Aviation Week Network editors and analysts discuss the safety questions being raised after a fatal crash and near-miss.
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Transcript
Karen Walker : Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Window Seat, our Aviation Week air transport podcast. I'm ATW and Aviation Week Network air transport editor-in-chief Karen Walker, and I am delighted to welcome you on board. Joining me today are Aviation Week senior air transport and safety editor Sean Broderick, ATW and Routes senior editor Aaron Karp, and CAPA senior analyst Americas Lori Ranson. Welcome on board to everyone, and I am very happy that you could join us today.
We are all based in the US, and actually in the Washington DC area. The subject of our discussion today is the ever-growing concern about how safe is America's air traffic management system, particularly near our major commercial airports. Sadly, this year, we've already seen the fatal crash of an American Eagle CRJ jet and a US army helicopter, as the CRJ was close to touching down at Washington Reagan Airport [DCA]. And then there was the near-miss at Chicago Midway Airport [MDW] when a Southwest Airlines 737 was forced to do a last minute go-around to avoid hitting a business jet that inexplicably crossed the runway.
Earlier this week, a US House Transportation subcommittee held a hearing on air traffic control, safety, staffing, and resource needs. There was a lot of concern expressed by lawmakers and the panel of industry expert witnesses. But today we've got our own very much expert panel here, so we're going to talk through some of these issues and thoughts as to what's going on.
Sean, I'm going to kick off with you. You really are an aviation safety expert and I know that you're tracking the NTSB investigations on these incidents. What's going on right now with those, and what are your very initial thoughts?
Sean Broderick: Sure. We'll start with the midair collision. Every time I say it, I can't believe that those are the words I'm using in 2025 in an accident involving a commercial airliner. The DCA midair collision, we're a little more than 30 days into the investigation, still very early. The NTSB's last major update, I think, was around about mid-February. Feb. 14, I think, was the date. Right now they're deep and still into the fact-gathering phase, and then what I will call the “understanding phase,” trying to understand the environment that these two aircraft were operating in, and then what should have happened and then why what should have happened did not happen.
There are some safe assumptions we can make based on what the NTSB has said. First of all, clearly loss of separation is what caused this. The question is why. The helicopter seemed to be following a defined path down the river, on the East Bank of the Potomac, which runs east of National Airport. And the aircraft was on an approach to not the main runway in National. If you know National, it has three runways. It has two smaller runways. 1/19 is the main runway and then it has two smaller runways. It was making an approach on one of the smaller runways. Very common thing to do at National, sometimes for weather, sometimes for capacity.
So, nothing unusual in the operations in general, until the helicopter crossed the approach path of the airplane, as apparently it should not have done because there was an airplane there. But it's not as if it was significantly off course. May have been a little high altitude wise, but even that isn't enough to explain the overall scenario that put an airplane and a helicopter that close together when the airplane was on final approach.
When this report comes out, probably not for a year or two, we're going to see the very specific causes. Perhaps the helicopter pilots didn't have situational awareness, never saw the CRJ. Maybe the controller will have some role in the probable cause. But I think the bigger story is going to be about the overall operating environment and why there weren't more safeguards to ensure that this kind of occurrence could not happen. And we're going to talk about more on this podcast. This is not an unusual set of operating circumstances in the DCA area, but it is very unusual in general for airline pilots.
One of the first things I did when I started reporting on this was went to look and see what the airline pilots flying into National are told about the helicopter operations. To my astonishment, I found they were told very little. Anything they want to learn, like where the routes are, they pretty much have to do it on their own. And then on top of that, the air traffic control procedures aren't any different from anywhere else. It's visual separation when available. It's instrument separation when not, which is hardly ever used for the helicopters, because the operations up and down the river would be significantly impacted.
So, what you have is a situation where you're expecting the pilots and the controllers to handle a very unique situation, at least from the pilot's standpoint an unusual situation, without extra safeguards that I would've thought you'd have. To me, that's one of the biggest areas that the NTSB is going to look at. And as we've reported and others have reported, it's not as if this was a secret. Decades of reports of concerns from controllers, helicopter pilots and airline pilots saying, "It gets a little crazy at National. I'm not sure what we have in place is working." Sadly, we now know that it wasn't working. And despite decades of otherwise safe operation, never had anything seemingly close to this, clearly what was in place wasn't sufficient. That's DCA.
