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The House’s aviation safety bill has undergone revisions and now enjoys the endorsement of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). However, the majority of the families of the 67 victims from last year’s tragic midair collision near Washington, D.C. remain firm in their demand for more stringent measures to ensure comprehensive reform.
The NTSB has confirmed that the updated Alert Act now includes its long-standing recommendation to mandate critical locator systems for all aircraft operating near busy airports. These systems are designed to provide pilots with precise information about surrounding air traffic. This recommendation has been a priority for the NTSB since 2008.
Despite these developments, the victims’ families expressed cautious optimism. On Thursday, they acknowledged the bill’s improvements but withheld full support. Their main concern is the absence of strict timelines for implementation, akin to those in the Senate bill, which narrowly failed to pass by a single vote.
“Safety requirements that depend on negotiated processes, administrative discretion, or multi-step rulemaking introduce delays that could cost lives,” the families stated. “The most effective version of this bill will establish clear statutory timelines and performance standards, ensuring that procedural hurdles do not impede progress.”
On Thursday, two pivotal House committees unanimously approved the revised bill, clearing the path for a full House vote. Following this, representatives and senators must collaborate to refine the bill before it is presented to the Senate for a final vote.
Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell, who crafted the Senate bill, also echoed the families’ concern that the Alert act still doesn’t include an ironclad requirement for the locator system that the NTSB said would have prevented the D.C. crash to be effective.
The Texas Republican and Washington Democrat said in a joint statement that any legislation will need the strongest standard for those systems to pass the Senate.
NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy sharply criticized the original version of the bill last month as a “watered down” measure that wouldn’t do enough to prevent future tragedies. But the board said in a statement that the revised version, which was drafted with input from experts at the agency that investigates crashes, would address the shortcomings their investigation identified.
The NTSB said this week that the bill would now require the Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Department and the military to take actions that would address their recommendations.
The bill will now require planes to have Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast In systems that can receive data about the locations of other aircraft that would have alerted the pilots of an American Airlines jet sooner about the impending collision with an Army Black Hawk helicopter on Jan. 29, 2025. Most planes already have the ADS-B Out systems that broadcast their locations.
The NTSB cited systemic weaknesses and years of ignored warnings as the main causes of the crash, but Homendy has said that if both the plane and the Black Hawk had been equipped with ADS-B In and the systems had been turned on, the collision would have been prevented. The Army’s policy at the time of the crash mandated that its helicopters fly without that system on to conceal their locations, although the helicopter involved in this crash was on a training flight, not a sensitive mission.
A number of key industry groups, including the Airlines for America trade group and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, have backed the House bill.