House Narrowly Rejects Air Safety Bill After Pentagon Opposition

A move to swiftly pass the bill failed by a single vote. It would have required aircraft to carry technology that officials said might have prevented a midair collision near Washington last year.

The House struck down aviation safety legislation on Tuesday that would have required planes to carry a type of tracking technology that federal investigators determined could have helped avoid a midair collision over the Potomac River last year that killed 67 people.

The bipartisan legislation, known as the ROTOR Act, passed the Senate unanimously in December, and appeared poised to earn widespread support in the House. But when the Defense Department withdrew its support for the measure on Monday, citing national security and cost concerns, it fueled opposition to the legislation, and ultimately led even the G.O.P. leaders who brought the bill to a vote to help kill it on the House floor.

The 264-to-133 vote was just shy of the two-thirds of the House lawmakers needed to send the legislation to President Trump’s desk: had one person voted differently, or two additional people voted in favor, it would have passed. Thirty-five members of the House did not vote, and in a sign of the tension surrounding the legislation, G.O.P. leaders gaveled the vote to a close while some members appeared to still be casting votes. All but one of the members who opposed the legislation were Republicans.

“It’s crushing,” Rachel Feres, whose cousin, Peter Livingston, his wife Donna, and their daughters Everly and Alydia, were killed in the midair collision, said in an interview following the failed vote, which she watched from the House chamber.

“The U.S. government failed my family in 50 different ways,” she said, referencing the number of recommendations a National Transportation Safety Board investigation determined could help avoid a similar accident in the future. “And the response today was more delay, still not going to take responsibility for it, still not going to do anything about it.”

For months, the ROTOR Act had been Congress’s primary response to the fatal crash between a military helicopter and a commercial jet, which exposed rifts between the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration that federal officials said posed risks to people who fly.

“How many more people need to die for us to decide that action needs to be taken?” Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the N.T.S.B., told reporters shortly before the vote.

But in the House, the leaders of committees overseeing military and aviation issues refused to embrace it, and last week, they unveiled alternative legislation they argued was more comprehensive. Ms. Homendy, whose board recently issued a list of policy recommendations for avoiding future tragedies, said the alternative bill largely “doesn’t implement the N.T.S.B. recommendations,” and fails to mandate the use of technologies that would have made flying safer.

The ROTOR Act was the product of intense negotiations between Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, who settled on their bipartisan compromise last fall. It would have required the F.A.A. to conduct a safety review of the flight routes at all large and midsize airports. It would have limited what military aircraft can turn off advanced location broadcasting technology when flying through congested airspace. And it would have forced nearly all aircraft to install advanced location tracking technology by the end of 2031, in an attempt to help pilots better see one another’s locations.

The N.T.S.B. determined that the tracking technology, known as ADS-B In, could have given the pilots of the Army Black Hawk helicopter and commercial jet that collided on the night of Jan. 29, 2025, almost a minute’s warning that they were on a collision course, had it been installed. Instead, the pilots realized they were about to crash only a little more than a second before impact.

House leaders could elect to bring the ROTOR Act to a vote again under a different procedure that would require a simple majority to pass, and its lead Republican author, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, told reporters he would keep pressing to get it passed.

But it is unlikely that the House will revive the bill, as Speaker Mike Johnson and the majority leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans from Louisiana, voted against it.

Instead, the failure of the ROTOR Act appears to be shifting momentum to the House’s bipartisan alternative, called the ALERT Act. It would require aircraft to be equipped with technology that can receive ADS-B In alerts. But it does not specify what that technology must be — or when it must be operational. It also includes significant carve-outs for certain types of private aircraft, and less stringent limitations on what military aircraft can turn off location broadcasting technology in congested airspace..

“Too often I have seen Congress react prematurely in a way that fails to address the multilayered consequences,” Representative Sam Graves, Republican of Missouri and the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said on the House floor Monday, calling the systems required by the ROTOR Act “emerging technology” that could cause an “operations crisis.”

He has also claimed that the ALERT Act would address all 50 of the recommendations the N.T.S.B. issued in its final report on the causes of the midair collision.

But in comments to reporters on Tuesday, Ms. Homendy accused Mr. Graves of intentionally misrepresenting the legislation.

“Getting up on the House floor and saying ‘we implemented all the N.T.S.B. recommendations’ is false,” she said. She also used an expletive to dispute Mr. Graves’s claim that technology required under the ROTOR Act was “emerging,” noting that the technology had been available for many years, and that N.T.S.B. has been recommending the F.A.A. require it to be standard for two decades.

Several Republican and Democratic lawmakers argued on Tuesday that the House could embrace both bills, pleading with their colleagues to pass the ROTOR Act now and continue to debate other aviation safety issues addressed in the ALERT Act later.

“Nothing up here is ever perfect, but it moves the football forward,” Representative Troy Nehls, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the House’s aviation subcommittee, said at a news conference Tuesday morning.

“The choice is simple today: delay or deliver?” Representative Gabe Amo, Democrat of Rhode Island, said at the same news conference.

Proponents of the ALERT Act have said that the failure of the ROTOR Act will not stall congressional action on aviation safety legislation. On Monday, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, predicted on the House floor that the ALERT Act could be voted on as soon as next week, though it is unlikely that the Senate will adopt it without significant pushback.

“Today’s result was just a temporary delay,” Mr. Cruz said in a statement after the vote, vowing to push the ROTOR Act to “become the law of the land.”

“The families and the flying public deserve nothing less,” he added.

Related Content