House Aviation Subcommittee grills FAA administrator on DC flights

FAA Administration Bryan Bedford vowed Tuesday that he would maintain air traffic safety in the Washington, D.C., region, as members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Aviation Subcommittee sharply questioned him about a push to allow waivers for military training flights.

After the January collision of an American Airlines regional jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that killed 67 people, FAA implemented additional operating restrictions around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, including requiring “all aircraft operating around DCA to broadcast their position and identification using ADS-B Out [Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast], with very limited exceptions.”

The annual defense policy bill, approved by the House last week, includes a provision known as Section 373 that would allow the military to waive the location broadcasting requirement for Defense Department training flights. Today, these aircraft cannot operate in “covered airspace” unless they are “actively providing warning of the proximity of such aircraft to nearby commercial aircraft in a manner compatible with the traffic alert and collision avoidance system of such commercial aircraft,” the bill reads.

“We learned of Section 373 essentially when everybody else did last week,” Bedford told the subcommittee members. “We are not going to go back into a position of a less safe airspace environment. We will monitor the airspace with vigilance and with safety first.”

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.), the subcommittee’s chairman, criticized the provision. “Put simply, I do not believe that the military should be conducting any classified training missions or check rides up and down the Potomac River, in one of the most congested Class B airspaces in the country,” he said.

On Dec. 10, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation and Safety Board, sent a letter to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees expressing “strong opposition” to Section 373, which she said would present “unacceptable risk to the flying public.”

Asked if he would ensure the provision were removed, Bedford said, “We’re in the process of renegotiating our memorandum of agreement [with the military] in terms of how we continue to operate with those restrictions in the capital region.”

Since the January crash, Bedford said, “we don’t allow visual separation any longer. And then, of course, we’ve completely canceled several helicopter routes” in the D.C. area.

“We’ve essentially moved the helicopter traffic out of the capital region. It’s certainly less convenient for people who might otherwise have wanted to take the shortcut, but if they want to fly, they can fly,” he said. “They just have to simply move around the traffic.”

The Senate is expected to vote on the defense policy bill before it breaks for the holidays at the end of the week.