The FAA Has No Clear Leader During the Worst Air Disaster in 16 Years

Last night a commercial airliner carrying 64 passengers collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River near Reagan International Airport in Washington D.C. This morning authorities said they’d pulled 27 bodies from the crash. They don’t expect to find any survivors.

The plane was a 20-year-old Bombardier CRJ700 on its way from Wichita, Kansas, and approaching its runway at the airport. The Black Hawk was flying a training mission out of nearby Fort Belvoir. The night was clear and both FAA and Army officials have told the public that there were no indications of malfunctions or miscommunications.

The jet was flying north towards its runway. The helicopter was coming south from the fort. They collided with each other just after 9 p.m. on Wednesday. The crash was captured on video and uploaded to social media after it occurred and the debris field spread across the water of the Potomac. Recovery efforts are ongoing.

The hunt for an explanation or someone to blame has begun. In a post on Truth Social last night after midnight, President Donald Trump suggested that air traffic controllers were at fault.

“The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport,” Trump said on Truth Social. “The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”

The tragedy comes less than a month after the start of his presidency and just days after the Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense. The Federal Aviation Administration is, at the moment, leaderless.

Michael Whitaker assumed the post in 2023 and announced his intention to resign back in December following Trump’s victory. Whitaker was a vocal critic of SpaceX and had chastised Elon Musk’s space program for skirting safety regulations. The only way to bring them to heel, he said, was to levy massive fines. Musk told him to resign from the FAA in a post on X. Whitaker did just that, leaving his post on January 20.

At the moment, it’s unclear who is running the FAA. The administrator is a post that requires Senate confirmation but Trump hasn’t named a successor. Former FAA official Chris Rocheleau returned to the agency recently and sources inside D.C. have told some news outlets that he’s the de-facto leader.

So the FAA is officially leaderless after the first major mid-air collision in the U.S. in 16 years. Adding to the confusion is the federal hiring freeze, which Trump enacted by dictate and has been unevenly applied and widely misunderstood. Though the executive order appeared to have a carve-out for officials related to “safety,” there was mass confusion about whether or not that involved air traffic controllers.

On January 22, a week before the crash, ranking members of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure called out the hiring freeze in a joint statement. “Hiring air traffic controllers is the number one safety issue according to the entire aviation industry. Instead of working to improve aviation safety and lower costs for hardworking American families, the Administration is choosing to spread bogus DEI claims to justify this decision,” Rick Larsen (D-WA) said in the statement.

“I’m not surprised by the President’s dangerous and divisive actions, but the Administration must reverse course. Let’s get back to aviation safety and allow the FAA to do its job protecting the flying public.”

On /r/ATC, a subreddit dedicated to air traffic controllers, members vented their confusion and asked what was going on with jobs. “Anybody else notice that all ATC job postings on usajobs have been removed besides DOD positions? I’ve been told that all vacancy announcements that closed before today will still go through the selection process. Anyone else heard anything?” One Redditor said three days ago.

Conditions at some federally-run aviation towers are so bad that they’ll soon be completely unstaffed. According to a memo from Airport Manager Gretchen Kelly, the San Carlos Federal Contract Tower will have absolutely no ATC services starting in February. “The FAA has awarded a new contract for air traffic services at SQL to Robinson Aviation,” the letter said. “However, the contract does not include locality pay to account for the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area.” As a result, none of the air traffic controllers decided to stick around

The FAA was formed in 1958, in part, because a series of mid-air collisions convinced Washington and the public that a federal agency was needed to regulate the skies.