You asked about Midway, thankfully much less serious situation there. Seems as if we have a runway incursion where, for whatever reason, the business jet pilots did not follow the instructions, even though they were given them and read them back correctly. Airport geometry and airport familiarization there, probably the first two things they're going to look at. And obviously, giving a pat on the back to the Southwest Airlines training department, because those pilots knew what to do when faced with a very unusual and potentially dire situation.
Karen Walker : Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. When you see the video that came out of that Southwest near miss, first of all, you're going, wow, and then secondly, you're thinking the reaction by those pilots almost certainly saved a lot of lives. But the point is that all lives were saved. Obviously, with the Reagan Washington National Airport incident, all 67 people involved were killed.
There was this hearing earlier this week, a House hearing, and obviously at the forefront of everybody's mind was the Washington National crash, but they'd also seen the Southwest incident. You've just really hit on that point, Sean, that it's not just people are in shock about a fatal crash at one of the US's most important airports, but that people are questioning the safety of the system now. There's been several near misses at major airports around this last couple of years.
That really was where the House hearing was trying to steer things, what's going on. And they were particularly focused on the air traffic control side. The FAA is down by about 3,600 controllers at the moment, so it was obvious that they were asking questions as to, "Is that the problem? Is the system too constrained right now?"
Aaron, I know you also followed that hearing this week. What were your thoughts in terms of what they were asking about FAA and the controllers?
Aaron Karp: I think one of the things that the DCA accident did was thrust the controller shortfall issue into the public eye. I mean, everyone in aviation knows it's an issue, but I think it's now front and center in the public's mind. A lot of the hearing was, “Why is this the case, why do we have too few controllers, and how do we get more controllers?” It's not an easy solution, because you have to hire controllers, you have to train controllers. Work conditions right now, there's a lot of overtime. It's a demanding, difficult job in the best of circumstances, and now the system's strained.
I think that there's just a lot of concern about the controllers. And one thing is they were also talking about the technology and that the technology is behind. The United States Congress, in 2003, mandated that FAA set up something called the NextGen project. [On] December 15, 2004, the FAA put out their plan for NextGen. It's unfair to say there's been no progress, but very incremental progress. Now we're 20 years out and we're basically a generation beyond when they put this out there, and we're still waiting for that.
I think there's a lot of concern about both that the technology needs to be upgraded, the controller staff needs to be at full speed, and that both of those things are behind. And they're things that the FAA has struggled with for two decades really.
Karen Walker : Picking up on Aaron's point about NextGen—NextGen specifically didn't really come up that much in the hearing, but technology did, and the fact that the FAA's air traffic management system is so antiquated. There was a lot of talk about there just aren't even the spare parts to keep this thing going. And when they try and add new bits to it, they sort of have to dumb it down because it's still got to work with the old system.
Sean, again, you're an expert on this. I'm starting to question after all these years, is NextGen even relevant anymore, if there was a magic switch where you could turn that all on tomorrow? Is it in itself so old now that it's not relevant? What's your thought on technology?
Sean Broderick: The technologies that make up the program that Aaron [was] talking about, a lot of them are relevant and are making a difference, but I think there's a bigger fundamental problem. And I think you heard it in the hearing and you hear it every hearing we have: It's always the same roadblocks that Congress or the FAA or industry points to. It says, look, we have an incremental funding system that we can't just go and buy all of the equipment we need for the entire country. We have to do it in-route center by in-route center, or tower by tower, or however you're going to do it.
To really change it to a system where new technology will work, you have to redo the system. There's no reason to have 20 in-route centers across the country, but to switch to a system where all of a sudden you're going to go from 20 to 5 ... And we've seen the problems that we've had up in the Northeast, of moving some controllers from New York to Philadelphia. Imagine that across the country with workers. It's a real concern.
Then the funding side's a whole different story. Privatization or the non-profitization, if you will, of the air traffic control system gets a bad rap from some in the industry. Some love it, others don't. So, you're stuck with a system, or rather a platform, a framework that's the same year in and year out. So, if you're not going to change the framework, you're going to have a hard time. It's like having a wooden house and putting all sorts of great materials on the top of it. You're still going to have a wooden house. And if those beams are rotten, then your house has got a problem.
