When Congress pushed ahead last year with adding 10 new daily flights to Washington D.C.’s Reagan National Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration had data showing an unnerving number of near misses in the already-crowded skies — something lawmakers apparently did not know.
The FAA, which manages the nation’s airspace and oversees aviation safety, had data on dozens of incidents that experts said documented a safety concern. That data didn’t prompt any action before January’s deadly midair collision between an American Airlines jetliner and a military helicopter that killed 67 people.
“Why someone was not paying attention to those numbers and those events are questions yet to be answered,” said James Hall, a for