Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) doubled down during an interview on his concerns about the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) space being overcrowded following the fatal collision between a military helicopter and an airline plane that killed 67 people.
“We need to spread the traffic among these airports, rather than have such congestion into Reagan National. The other thing about Reagan National is when you’re right in downtown DC, there’s a lot of military flights,” Kaine said during his Thursday appearance on Fox News. “It is a very complicated and congested airspace. It’s gotten more complicated after 9/11 with certain security details.”
Kaine said DCA was “built very close to downtown Washington on an acreage and with a runway structure that was estimated to be able to serve 15 million passengers a year in and out of that airport; we’re now well over 20 million passengers a year, getting up to 25 million.”
The Virginia lawmaker was one of the Democratic Senators who did not back the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization deal, which was reached last year as it included a provision to add five new long-range flights from and to DCA. Kaine said at the time that busy traffic at DCA was a major security risk. DCA is one of the nation’s busiest airports.
Authorities think that there are no survivors after the Wednesday night crash between a Black Hawk Army helicopter and the American Airlines flight that was flying from Kansas. Sixty passengers were on board, along with four crew members.
Kaine praised the FAA reauthorization legislation for addressing some of the air traffic controller shortages in the country, but adding more flights from DCA made it impossible to get his vote.
“So that was a good part of the bill, but the addition of even more traffic into Reagan National was a bad part of the bill,” Kaine told Fox News anchor Bret Baier. “I ended up wanting to support the bill, but I opposed it over this jamming more flights in the Reagan National.”
The Virginia Senator made similar remarks earlier on Thursday while on CNN.
“It‘s a popular place for people to come, but you can spread traffic among the airports and that‘s why we so strongly, strongly opposed adding even more flights into a situation that we thought was already dangerous,” he said on Thursday.
