Dear Friend -

On the evening of January 29, 2025, a UH-60 Army Black Hawk helicopter tragically collided with American Airlines Flight 5342 over the Potomac River in Washington, DC. The collision took the lives of 67 people.

After the accident, I committed to first gathering all the facts and then deciding how to address the issues that caused it, so we wouldn’t see it happen again.  From the beginning, I said we should wait to legislate solutions until the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) completed its full and thorough investigation. The sad truth is that aviation accidents are almost never the result of just one cause, and we needed to know all the factors that contributed to this terrible incident. The last thing such a complex system needs is a knee-jerk reaction from Washington. Once we had the results of that investigation though, I introduced the Airspace Location and Enhanced Risk Transparency (ALERT) Act in February with colleagues on both sides of the aisle.