Air traffic controllers to get more support after a fight and latest near miss at Washington airport

Air traffic controllers at Washington's Ronald Reagan National Airport will be offered crisis counseling and additional supervision after a fight in the tower and another alarming near miss two months after a midair collision between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter killed 67 people.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday it is also evaluating whether the current arrival rate at Reagan is too high. The agency said it would extend extra support to the controllers who direct flights around the busy airport while Congress and the National Transportation Safety Board continue investigating the deadly January crash.

Sen. Ted Cruz, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said that troubling missteps since the crash “underscore the precarious situation in the nation's airspace.” Expressing frustration with the Army's refusal to turn over a memo detailing its flight rules, Cruz said during a Wednesday hearing that any deaths resulting from another collision near Reagan “will be on the Army's hands.”

The FAA's decision to bring in crisis counselors followed the Thursday arrest of a 39-year-old employee from Maryland on suspicion of assault and battery after the control tower fight, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority confirmed in a statement.

No details were released about the altercation. The FAA said the employee was put on administrative leave while the fight is investigated.

The next day, a Delta passenger jet had to take evasive action as it took off from Reagan because of the proximity of a flight of four Air Force jets involved in a flyover at Arlington National Cemetery. The incident continued a pattern of close calls that the NTSB has said went on for years around the airport as commercial flights repeatedly got dangerously close to helicopters and other aircraft.

The FAA said Wednesday that it was reviewing the “current arrival rate of aircraft per hour, which is disproportionately concentrated within the last 30 minutes of each hour.”

After January's crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter, the arrival rate at the airport fell to 26 an hour while crews worked to recover the wreckage and victims' bodies from the Potomac River. The acting head of the FAA said last week that arrivals were back up to 30 an hour and could go up to 32. Now, the agency is rethinking that.

To help with the stress air traffic controllers are under, the FAA plans regular wellness checks of its staff at Reagan as well making a team of crisis counselors available. The agency offered counseling to its employees at the airport right after the Jan. 29 crash and encouraged them to follow up with individual appointments if needed.

The FAA said that going forward, it will increase the number of supervisors from six to eight and evaluate whether it has enough controllers working each shift.

The union that represents air traffic controllers at Reagan and airports across the country declined to comment on the situation.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Cruz threatened the Army with a subpoena if it did not give the committee a copy of its memo spelling out when its aircraft are allowed to fly without a key system that broadcasts their location to other aircraft turned on.

The fact that system wasn’t activated in the Black Hawk that collided with the passenger jet is a key concern investigators have highlighted. With the location system turned off, the tower had to rely on radar for updates on the helicopter’s position that only came once every four seconds instead of every second before the crash.

“It begs the question, what doesn’t the Army want Congress or the American people to know about why it was flying partially blind to the other aircraft and to the air traffic controllers near DCA (Reagan airport)?,” Cruz said. “This is not acceptable.”

The Army didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry Wednesday about the memo. The U.S. Army’s head of aviation, Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman, told the Senate Commerce Committee last week that he wasn’t sure if he could provide the memo because it is part of the investigation, but the head of the NTSB assured him that would be okay.

The January crash was the nation’s deadliest plane crash since November 2001. But a series of other crashes and near misses in the months after fueled worries about air travel even though it remains safe overall.

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Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lisa Leff contributed to this report.