Twenty Months After the Midair Collision That Killed 67 People, Virginia's Senators Move to Cut Flights at Reagan National — the DCA Air Safety Act Would Cap Arrivals at 28 an Hour and Strip 30 Slots, Most of Them the Long-Haul Exemptions Congress Added
On September 10, 2026, Sens. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Mark Warner (D-VA) unveiled the DCA Air Safety Act, which they said they would formally introduce the following week, to reduce air traffic at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The bill comes roughly twenty months after the January 29, 2025 midair collision between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet on approach to DCA killed 67 people — a crash whose National Transportation Safety Board investigation, the senators said, "underscored the serious risks posed by unsustainable traffic levels at the airport." The legislation would cap arrivals at 28 aircraft per 60-minute period — down from the FAA's current rate of up to 48 an hour on DCA's single main runway, the busiest in the country — and require the FAA to reduce clustering of flights within 30-minute windows within 180 days. It would eliminate 30 daily slots over five years, with the FAA withdrawing six authorizations a year from 2028 through 2032; at least 26 of those would come from the "beyond-perimeter" exemptions that let flights exceed DCA's usual 1,250-mile limit, which Congress has repeatedly expanded over the objections of the Virginia and Maryland delegations. Slot eliminations would require a public process with a 60-day comment period, and the bill would set up a commission including the FAA, the Pentagon, the governors of Virginia and Maryland and the D.C. mayor's office. "We owe it to the victims of the fatal mid-air collision near DCA and their loved ones to take action and prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again," Warner said. Kaine said "Congress must do more to ensure that the highest level of safety regulations is in place to prevent future tragedies." The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority said only that it "will monitor the progress of the proposed legislation." American Airlines, DCA's dominant carrier, faces the largest schedule disruption and Alaska Airlines the largest proportional exposure. Senate Commerce Committee leaders, who wrote the most recent perimeter expansions into the 2024 FAA reauthorization, had not publicly responded as of September 11.
“We owe it to the victims of the fatal mid-air collision near DCA and their loved ones to take action and prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again. DCA's overburdened runway is the busiest in the country, and the National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) investigation of the January 2025 crash underscored the serious risks posed by unsustainable traffic levels at the airport.”