By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, Feb 26 (Reuters) – The National Transportation Safety Board said on Thursday a proposed U.S. House of Representatives aviation safety bill does not fully address safety recommendations it issued after a 2025 mid-air collision killed 67 people near Washington.
The NTSB said the House’s ALERT Act fails to address its recommendation to require the aircraft tracking technology known as ADS-B.
The NTSB said ADS-B would have prevented the 2025 collision of an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter in the crowded airspace near the nation’s capital.
House Transportation Committee Chair Sam Graves said on Wednesday that his panel would take up the ALERT Act as soon as next week. The bill aims to address all 50 recommendations made by the NTSB after the crash, but would not mandate ADS-B use.
“We cannot support the ALERT Act in its current form as it is not fully responsive to the NTSB’s recommendations,” the NTSB board members said in a joint letter. The House voted 264-133 on Tuesday in favor of the ROTOR Act, which the Senate passed unanimously in December. But under fast-track rules designed to expedite legislation, the bill needed a two-thirds majority to pass and it fell one vote short. The ROTOR Act would require the military to use ADS-B, advanced surveillance technology that transmits an aircraft’s location, on routine training flights but not on sensitive military missions.
“How many more people need to die for us to decide that action needs to be taken?” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters this week, saying it was “despicable” the ROTOR Act failed.
The NTSB said ADS-B could have alerted the passenger plane pilot 59 seconds before the collision and the helicopter crew 48 seconds before.
In December, the Pentagon said it supported the ROTOR Act legislation, but on Monday it said the bill could create “significant unresolved budgetary burdens and operational security risks affecting national defense activities.”
The Pentagon has not commented on the ALERT Act. House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, who is an author of the ALERT Act, said the bill would increase coordination between the military and the FAA on aircraft safety matters and require enhanced training for military pilots operating in congested airspace.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chris Reese and Jamie Freed)
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