The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), or the US Aeronautical Authority, has announced a reduction in air traffic to the Reagan Washington National Airport in order to be able to face the safety problems that emerged following the fatal collision in flight last week between a Regional Jet CJ-700 and an UH-60l Black Hawk helicopter, events that caused 67 victims. The FAA has notified the airlines operating on the Reagan that the maximum number of landings will be reduced from 28 to 26 per hour, an operation that will certainly increase safety but which will involve average delays from 40 to 50 minutes for the approach flights . The communication did not hide the concern of the investigators of the body and those of the Department for the Safety of Transport for the stress accumulated by the air traffic controllers, while in response to the accident, FAA itself has imposed restrictions on flights by helicopter nearby At the airport, limitations that will remain in force at least until the end of February. In addition, two slopes of the airport, the least used, have been closed and to civil aircraft it is forbidden to operate in the airspace when there are police helicopters, rescue or for presidential transport. The latter limitation is indefinitely, since there is a project to reorganize the airspace of the entire area and the neighboring ones, starting to examine some of the in -standing situations on other airports that show the same critical issues of the Reagan National, especially having to do coexist aircraft and military helicopters. In the meantime, on the morning of Thursday, February, speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, at the Campidoglio della Unitedi, the Tycoon has announced the desire to create a new computerized air traffic control system, attributing part of the fault of the air clin a What described as an obsolete system. And before insisting on the hiring of new heterogeneous staff, without applying the “gods” – system for the equity between genres and ethnic groups – he said: “Many errors have occurred, I think what will happen is that we will all sit At a table and we will make a fantastic computerized system for our control towers. Mint new, not assembled by existing and obsolete technologies “. Trump therefore also criticized the expenses made by the Biden government for the air traffic control system (ATC), claiming that billions of dollars have been spent in an attempt to renew an infrastructure already in crisis rather than investing in a completely new system. He also compared the current United States air traffic control system to those of other nations, suggesting that even his private jet relies on foreign technology because his pilot considers the US system inadequate. In the meantime, FAA has been working on the modernization of the National Airspace System through Nextgen, a multi -year initiative aimed at improving safety and efficiency through advanced technologies. This program makes progress very slowly but this is largely due to the need to guarantee levels of reliability not less than the current ones, in areas in which the number of flights is enormous. The idea is that the man, understood as the flight controller, takes care of the particular situations to be managed by leaving a computer the decision to create the entrances, the routes and the approach sequences, systematically protecting the air spaces from possible traffic conflicts. Do you think that the busiest airport of the US is the Hartsfield Jackson in Atlanta (Georgia) from which over 96 million passengers passed in one year with almost 800,000 movements between take off and landings, distributed over five slopes for almost 24 hours a day. To make a comparison, all the passengers of flights left and landed in Italy in 2024 was 220 million and the busiest airport, the Leonardo da Vinci of Fiumicino, does not reach half of the traffic of the capital of Georgia.
