The Scene
Members of Congress are coworkers who often have little in common. One of the few things that unites the divided House and Senate is Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Every week, hundreds of legislators land at and take off from the bank of the Potomac River, sometimes sprinting out of votes to make their flights. They sit near their constituents and lawmakers of the opposite party for air travel so frequent that it eventually starts to feel like any ordinary commute.
Which added an acute degree of dread to the fatal Wednesday plane crash at Reagan. Most members of Congress are regularly in the exact same spot that the mid-air collision happened, suspended over the river with monuments on one side of the plane and Virginia on the other. The devastation in the Potomac, for many lawmakers, felt personal as well as tragic.
“You kind of have a connection to the airport,” said Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt, who flies between Washington and Missouri each week.
Landing at National Airport, or DCA as locals call it, can be a hair-raising experience even at the best of times. Planes take off and land right over the river every few minutes on the busy runway; on Wednesday night, a flight from Kansas collided with a military helicopter, killing 67 people. Congress is now preparing for a long investigation into how it happened, and a likely debate over how to prevent a repeat.
But DCA is already back open. And when the Senate holds its last vote this week, many members will head right back to the airport for a brief respite in their home states. The crash won’t be far from their minds as they do.
“I’ve been using [DCA] for 30 years, so I feel confident it was a tragic accident,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said of the crash. She said she didn’t have reservations about flying in and out of the airport, but acknowledged: “Of course it makes you think about it.”
In fact, Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., had even tentatively booked his flight home to Wichita on Thursday — reserving a ticket on the return leg of the same flight that crashed Wednesday. He might have to wait, depending on Senate business.
“I’m going to get on an airplane and go home as soon as the majority leader lets me do that,” he said. “I just talked to the mayor of Wichita, indicating that at the first opportunity I want to be in Wichita.”
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Congress holds immense sway over DCA and its governing board, as well as unique control over long-distance flights from the airport. It’s the clear preference of any commuting lawmaker compared with the larger but more distant Dulles International and Baltimore-Washington International.
Just last year, lawmakers approved new flight slots for it, shrugging off complaints from some Virginia lawmakers that the added DCA flights would create too much air congestion.
A “very distraught” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said it was too early to say whether that decision was a factor in the crash. But he called for a more serious examination of the airport’s workload going forward.
“That was why I worked so hard to beg my colleagues not to put more flights into it,” Kaine said. “The NTSB does a very good job, and they’ll give us the answers. But we’ve all been worried about this congestion issue for a long time.”
Congress will investigate, too. As a member of the Commerce Committee, Moran said there will be hearings and a probe: “We’ll be fully engaged in making certain that Americans are safe to fly and they know it.”
None of the lawmakers interviewed for this story said they have second thoughts about flying in and out of DCA after the crash, the nation’s first major commercial aircraft crash since 2009. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said “virtually everybody here” uses the airport.
“You get on a plane and you expect to land and see your family. It’s just terrible, as a human being. I’m in and out of that airport twice a week,” Schmitt said.
And this weekend, he added, “I’ll be on a plane going back and forth again.”
Notable
- This week’s crash is reviving memories about a devastating incident out of DCA in 1982.
- President Trump named Christopher Rocheleau the acting FAA administrator, according to the Hill.