Senate approves bill inspired by DC plane crash to ensure military aircraft will broadcast location
By Wednesday afternoon, lawmakers in the Senate sprang into action to shut a critical loophole that had let military aircraft fly without broadcasting their positions—a practice that had just caused an Army helicopter to collide with an airliner over Washington, DC, killing 67 people.
Only hours after pushing through a hefty defense bill that contained the problematic flight‑security provisions, the Senate ratified a bipartisan measure mandating that every airplane, including military jets, use ADS‑B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance‑Broadcast) to reveal its location to air‑traffic controllers.
Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, said that “tragedy could have been avoided” if the Army’s Black Hawk had been transmitting its ADS‑B signal before the fateful crash, insisting that the new bill would save lives.
It remains unclear when the House will tackle the same proposal—known as the ROTOR Act and backed by Cruz, Democrat Maria Cantwell and the rest of Commerce Committee—or whether any amendments will sneak in. Cruz told reporters that the White House backs the Senate’s version and plans to push it to the president’s desk as early as next month.
Republican leadership chose not to amend the defense bill to address the safety issue, a move that would have sent it back to the House for another vote.
The final report on the collision will not be finished until next year, but Cruz explained that it was time to require military aircraft to operate under the same surveillance rules that commercial planes use around the nation’s capital, especially after the NTSB identified 85 near‑miss incidents in the three years leading up to the crash.
Although the NTSB has urged mandatory locator systems for decades, the legislation never passed partly because of worries over costs for private pilots and privacy concerns. Commercial jets and recent general‑aviation planes already run ADS‑B, and the Black Hawk involved in the collision was equipped with a system that was simply switched off during training, a decision the military justified by fearing that observers could pinpoint its position.
Parents Tim and Sheri Lilley, whose son Sam was the first officer on the American Airlines jet that struck the helicopter, said the new legislation “acknowledges the magnitude of that loss and affirms that meaningful change can come from it.”
In March, the FAA mandated that all military helicopters activate their locator systems at all times when flying through the busy airspace around the capital. The agency also instituted procedures to keep helicopters and fixed‑wing aircraft from sharing the same low‑altitude corridors by pausing takeoffs and landings whenever a helicopter was passing the airport and by closing certain routes.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford pledged Wednesday that even if the military bill becomes law, the FAA will uphold those safety measures to keep flights around Washington, DC, safe. Bedford also testified to a Senate committee that day.
The bill will also prompt a nationwide review of airport safety protocols to prevent the types of hazards that contributed to the Reagan National incident. It will require the military and FAA to exchange safety data more openly, strengthening the overall safety net for air travel.
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