Flights into Reagan National Airport being slowed after crash, as Musk intervenes

The Federal Aviation Administration is slowing flights into Reagan National Airport, a safety measure taken as members of Congress demand answers about last week’s deadly crash and President Donald Trump and Elon Musk promise a rapid overhaul of aviation technology.

Officials are still piecing together what went wrong last Wednesday when a commercial plane and Black Hawk helicopter collided, killing 67 people. On Thursday, authorities announced they had removed all major components of both aircrafts from the Potomac River and would shift their focus to smaller debris.

“Mistakes were made, at this point the investigation has not reach a conclusion as to who specifically made those mistakes,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who chairs the Senate transportation committee, said after a briefing for lawmakers by the National Transportation Safety Board. But, he said, it was clear the helicopter was flying outside its 200-foot limit. He said the collision happened at 345 feet.

And he questioned why the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B), which enables the position of an aircraft to be tracked, was turned off. FAA rules allow military aircraft to turn off ADS-B, but Cruz said since this was a training mission, there did not seem to be a compelling reason for it.

At the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning, Trump promised a “great, computerized system” of air traffic control, something “brand new … done by two or three companies.” Musk chimed in on his social media platform X with a promise to “make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy and Cruz both said they welcomed Musk’s involvement given his experience running the rocket company SpaceX. “One of the top technology CEOs on planet Earth, is available,” Cruz told reporters. “I think that is a real opportunity.”

But SpaceX has billions of dollars in government contracts and has been penalized by the FAA for ignoring regulations, after which Musk pushed for the resignation of the agency’s chairman. He left on Jan. 20 and was not replaced by an acting chairman until after the crash.

“We have ethics and recusal laws for a reason – to prevent corporate interference in protecting the public interest,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the transportation committee wrote in a letter to Duffy Thursday. “It is a conflict of interest for someone whose company is regulated by the federal government to be involved in anything that affects his personal financial interest, his company, or his competitors.”

At an event Wednesday evening, Duffy said that Musk “thinks differently than I think probably a lot of us do, but he has access to the best technological people, the best engineers in the world.” He added, “We’re going to remake our airspace, and we’re going to do it quickly.”

National’s main runway is the busiest in the United States, with about 819 takeoffs and landings each day. It’s also shorter than most, with a tricky approach. And pilots have to contend with military and Coast Guard helicopters.

There have been warnings for years that the situation is hazardous, particularly because a long-gestating overhaul of aviation guiding systems remains incomplete.

Pilots have long complained that the airspace at National is overcrowded and that some of the systems used to coordinate flights are woefully out of date.

Two individuals with knowledge of the decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, confirmed that some arrivals are being reduced. For now, flights are being cut from 28 to 26 arrivals an hour in response to the crash, according to Reuters.

An FAA spokeswoman would only say that the agency “is slowing traffic into and out of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport due to weather conditions and recovery efforts in the area.”

Nicole Suissa, a close friend and ex-fiancée of American Eagle Flight 5342 pilot Jonathan Campos, said the promises from Trump and Musk only added to her pain and outrage.

“It’s frustrating to the families to hear this now,” she said. “We should be dealing with the shortages (of air traffic controllers) instead of making up an imaginary new computer system that didn’t help us last week. … There seems to be this frantic, kinetic energy trying to figure out what to do.”

She said she also found Trump’s suggestions that diversity efforts might have contributed to the crash deeply offensive; Campos was Puerto Rican. When the NTSB investigation is complete, she said, she’s confident that “we’ll find out just how much Jonathan attempted to do and just how much he did right in this situation.”

The number of fully certified controllers at National’s air control tower has fallen in recent years, with trainees making up more of its workforce, according to FAA records. At the time the two aircraft collided, two people in the control tower were handling the jobs of four, and no single controller was dedicated to managing helicopter traffic, according to a report described to the Washington Post.

“We were assured that the personnel at the at the tower was consistent with normal practices and there wasn’t something missing that night in the staffing of the of the tower,” Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., said in remarks following the NTSB briefing.

Cruz was one of the most forceful advocates for adding dozens of flights at National in recent years. Over the objections of the airport and some airlines, a compromise was struck for five more, including one to San Antonio. Asked Thursday if he would support cutting back the amount of air traffic, he replied that “there’s no indication in the investigation that congestion was the cause of the accident.” He and Duffy both suggested that the military could do training flights later at night to avoid conflicts.

Dying in a commercial plane crash remains extremely rare; there were no such casualties at all in 2023. Last year was an unusually deadly one for aviation in this millennium, with 318 deaths out of nearly 5 billion travelers.

Trump on Thursday called the crash an anomaly, comparing it to golf balls on a driving range. “It’s like, did you ever see, you go to a driving range in golf and you’re hitting balls, hundreds of balls, thousands of hours,” he said. “I never see a ball hit another ball.”