Hotline between military and air traffic controllers in Washington hasn’t worked for over 3 years

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A hotline between military and civilian air traffic controllers in Washington, D.C., that hasn’t worked for more than three years may have contributed to another near miss shortly after the Army resumed flying helicopters in the area for the first time since January’s deadly midair collision between a passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter. Sen. Ted Cruz said a hearing Wednesday.

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The Federal Aviation Administration official in charge of air traffic controllers, Frank McIntosh, confirmed that the agency didn’t even know the hotline hadn’t been working since March 2022 until after the latest near miss. He said civilian controllers did still have other means of communicating with their military counterparts through landlines, but the FAA is insisting the hotline be fixed before helicopter flights resume around Ronald Reagan National Airport.

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Defense department officials didn’t immediately respond to questions Wednesday about the near miss earlier this month and the steps it is taking to ensure helicopter flights in the area are safe. The FAA didn’t immediately answer follow-up questions after the hearing about how that hotline was supposed to be used.

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“The developments at DCA (Reagan airport) in its airspace are extremely concerning,” Cruz said. “This committee remains laser focused on monitoring a safe return to operations at DCA and making sure all users in the airspace are operating responsibly.”

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The Army suspended all helicopter flights around Reagan airport after the latest near miss, but McIntosh said the FAA was close to ordering the Army to stop flying because of the safety concerns before it did so voluntarily.

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“We did have discussions if that was an option that we wanted to pursue,” McIntosh told the Senate Commerce Committee at the hearing.

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January’s crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter killed 67 people — making it the deadliest plane crash on U.S. soil since 2001. The National Transportation Safety Board has said there were an alarming 85 near misses around Reagan in the three years before the crash that should have prompted action.

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Since the crash, the FAA has tried to ensure that military helicopters never share the same airspace as planes, but controllers had to order two planes to abort their landings on May 1 because of an Army helicopter circling near the Pentagon.

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In addition to that incident, a commercial flight taking off from Reagan airport had to take evasive action after coming within a few hundred feet of four military jets heading to a flyover at Arlington National Cemetery. McIntosh blamed that incident on a miscommunication between FAA air traffic controllers at a regional facility and the tower at Reagan that he said had been addressed.

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