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A Black Hawk helicopter approaches landing in the Pentagon in July 2024.
Alex Brandon/AP
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Alex Brandon/AP
An official from the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday confirmed that a hotline that has not worked direct communication between the Pentagon and the air traffic control tower at Ronald Really Washington National Airport since March 2022.
Public recognition came during a hearing from the Senate Commercial Committee when the Republican Senator Ted Cruz from Texas asked the FAA officials after the fatal collision between a helicopter of the army Black Hawk and a regional jet American airline that approached the airport to land. This crash killed sixty people.
Franklin J. Mcintosh, the deputy operational operating officer of the FAA, said that the agency did not know at the time of the accident that the hotline did not work.
“We were not aware of it, but we became aware of this event, and now that we became aware of this event, we insist that this line should be repaired before we resume operations from the Pentagon,” he said.
In a statement to NPR, the FAA said that a “committed, direct access line” between the airport and the Pentagon’s Army Heliport “has been triggered since 2022 because a new tower was built in the Pentagon. The two facilities continue to communicate by phone for coordination.”
The army did not respond to inquiries about comments.
One army unit stopped the training flights in the National Capital region, which included Washington, DC and the nearby areas in Maryland and Virginia, less than two weeks after taking flights back to the accident in January after a break.
This decision came after two commercial aircraft had to stop their landings in the DCA on May 1st, since a helicopter of the army had come too close to their flight path on a training mission.
Margaret Wallace, a professor of Technology Institute for Technology in Florida, who teaches air traffic control, said that it is common for flight safety facilities to have hotlines at other critical offices such as weather authorities, government buildings and military facilities.
“You just press a button and rings directly to this facility or the agency with which you have to coordinate,” she said.
Wallace, which was also air traffic controller in the US air weapon, said that Hotlines can be useful to communicate with people who are not in radio communication that use controllers. “Maybe it’s the commander on an Air Force. He doesn’t sit there and hears radios, but it’s a direct line for him. Or a direct line to the White House,” she said.
In the hearing on Wednesday when Cruz asked when the hotline would work again, Mcintosh expects that the Ministry of Defense “would accelerate this timeline so that they could start their operations”.