The Federal Aviation Administration has permanently restricted non-essential helicopter operations around the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Following recommendations to block helicopter traffic in the area by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the FAA announced on Friday that it would “permanently close” Route 4 between Hains Point and the Wilson Bridge.
Additionally, the FAA announcement stated that the agency would begin evaluating alternative helicopter routes as recommended by the NTSB. The FAA will also prohibit using Runways 15/33 and 4/22 at the same time when helicopters conducting urgent missions are operating near the airport.
“If a helicopter must fly through the airspace on an urgent mission, such as lifesaving medical, priority law enforcement, or Presidential transport, the FAA will keep them specific distances away from airplanes,” the FAA news release stated.
AI Assisting Air Traffic
The FAA also announced it will assess eight cities with chartered helicopter routes: Boston, New York, the Baltimore-Washington area, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles.
Some of these cities have multiple airports, and the FAA stated it will also review the U.S. Gulf Coast and some offshore helicopter operations.
The agency added that it will use machine learning and language modeling “to scan incident reports and mine multiple data sources to find themes and areas of risk” for these assessments.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said during a press conference Tuesday that the FAA is conducting its ongoing review of January’s midair aircraft collision near DCA.
During this conference, Duffy said the agency will be using AI at other airports with high volumes of helicopter traffic to identify possible safety improvements.
“What the FAA has deployed is AI tools to make sure that we can sift through the data and find hotspots in our airspace at our airports,” he said. “So if there’s another DCA-esque situation out there, our AI tools will help us identify those and take corrective actions preemptively as opposed to retroactively.”
