the way that the security demands of being the nation’s capital puts some significant restrictions on it. And I am really worried about that,” he continued.

“I’ve been praying that there wouldn’t be something like last night,” Kaine said, “but kind of dreading in my heart that there would be.”

There were 60 passengers and four crew members aboard the American Eagle jet, which was flying from Wichita, Kansas, to DCA, which sits on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. Three people were aboard the Army Black Hawk helicopter. President Donald Trump said at a White House briefing that there were no survivors in the crash.

The airspace above Washington is complex for a variety of reasons. DCA is one of the busiest airports in the country, with hundreds of flights arriving and departing each day. The airport saw a record 25.5 million passengers in 2023.

Some airspace above Washington is restricted because of security issues. On top of that, there is a plethora of other aircraft — military, National Park Service, Metropolitan Police Department, not to mention Marine One — that use the airspace because of the fact that the District of Columbia is the nation’s capital and that it sits in between Maryland and Virginia. Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling also is just across the Potomac from DCA.

Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and who previously spent two decades on the Armed Services Committee, said he’s flown out of DCA countless times and never has been worried about congestion there in the past.

But he said in a phone call Thursday that “certainly this tragedy raises my concerns about the amount of traffic in that area.” Larsen added that the focus now should be on the victims, their family members and the first responders who rushed to the scene Wednesday night.

He said the NTSB assigned 40 investigators and staff to the crash, and that their probe could take more than a year.

“The slow process begins of investigating the root cause. So, the timeline is the timeline. I expect a preliminary report in several weeks,” Larsen said. “But the investigation will take a long time to get done … It could take 18 months.”

Kansas lawmakers, including GOP Sen. Jerry Moran, had lobbied American Airlines to add the nonstop flight between Wichita and DCA, which has been in existence for about a year. Moran said he had taken that flight many times.

Kansas’ other senator, Republican Roger Marshall, told reporters Thursday that he expected to meet with family members of victims in Washington later in the afternoon and receive a briefing from the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration.

He added that there was plenty of blame to go around, saying that the air traffic controller should have had the plane and helicopter flying at different altitudes and that the helicopter pilot should have had visuals of multiple planes that were landing at DCA.

“Clearly this was a confluence of errors … It’s unacceptable, and I appreciate President Trump and his team saying there’s challenges here, there’s problems here, and we’re going to correct them,” Marshall said.

Asked if he’s concerned about air congestion in the region, Marshall replied: “Certainly that’s what it looks like to me. I understand that commonly happens — the military aircraft shares its shared airspace with the civilian aircraft. But is that necessary? Are we just inviting a disaster to happen? And I think that’s a question that I want answered as well.”

The skies above Washington have grown more crowded recently. The FAA reauthorization legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden last April boosted air traffic controller staffing but also added five additional longer-distance, round-trip flights out of DCA.

Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, negotiated the deal. But the added flights were opposed by the four Democratic senators from Virginia and Maryland, who argued that it would add to the congestion and potentially lead to an accident.

In a floor speech during that FAA debate in May, Kaine, the Virginia senator, pointed to a recent near-collision on a DCA runway between a Southwest Airlines plane and a JetBlue Airways plane. 

“With congestion, you run into risks of safety,” Kaine said. 

Cruz, who now chairs of the commerce committee that provides oversight of aviation issues, said the NTSB and the FAA would hold a “high-level” briefing with his panel’s members later Thursday to find out what is known so far about the crash, and that his own panel would investigate, as well.

“I’ve directed the Commerce Committee to actively gather information about what went wrong,” he wrote on X, “and I plan to hold a bipartisan member-level briefing with key federal officials as soon as possible.”