Until we—we being everyone involved in this industry and everyone that covers it—decide that they want to fix that, I don't see this ever changing. No matter how great the whiz-bang technology is, it's going to take a while to roll it out to 20 in-route centers, for example. It just is.
Karen Walker : Yeah, you were really talking about the human side of this. There is the technology, of course, but the human side and the system is what they've never seemed to be able to address.
Aaron?
Aaron Karp: Yeah. I just wanted to quickly say that there's always been an inherent conflict, in that FAA both runs ATC and regulates ATC. In Canada, for example, NAV Canada runs ATC and Transport Canada regulates it. In the UK, UK NATS runs ATC and the CAA regulates it. I think that's always been this strange thing about the FAA and ATC. One of the reasons it's so inefficient in many ways is that you have the regulator operating the system.
I think that creates this obvious conflict of interest that, I think, is part of the overall system structure that Sean's been talking about that needs to be fixed.
Karen Walker : Lori, can I bring you in, here on the political side of this, which you can't get away from that too with these issues. Obviously we've got a new Trump administration, therefore we've got a new transport secretary, Sean Duffy. With everything that's been going on so early in this administration on the aviation side, it's probably not surprising for them to at least be making it clear they're paying attention. Secretary Duffy has pledged that they're going to offer larger salaries for new air traffic controllers, only hire the brightest and best, get them into this academy, the FAA ATC Academy in Oklahoma City.
Is this going to make a difference? Is there going to be a difference from this administration in terms of how it approaches aviation, do you think?
Lori Ranson: I think it's early days. I think it's great what they're discussing, if they can actually implement it. That's the challenge, right? We can all get up and say we'd like to do this, or this is our plan, but sometimes plans can get bogged down in the bureaucratic process. I think it's a wait-and-see attitude. I think what he's trying to do or what they're proposing is a great idea, because we need more controllers. We've all known that for a decade, but now it's really getting into the public eye.
Maybe because of that there could be a bit more pressure to get these plans through.
Karen Walker : Yeah, because it's the wait-and-see that people are fed up with, and, frankly, scared about, I think as well. These lawmakers all fly in and out of Washington Reagan all the time. I got the feeling at the hearing that some of them are very personally scared.
Lori Ranson: Just on the political process, if you will, there's always issues with FAA funding, not just reauthorization, but appropriations from Congress. In this white paper that some of the groups are circulating, one thing that stood out to me is CBO [Congressional Budget Office] in June 2024—the baseline projections of the Airport and Airway Trust Fund show end-of-year uncommitted balances of $6 billion for fiscal '25, and that grows to $17.5 billion by 2034. Those are pretty astonishing numbers.
I just think if we're talking about overhauling the system, funding needs to be a very important discussion topic in terms of if we want to implement this technology, figuring out the technology that works best, and giving the FAA resources that it needs just to do its job.
Karen Walker : Yeah, that's right.
Sean, I know, again, you are very focused on the technology side and technical side. And when things go wrong, you're looking at all of that. But how important do you think is this whole political system in terms of being able to address the issues the FAA is seeing?
Sean Broderick: The FAA, by definition, it needs stability to ensure confidence in the industry. One of the things that I've been carefully watching is the confidence meter of both folks within the FAA and then obviously the folks that are regulated by the FAA. We're in a tough spot. Clearly this administration has goals and they're results-oriented and the process of getting there is much less important than the results.
But if you take what we were just talking about, hiring controllers, for example. We clearly need more controllers, and I don't think anybody's going to complain about the controllers being compensated more. But yet, you're hiring them into an agency that is also seeing it's part of the budget reduction by hatchet and not scalpel approach that's being taken, and the questioning of whether colleagues, an unspecified subset of people within the FAA, are useful.
On the one hand, you're cutting within the agency and saying, "We don't really need all these federal workers. Heck, we don't even need a headquarters building downtown." But then on the other hand, you're saying, "But we really need you guys to come and direct the air traffic, because that's very important and we're going to give you more money to do it." You have to be careful in saying, "You want to argue about whether you need this department or that department that was only created 20 or 30 years ago?" That's fine. It's a political debate and it's something that I personally try not to pay a whole lot of attention to, certainly what I did in my reporting.
