Safety in our Skies

On the evening of January 29, 2025, a UH-60 Army Black Hawk helicopter tragically collided with American Airlines Flight 5342 over the Potomac River in Washington, DC. The collision took the lives of 67 people.

After the accident, I committed to first gathering all the facts and then deciding how to address the issues that caused it, so we wouldn’t see it happen again.  From the beginning, I said we should wait to legislate solutions until the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) completed its full and thorough investigation. The sad truth is that aviation accidents are almost never the result of just one cause, and we needed to know all the factors that contributed to this terrible incident. The last thing such a complex system needs is a knee-jerk reaction from Washington. Once we had the results of that investigation though, I introduced the Airspace Location and Enhanced Risk Transparency (ALERT) Act in February with colleagues on both sides of the aisle.  

The ALERT Act addresses the root cause and full scope of the safety issues identified by the National Transportation Safety Board, implementing all 50 of the Board’s recommendations. It requires the adoption of cutting-edge collision alerting and avoidance technologies, as well as strengthening coordination across the national airspace system, particularly between civilian and military operations.

The ALERT Act takes important steps to improve safety in our skies, ensuring that technology is being used to improve pilots’ and air traffic controllers’ situational awareness (a safety technology known as “ADS-B In”), but more importantly, the bill requires that collision avoidance technology be implemented to better alert pilots and avoid collisions.

Further, the bill requires important updates to air traffic control training, processes, and procedures to promote safety; it addresses shortcomings in safety culture and data sharing; and it strengthens oversight and standards for military and civilian operations in congested airspace.

Here’s the bottom line: the ALERT Act takes numerous meaningful steps to address every issue identified by the NTSB to ensure that you and your loved ones will be safer when flying. I introduced this bipartisan legislation with colleagues on both sides of the aisle on the Transportation Committee and the House Armed Services Committee. This week, the House overwhelmingly supported it, passing the bill by an overwhelming vote of 396 to 10.

The safety of everyone who shares our airspace is critical. This bipartisan step forward honors the 67 lives that were lost and helps ensure a tragedy like this does not happen again. I look forward to working closely with the Senate, which has related legislation that takes a narrower approach, to get a final bill to the President so we can improve the safety of the aviation system and better protect the flying public.

Sincerely,

Sam Graves