By David Shepardson
FREDERICK, Maryland, Aug 25 (Reuters) – The head of the Federal Aviation Administration said on Tuesday that an antenna was relocated and a procedure changed after a military helicopter carrying President Donald Trump came too close to a passenger jet departing Reagan Washington National Airport.
The Aug. 4 incident raised serious questions about why the passenger airplane was allowed to depart while Marine One was nearby, a time when commercial traffic is typically halted. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters after an aviation event he was confident the communication issue had been resolved.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident.
Following a January 2025 crash between a military helicopter and a commercial jet that killed 67 people, the FAA barred mixed helicopter and jet traffic around the airport.
Congress awarded FAA $12.5 billion last year to replace outdated air traffic control telecom infrastructure and radar surveillance systems after a series of failures including significant serious outages covering Newark and Washington traffic and a 2023 failure of an FAA system that forced a brief nationwide ground stop.
Bedford, who has asked Congress for another $10 billion, said the FAA is “already starting to delay phase two and phase three because of lack of funding … If we don’t get funding for modernizing the data architecture and modernizing the operating platform, then we will have failed to deliver modernization.”
The FAA plans to deploy a new system called SMART to reduce congestion and head off delays by using predictive analytics to manage flights before they depart as part of an $875 million, 12-year contract awarded to Air Space Intelligence.
The FAA plans to launch SMART in a testing mode starting Sept. 14 and is working with several commercial airlines “to start testing the predictive analytics to see if they actually do what we believe they can do.”
Facing rising demand, runway construction, severe weather issues and air traffic controller shortfalls, the FAA has struggled to address congestion issues for years. The agency ordered airlines at Chicago O’Hare in April to cut 300 daily flights, citing congestion concerns, and has extended those cuts until October 2027.
(Reporting by David Shepardson, Editing by Nick Zieminski)
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