But in terms of the FAA, somebody's got to regulate the industry. And somebody's got to regulate a separate air traffic organization if we create one, like Aaron said. There has to be a regulator, and there has to be a standard setter, and there has to be an organization that is ensured with making sure that industry has systems in place to meet those standards. That confidence has to go from administration to administration to administration. They tried to make that happen by putting the administrator on a five-year term. But I think, as we've seen in the last 10 years now, it's not working out the way they had hoped. Still some work to do there.
Karen Walker : Yeah, absolutely. Because we're still in a situation where we've got an acting administrator again at the moment, so it's an ever-moving belt, isn't it? The other thing that I thought was interesting that came out at the hearing, probably not surprising because it was a political point to make, we're under a threat of potentially another government shutdown. That's a much wider thing about use of budgets, et cetera.
The point was made again and again that even just the threat of that to air traffic controllers who would have to keep working but without pay, that's an additional stress on those people at the point when they're already stressed. And also, somebody made the point that the academy in Oklahoma City would shut down, and that would therefore obviously have a huge effect in terms of how fast you can be bringing on new trained controllers.
Aaron, what was your thought when you heard about that conversation at the hearing?
Aaron Karp: Yeah, absolutely. They have to show up for work not being paid, the way it works is, eventually they would get paid. But when you have a very stressful job that's already stressful and you're showing up not being paid, I think there's a morale issue. I think generally with the federal government right now there's a morale issue. And I think with the FAA there's a morale issue.
The thing about government shutdowns is they keep the air traffic control system going, but you're asking people to do a very difficult job not getting a paycheck and not knowing how long they're not going to get a paycheck. Anyone would say if you don't know when your next paycheck's coming, that's just enormous stress.
Karen Walker : Sean, can I go back to you on something you said right at the beginning about the shock that people had about military helicopters operating within the same space as commercial airliners, right in their flight paths, as it turns out. Again, in the hearing, it was touched on, but not a lot. I was surprised that it wasn't raised more.
But there was a question about: Is it correct, is it right to continue to allow military and general aviation aircraft? Bearing in mind the Midway one was a business jet on the runway. Should they still be allowed to continue to be integrated into the major commercial airports' space in the US? What's your thoughts on that?
Sean Broderick: I don't think the integration is as much of an issue, as long as you have proper protocols to account for the integration. I think it's doable, and I think the system has proven that it is doable again. What the FAA will point to, and rightly so, is they had decades of safe operations of not just military helicopter traffic. It's really helicopter traffic up and down the Potomac. A lot of it is military, but not all of it. National is hardly the only airport with transitioning helicopter traffic, and even more of them have helicopters that come and go.
I don't think it's the prevalence of the traffic that's an issue. It's the protocols that are in place to ensure that safe operations are maintained. We saw with wake turbulence, for example. After years of study, the smart folks determine that you have to have warnings behind bigger airplanes when smaller planes are following them, simply because of the effects of the wakes coming off of the wingtips. So, you put that in place for airplanes that are in the same category, large transport aircraft. I think you can do it.
What it underscores is the challenge that the next generation, the eVTOL world has. If this kind of thing can happen ... We saw it happen. Imagine these eVTOLs flying around every city that has a major downtown airport, you're going to have ... It's going to be interesting to see the protocols that get developed. I don't envy my colleagues Graham Warwick and Ben Goldstein and the rest that cover that, because it's going to be interesting evolution over the next decade or so.
Karen Walker : Right. That leads you to thinking about drones which have been in the headlines in the States also. There's a lot of controversy about that, too.
Aaron, what are your thoughts about ... Is there a threat there?
Aaron Karp: Yes, absolutely. There was actually an incident in December at Boston Logan Airport, which was almost like something out of a movie, where the Boston police actually had some sophisticated technology to track drones, realized that drones were operating what they call "dangerously close" to Logan, and then used their technology to actually track down three guys who were in an abandoned building, flying drones close to Logan. I don't know what the reason was, whether they were bad actors or getting kicks or whatever. They were arrested.
