‘safety Whitewash’: Defense Bill Spawns Uproar Over Military Helicopters In Dc

Almost a year after the nation’s worst aviation disaster in decades, Congress is poised to give the military free rein to resume flying helicopters on training missions in Washington without using a key location-transmitting technology, a top federal accident investigator has warned.

But a bipartisan pair of lawmakers is trying to ax the provision with just days until Congress heads home for the holidays.

The proposal, buried in an annual, must-pass defense policy package, is igniting fury among victims’ families, a federal disaster investigator and even some Republicans on Capitol Hill. Yet it has brought no public objections from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who refused Friday to weigh in on the brawl — beyond saying he will make sure planes and helicopters don’t cross paths in the area. He didn’t offer specifics.

“I know there’s a debate happening,” Duffy told reporters during a news conference at the Transportation Department’s headquarters. “Lawyers are looking at the language, but again, I’m going to drive safety” around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Asked if he thinks the provision would increase risk, Duffy declined to comment.

“We are going to use every equity to keep Americans safe,” he said.

The issue may come to a head on the Senate floor next week as two lawmakers seek to strip the language out of the National Defense Authorization Act and insert their own legislation responding to January’s crash between a regional jet and an Army Black Hawk above the Potomac River, which killed 67 people. The helicopter was on a training flight.

A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday on whether he will allow amendments on the more than 3,000-page NDAA. The upper chamber is in session for only a handful of days before its year-end recess.

The House and Senate Armed Services committees have defended the NDAA’s proposed requirements as being “critical first steps that will help make our skies safer.” The House passed the bill 312-112 on Wednesday.

Duffy said he wouldn’t get involved in the legislative process, but that he knows that the White House is engaged on the topic.

The White House didn’t immediately provide comment. Army Lt. Col. Kevin Sandell, a Defense Department spokesperson, said in an email that the Pentagon doesn’t comment on pending bills in Congress.

A top federal safety official said the provision before the Senate, first reported by POLITICO, would allow the military to resume flying helicopters in the Washington area without using an advanced location-broadcasting technology known as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Out, or ADS-B Out. The Federal Aviation Administration had said in March it was requiring the technology for all aircraft flying near Reagan National, with “very limited exceptions.”

On its face, the Senate language would prohibit military leaders from greenlighting DOD helicopter training missions in the Washington area unless, while flying, the aircraft give warning to nearby commercial planes of their proximity. But that notice would only have to occur “in a manner compatible with” jets’ traffic alert and collision avoidance systems, or TCAS, which can give pilots audible instructions on what to do if aircraft are getting too close midair.

The provision doesn’t specifically include a requirement of using ADS-B Out.

Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is conducting a yearlong probe into the disaster near Reagan National, eviscerated the NDAA provision earlier this week during an unusually fiery news conference, calling it an “unacceptable risk” to flyers and a “safety whitewash.” She said the PSA Airlines flight in the catastrophe had TCAS — but that it issued an alert only around 20 seconds before impact.

“That didn’t avoid anything,” she said, adding in a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees that TCAS is limited “by design” when a plane is nearing the end of its descent “to avoid nuisance alerts to crewmembers.”

Homendy in her letter said the NDAA provision would allow “military aircraft to operate without ADS-B.”

The NDAA would also permit DOD to waive the TCAS restriction, with Transportation Department sign-off, for national-security-related training flights in which a “risk assessment” has been conducted to address potential issues.

That’s especially contentious given that an FAA rule has historically allowed helicopters to switch off ADS-B Out for defense, homeland security, intelligence or other law enforcement purposes.

The Black Hawk involved in the collision didn’t have its ADS-B Out engaged — and Homendy previously said the device hadn’t been transmitting data for months. A 2023 Air Force letter unearthed following the disaster said the Army brigade where the helicopter was based in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, executed “100 percent of their missions” with the technology turned off due “to the sensitive nature” of their flights “supporting the movement of very important persons.”

After the catastrophe, the FAA says it revised agreements with the military to mandate ADS-B Out broadcasting around Reagan National. The only exemptions are for critical national security issues, such as transporting the president, the FAA told POLITICO.

In her letter, Homendy argued that the NDAA provision would roll back this new requirement “to the very conditions that existed in the [Washington] airspace at the time of the accident.”

Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety consultant and former NTSB and FAA official, told POLITICO that the language was “too general,” “too vague” and “confusing,” but didn’t view it as an intentional attempt to undo any FAA actions. Whomever drafted it, he said, was “ignorant of all the facts.”

Families of people killed in the crash are calling on Congress to pass alternative legislation.

Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state, are trying to ax the NDAA provision and attach their own crash-response bill, the ROTOR Act, which is more sweeping and detailed than the language in the defense policy package.

In part, their bill would limit when the Army can switch off ADS-B Out nationwide, prohibiting the practice on training and proficiency flights and when transporting a federal official who is not a Cabinet member.

Cruz has said the NDAA section “endangers the flying public.”