Before he joined Congress, freshman Rep. Tom Barrett flew helicopters for the U.S. Army for 21 years. He now wants to use that experience to pressure the Pentagon to use better technology to prevent midair collisions between a military chopper and a commercial airline like the one last month that killed 67 above the the nation’s capital.
“I’ve got a lot of thoughts about what could have been done differently to prevent this from happening,” he told the Just the News, No Noise TV show this week. “But as we stand right now, of course, this is our largest tragedy in over a decade, in civilian airspace. We want to keep Americans safe, and I think this is the first step in doing that.”
Barrett, R-Mich., is specifically working with the Defense Department to analyze the possibilities of equipping military aircraft with the same traffic collision avoidance equipment that civilian aircraft use. He plans to introduce legislation as early as this week to codify the solution.
He says that systems now used on military aircraft are incompatible with the technology used by commercial airlines.
“It requires both aircraft to have that system installed for it to operate properly, and we know that on the night that this happened, the Army helicopter did not have that equipment on board, because it’s not necessary for combat operations,” Barrett said.
Investigators are still trying to determine what exactly happened the night of Jan. 29 when an American Airlines flight coming into Reagan Washington National Airport collided with an Army Blackhawk helicopter, sending both craft plummeting into an icy Potomac River below.