I think there's a general issue with ... Drones are not supposed to be around airports. But you have recreational drone users. Between recreational drones and commercial drones, you have about 2 million drones in the United States. There's not a lot of reliable data, but DFW [Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport] has been doing a lot with Embry‑Riddle University on tracking drones. What they found is, there are about 5,000 drones in the several mile vicinity of the airport that are operating every year. Almost all of those are okay. There's about 150 that get dangerously close to the airport and are problematic. And there's about three or four that they believe are genuine bad actors who are putting drones where they're not supposed to go.
The problem is, is that there's still research being done, but if a drone gets ingested into an aircraft engine, or a drone smacks into an aircraft, or a plane veers out of the way at the last second, or drones hitting helicopters is a big issue, so if a helicopter at an airport sees a drone and it veers out of the way at the last second, what happens to that? One of the issues here is that FAA and Congress, for 10 years, have been trying to play catch-up on drones. They can't figure out quite how to regulate them. One of the things that happened 10 years ago was that the US government decided that drones were aircraft and had all the legal protections of an aircraft.
Even if a police department, if you jam a drone ... There's technology that can jam a drone, for example, and send it away from an airport. But if that technology is used by certain ... The Department of Justice and Homeland Security have limited jurisdiction. But for the most part, if that technology is used, it violates multiple federal laws, including the Aircraft Sabotage Act, which could lead to a 20-year prison sentence. The only thing that can be done now is to track the drones. And all drones now have a remote identifier, which is like a digital license plate, and you can figure out basically who the operator is and maybe track them down.
But drones are classified like a [Boeing] 737, and so there's limited ability to take them out or to jam them. It just becomes that the airport has to decide, do we do a ground stop? The air traffic control really doesn't have the ability to talk to the drone pilot. I think this is just an underrated issue, where what could happen if a drone is ingested in an engine, if it smacks into an aircraft, or it causes other aircraft to veer out of the way, which causes an accident.
Karen Walker : Certainly in the current environment though, and it wouldn't be an underrated issue if there is an incident right now, with everything else that's happened. But wouldn't it also, Sean, be a case of, like the incident at National, it's now too late to say it's too late. As Aaron has said, the presence of these drones is known about. When it comes down to protocols, should the protocols change?
Sean Broderick: Right. In National, we've gone from helicopter flights everywhere, all the time to none, except for the president and emergency. So, pretty drastic change, could be temporary. On the drone side, as Aaron said, you have rules in place now. Designating them as an aircraft could be one major change. I'm not sure what that gets you. Because most of the people that are doing stuff around airports, I think, either they don't know the rules, and so maybe a PR campaign is needed, or there's three or four that are nefarious characters. And I don't know how you stop them.
The only good news is that the drones are small enough. They're smaller than the birds that engine makers are having to certify as being able to ingest into their engines.
Karen Walker : Except they're made of metal, and birds tend not to be, so we don't know.
Aaron?
Aaron Karp: I would say that drones are getting bigger. A recreational drone can be up to 55 pounds, and a commercial-use drone, like to inspect power lines or something like that, can be 150 pounds. You're talking about some larger ... It's not just the small drones that could be ingested into an engine, but it's this ... There are a lot of drones out there, and grappling with how to integrate them all into the airspace is difficult. But as Sean said, it's not allowed to operate a drone around an airport, certainly a recreational drone. So, the rules are in place, it's just a matter of ... In the drone world, they talk about the careless and the clueless, that they're either careless or they don't know. And then there's the small criminal element. Some of it, like Sean said, is a PR campaign, to say if you're operating a drone, the airport is completely off limits.
Karen Walker : Getting back again to the incidents that have happened, and why I think that hearing was held, which was just trying to obviously make sure nothing else happens. The thinking there was very much, make sure this doesn't happen again for the aircraft types that they were thinking of. One of the thoughts that came to me was Paul Rinaldi, who is a former president of NATCA [National Air Traffic Controllers Association], the association that represents the US air traffic controllers, and he's a former controller himself, so he's an expert, and he was giving witness. I thought it was very interesting that he said that, "In 2025, the US air space system is no longer the gold standard of the world." He said, "We're not even on the world's podium right now." That's a pretty big and damning statement. FAA has long led the world when it comes to aviation and how to manage safe commercial aviation around the world.
