Trump Vows to Improve Air Traffic Control System After D.C. Plane Crash

Politics|Trump Vows to Improve Air Traffic Control System After Crash

President Trump on Thursday said he would speak with members of Congress about legislation that would revamp the nation’s aging aviation safety infrastructure used by air traffic controllers.

During the National Prayer Breakfast, Mr. Trump highlighted the deadly midair crash last week near Ronald Reagan National Airport between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines that killed 67 people.

Mr. Trump was critical of the cost of modernizing current aviation safety systems, saying the United States has spent billions of dollars to renovate a system that has been cobbled together when it should instead build a new one.

“We should have had better equipment,” Mr. Trump said. “We don’t. We have obsolete equipment.”

Mr. Trump also said that the crash would never have happened if the United States had the right equipment.

The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration are leading an investigation into the crash to figure out what happened and have not yet determined an official cause. In a closed briefing with Senators on Thursday, the investigators said they still need to collect evidence from the Black Hawk helicopter.

Mr. Trump’s comments come a day after Elon Musk announced on the social media platform X that his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency would be looking into outdated aviation technology at the F.A.A. after the safety messaging system for pilots experienced a weekend outage.

The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, confirmed on X that he had talked to the DOGE team and said it would upgrade the U.S. aviation system. In a Fox News interview on Monday, Mr. Duffy said that Mr. Trump has directed him to ensure that safety is paramount at the Transportation Department.

On Thursday, Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber’s commerce committee, sent a letter to Mr. Duffy, calling on him to keep Mr. Musk out of the F.A.A. She cited concerns about potential conflicts of interest, as the F.AA. has oversight of SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s commercial space company.

Nick Calio, the chief executive of Airlines for America, the trade group for the nation’s largest airlines, applauded Mr. Trump’s taking “swift, decisive action to get adequate staffing in air traffic control facilities and to modernize our nation’s ATC technologies with smarter, more efficient equipment.”