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

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 U.S. 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 at a hearing Wednesday.

The Federal Aviation Administration official in charge of air traffic controllers, Frank McIntosh, confirmed 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 still have other means of communicating with their military counterparts through landlines. Still, the FAA insists the hotline be fixed before helicopter flights resume around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

The Army didn't immediately comment Wednesday about the near miss earlier this month and the steps it is taking to ensure helicopter flights in the area are safe or about the hotline.

The FAA said in a statement that the dedicated direct access line between air traffic controllers at Reagan and the Pentagon's Army heliport hasn't worked since 2022 because of the construction of a new tower at the Pentagon. But the FAA said ''the two facilities continue to communicate via telephone for coordination.''

''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.''

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.

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

Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB and FAA accident investigator, said ''the fact that they were unaware that this connection was not working for three years is troublesome.'' But he is not entirely clear on the purpose of the hotline when controllers had other ways to communicate.

But Guzzetti thinks the Army needs to be more forthcoming about what it is doing to ensure the airspace around Washington remains safe. Since the crash, the Army has at times refused to provide information that Congress has asked for, and officials didn't answer all the questions at a previous hearing.

''The DCA airspace is under the white hot spotlight. So the Army's going to have to be more transparent and more assertive in their dealings with this problem,'' Guzzetti said.

According to a U.S. official, one course of action under consideration now is to have the Army give 24 hours notice of any flights around National Airport. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made and discussions are ongoing.

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.

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.

''After the deadly crash near Reagan National Airport, FAA closed the helicopter route involved, but a lack of coordination between FAA and the Department of Defense has continued to put the flying public at risk,'' Sen. Tammy Duckworth said.

McIntosh said the helicopter should never have entered the airspace around Reagan airport without permission from an air traffic controller.

''That did not occur,'' he said. ''My question — and I think the larger question is — is why did that not occur? Without compliance to our procedures and our policies, this is where safety drift starts to happen.''

The NTSB is investigating what happened.

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, which he said had been addressed.

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Associated Press writer Lolita Baldor contributed to this report.