A hotline connecting Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport air traffic controllers and their counterparts at the Pentagon has been “inoperable” for more than three years, a Federal Aviation Administration official told lawmakers Wednesday.
Franklin McIntosh, the deputy head of air traffic control, testified Wednesday before the Senate Commerce Committee that the line maintained by the Defense Department has been down since March 2022.
During questioning by Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, McIntosh said the FAA had been unaware of the outage until May 1, when controllers at Reagan National were forced to order two flights to abandon landing attempts due to an Army helicopter heading to the Pentagon.
“We’re insisting upon that line to be fixed before we resume any operations out of the Pentagon,” said McIntosh, who added he expected the DOD to “expedite that timeline, so they can begin their operations.”
McIntosh explained that, without the hotline, air traffic controllers had the ability to communicate via landlines to remain “aware of the [aircraft] activity.”
On Jan. 29, an American Airlines plane and an Army helicopter collided as the plane was about to land at Reagan National, located in Arlington, Virginia. All 67 people aboard the two aircraft were killed.
The incident of two flights abandoning landing attempts came a week after a Virginia-based Army unit said it was resuming flights in the capital region following the Jan. 29 crash.
McIntosh on Wednesday said that before the Pentagon halted flights, the FAA considered revoking the permission that allowed helicopters to operate in the D.C. airspace without clearance.
“We were ready to deploy any option available that we could use or have that we felt was necessary to bring safety measures and better behaviors from the DOD,” McIntosh told the committee.
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