FAA ignored warnings before DCA crash, federal investigators say

The Federal Aviation Administration is continuing to ignore warnings about close calls between aircraft a year after a deadly collision above Reagan N...

The Federal Aviation Administration is continuing to ignore warnings about close calls between aircraft a year after a deadly collision above Reagan National Airport between a commercial jet and a U.S. Army helicopter, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday.

“Are there other hot spots? And am I concerned that the FAA is not paying attention to those other hot spots? The answer to that is yes,” Jennifer Homendy told reporters during a break in a hearing on the crash that killed 67 people.

Investigators found in their nearly year-long review of the tragedy that it was “100 percent preventable,” Homendy said. Air traffic controllers were routinely overwhelmed and probably desensitized to the number of near misses at the airport, investigators concluded, while pilots were left to manage visual separation from other aircraft on their own, without being told how narrow their flight paths were. And controllers and pilots who flagged the situation as dangerous went unheeded, they said.

“We have an entire tower who took it upon themselves to try to raise concerns over and over, and over and over again, only to get squashed, by management and everybody above them within FAA,” Homendy said. “For years, no one listened.”

Within the FAA, she noted, people did not want to be interviewed on the record “because they are afraid of retaliation.” Employees said that management discouraged them from reporting some issues because doing so made the facility “look bad.”