What I'd just like to very quickly do, as we're running out of time here, but can we just very quickly hear from each of you, do you agree that the US is losing or lost its standard as the leader in aviation, particularly safety? And as we all live in the DC area and use Reagan National Airport, I'm getting asked the question a lot by people these days because of what I do, and I think that's what's happening, people are saying, is it safe to fly in the US?
Do you feel safe to fly? Lori, can I start with you, please?
Lori Ranson: I do feel safe to fly. If you just take a step back and think about the sheer number of operations every day that occur in the National Airspace System, it's still very safe. Unfortunately, accidents happen, but I think the proper authorities are investigating these accidents and there will be learnings from these incidents. I think you really just have to take a step back and think about how big our airspace system is and how many operations occur on a daily basis.
And yes, I do feel comfortable flying.
Karen Walker : Thank you, Lori.
Aaron, very quickly, is the US still the gold standard and do you feel safe?
Aaron Karp: I do. When I'm asked that question, what I point out, and Sean can really speak to this, is the numbers. So few people that get on a plane end up dying. So few planes that fly, especially in the United States, end up crashing. 75 people a day die in the United States in car accidents. I think part of it is a perception problem, is that people see these crashes. Airplane crashes are so dramatic, they make such news. I do offer some caveats when I answer the question that maybe I wouldn't have a couple of years ago, in that there has to be investigations. What's happened recently is unacceptable. And people see it, people see the accidents. When you see the crash, comparing it to the sheer numbers is sometimes, from a perception point, difficult. But if you just look at the numbers, it's very safe.
I think one of the effects will be efficiency, because safety is always a part where the industry is less efficient necessarily because of safety, because you put safety first. And I think when you're cutting people from FAA, when you hear there's so much more hyperfocus on it, that what you could see is simply a less efficient system, that it leads to more delays and cancellations and that sort of thing.
Karen Walker : Thanks, Aaron.
Sean?
Sean Broderick: I take the gold standard question a little bit differently. I don't think the FAA is the gold standard anymore, but not necessarily because the FAA has slid back. I think one of the efforts that FAA and the other leading regulators around the world have tried to do is raise the standards across the globe. And I think we now have a standard where you have multiple people on the top step of the podium, I think, or multiple agencies. And I think that's a good thing overall for aviation.
Are there lessons that the FAA can learn from others? Absolutely. Are there lessons that others can still learn from the FAA? I believe so. I think overall, the standards have risen across the world to a point where you should feel safe flying. IATA put out its latest safety report. From an air transport standpoint, the numbers are staggering in terms of how safe we are.
If you look at the entire world, you'd have to get on an airplane once a day for the next almost 16,000 years before you'd have the likelihood of experiencing a fatal accident. Nobody's going to do that. It's hard for people to comprehend. I tell people, "Yes, things are safe." I, when I fly, worry much more about where my bags are and whether I'm going to make the flight or whether I'm going to get a seat on the next flight if I get bumped from my current flight.
Karen Walker : Some good thoughts, Sean. Good thoughts for all of you. Thank you very much. I would just add that it still seems to me tragically that the crash at Washington National was avoidable. We should not be in a situation in the US where avoidable air crashes are happening. That should be behind us. And I think when you add on all the stuff that's been going on at Boeing and the MAX, et cetera, I think that has definitely, to put it this way, not done much good for the US reputation in aviation. But hopefully everybody's going to be working on it very hard now.
And the other one thing I would just say is, think of all those amazing airline crews. They're doing this multiple times every day, the flight attendants, the pilots, very professionally. They're human, too. This must be on their minds, too, but they are acting amazingly professionally. And that's, I think, a really, really strong sense of where my sense of safety lies. You know they're doing their job 200%.
Sean, Aaron, Lori, thank you so much for your time and insights today. And thank you also to our producers, Guy Ferneyhough and Cory Hitt, and of course, a huge thank you to our listeners. Make sure you don't miss us each week by subscribing to the Window Seat podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen. This is Karen Walker, disembarking from Window Seat.
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