The National Transportation Safety Board says the FAA has given unacceptable responses to one-third of the safety fixes it demanded after 67 people died in a midair collision near Washington in January 2025. At the center of the dispute is a tracking system the safety board says could have given pilots a warning nearly a minute before the crash. The FAA has not committed to requiring it.

The January 2025 collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in more than two decades. The NTSB's investigation found that the FAA allowed helicopters to fly close to the airport with no reliable mechanism to keep them separated from commercial planes, and had failed to act on prior recommendations to change that.

The technology exists. The mandate does not.

The system at issue is called ADS-B In. In plain terms, it lets a cockpit display the position of nearby aircraft in real time, pulling from signals that planes and helicopters already broadcast. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told Reuters that ADS-B In would have triggered an alert to the passenger jet's pilot 59 seconds before impact, and to the helicopter crew 48 seconds before impact. A minute is a long time when you are trying to avoid a collision.

"How many more decades have to go by before we again and again and again have to recommend it after terrible tragedy?" Homendy told Reuters.

The FAA's own administrator, Bryan Bedford, acknowledged in July that the agency could move forward on ADS-B without waiting for Congress. But he said the FAA would prefer lawmakers to give it direction first. That is not a technical obstacle. It is a choice to wait.

Eleven of thirty-three recommendations rated unacceptable.

The NTSB makes safety recommendations after major accidents and then tracks whether agencies follow through. When an agency disagrees, proposes an alternative the board considers inadequate, or simply fails to act within a reasonable time, the board labels that response unacceptable. Out of 33 recommendations the NTSB made after the Reagan Airport collision, 11 have now received that label from the FAA.

The FAA told Reuters it has reviewed helicopter routes in multiple cities and issued a directive to keep planes and helicopters separated. Those are real steps. But the board's position is that without a mandate for ADS-B In, the underlying vulnerability that killed 67 people remains unaddressed.

Homendy and families of some of those killed are urging Congress this week to pass legislation that would force the issue. The House passed a broad aviation safety bill 396 to 10 in April. A separate Senate bill passed unanimously but fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed for fast-track passage in the House. The legislative path exists. It has just not been completed.

The deeper pattern here is familiar to anyone who follows how regulatory systems actually work. Safety boards investigate, they recommend, agencies respond slowly or partially, and the fixes that require the most institutional commitment, the ones that cost money or force operational changes, tend to accumulate on a list of open items until the next disaster reopens the conversation. The NTSB has been recommending some form of ADS-B adoption for years. The Reagan Airport crash did not create that recommendation. It just made ignoring it harder to defend.

The question now is whether the political pressure from grieving families, a near-unanimous House vote, and public NTSB rebukes will do what two decades of recommendations could not: get a specific technology requirement written into federal aviation rules before it is needed again.