NTSB Rejects FAA Responses to 11 of 33 DCA Crash Safety Recommendations

WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board said Monday that Federal Aviation Administration responses to 11 of the 33 safety recommendations the board sent the agency after last year's fatal midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) are "unacceptable."

The finding closes the loop on a recommendation package the NTSB issued on February 17, 2026, after its final report into the January 29, 2025 collision between PSA Airlines (OH), operating as American Eagle, Flight 5342 — a CRJ700 whose type certificate is now held by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries RJ Aviation (MHIRJ) rather than original manufacturer Bombardier — and a U.S. Army UH-60L Black Hawk on a priority air transport flight. All 67 people aboard both aircraft were killed.

What "Unacceptable" Means

An NTSB safety recommendation is not a rule. It is a formal request that the receiving agency must answer, and the board then classifies that answer. A response counts as unacceptable, in the board's own terms, when the agency disagrees with the recommendation outright, offers an alternative the NTSB judges would not fix the underlying concern, or fails to act within a reasonable time.

Eleven of the FAA's 33 responses met that bar this week. The NTSB's public comment singled out one: Safety Recommendation A-26-31, which asks the FAA to require that any aircraft operating in airspace where ADS-B Out is mandatory also carry ADS-B In — a cockpit display, with audible alerting, that shows pilots the traffic around them rather than only broadcasting their own position to controllers.

The 59-Second Gap

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy has made the ADS-B In recommendation personal. "How many more decades have to go by before we again and again and again have to recommend it after terrible tragedy?" she said, a reference to a board push for cockpit-alerting mandates that The Air Current traces back to at least 2008.

The number behind that frustration comes from the NTSB's own accident reconstruction: had the systems been aboard and configured to alert, the simulation found, American Eagle's crew would have had a 59-second warning before the collision, and the Black Hawk crew 48 seconds. Against a closure that fast, either figure is the difference between a near miss and a collision that killed all 67 people aboard both aircraft.

The FAA has not said it disagrees with the recommendation. It has also not said it will write the rule. According to the FAA's letter, the agency is reviewing helicopter routes in six major cities, has completed reviews in four, and has issued a directive to keep airplane and helicopter traffic separated — steps the NTSB does not dispute took place, but that do not answer the specific ask in A-26-31. The board said the FAA's response gave no indication of whether it intends to pursue an ADS-B In rule at all.

That silence has a history. The FAA told the NTSB in 2019, after a fatal floatplane collision near Ketchikan, Alaska, that traffic-alerting systems "contribute to aviation safety" — and still declined to write a rule. By 2024, the agency's position had hardened into "not pursue any additional ADS-B requirements at this time." The DCA collision is the event that finally moved that position from "not now" to "reviewing," not yet to "yes."

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told Reuters in July that the agency could move on ADS-B In without Congress passing anything — but that he would rather have lawmakers direct it. Nine weeks later, with the FAA's formal response on record, that preference reads less like patience and more like the reason nothing has moved.

A Congress That Can't Agree on Its Own Bill

The FAA's discretion matters because Congress has spent a year failing to remove it. Two bills have moved through the Capitol since the collision, and neither has become law.

The Senate passed the ROTOR Act unanimously in December 2025. It would codify several of the NTSB's recommendations directly, ADS-B In among them, rather than leaving them to FAA rulemaking. When the House tried to pass it under fast-track rules in February 2026 — a procedure that needs a two-thirds majority — it fell one vote short, 264-133.

The House instead passed its own bill, the ALERT Act, 396-10 in April 2026. The NTSB had already told congressional leaders it could not support that version. In a February 26, 2026 letter, the board wrote that "many key provisions fall short of fully implementing all of the NTSB's recommendations" and that it "cannot support the ALERT Act in its current form as it is not fully responsive to the NTSB's recommendations." The House passed it anyway, by a margin large enough to suggest the objection changed few votes.

That leaves the Senate holding a bill the NTSB endorses and the House holding one it does not, with no reconciliation since spring. Homendy and families of people killed in the collision were expected to press Congress again this week to resolve the difference — the same argument, and largely the same ask, that has now run for the better part of a year without a bill reaching the president's desk.

What Comes Next

Monday's evaluation does not close any recommendation. Under NTSB practice, an "unacceptable" classification keeps the item open and awaiting a revised FAA response, which the board will then assess in turn. The NTSB did not publicly identify the other 22 of the 33 FAA-addressed recommendations, or how it classified the FAA's answers to them.

DCA's safety margins remain a live question independent of this week's classification. Airways has reported separately on a loss of separation at the same airport, in which a presidential helicopter's own three-minute departure call never reached the tower — a different failure mode than ADS-B In, but evidence that the procedural layers protecting Reagan National are still being tested in real time while the FAA's answer on cockpit traffic alerting remains open.