Virginia’s senators want to restrict the number of flights at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to increase safety after a fatal in-air collision last year.
Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner are set to introduce legislation next week that would limit the number of hourly arrivals at DCA, according to a joint statement from the senators on Thursday. The effort comes after an Army helicopter collided with a commercial plane over the Potomac River in January 2025, killing 67 people.
The proposal, which was first reported by The Washington Post, would cap hourly arrivals at the airport to 28. Prior to the 2025 crash, the airport allowed 36 arrivals each hour. That was reduced to 26 following the accident, then gradually increased to the current cadence of 30 per hour.
In an interview with The Sun, Kaine said he and Warner have warned Congress about the dangers of the congested airport for years. The pair “almost lit our hair on fire,” Kaine said, trying to convey the deadly threat of overcrowded air space.
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“Now in September 2026, everyone knows we weren’t Chicken Little saying, ‘The sky is falling.’ We were telling the truth,” he said. “Everybody realizes that the warnings we were giving about increasing flights into DCA were not hollow warnings. They were serious, and we experienced one of the worst air tragedies in recent American history because of this congestion.”
Congress has failed to pass prior proposed legislation to limit flights out of DCA. The fatal 2025 crash should offer enough of a sobering reality for the new bill to gain sufficient support, Kaine said.
Reagan National is the busiest runway in the U.S. with an average of more than 800 takeoffs and landings on the main drag in 2023, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.
Members of Congress have long tried to increase the number of flights to and from DCA to make traveling home easier for them, as the Arlington, Virginia, airport is less than a 30-minute drive from the Capitol.
The airport uses “slots,” an authorization to take off or land at a specific time, to mitigate traffic. Congress has added 64 daily slot exemptions, which bypass limits, at the airport since 2000. The bill would also walk back those increases, eliminating 30 slots in five years.
Kaine said Congress added those slots despite warnings from experts and objections from local officials. He said he played multiple air-traffic-control audio clips of near-misses for his colleagues to convey the seriousness of the issue, to no avail. Kaine also said that the addition of President Donald Trump’s proposed 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery would only further complicate local airspace.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said in a statement that it’s past time for Congress to commit to keeping air travel safe in the nation’s capital and to ensure a tragedy like the January 2025 crash never happens again.
“Even as the FAA raised concerns that congestion at the airport had reached its limits, Congress continued to consider adding more flights,” she said in a statement.
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