Airspace Location and Enhanced Risk Transparency Act of 2026

Floor Speech

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Mr. OBERNOLTE. Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of the ALERT Act. The collision last year at DCA was a terrible tragedy, and like most aviation tragedies, it was 100 percent preventable.

The NTSB earlier this year released a comprehensive report analyzing the accident. What it discovered, like most aviation accidents, is that there was a whole chain of events that occurred. Any one of those links could have been interrupted and prevented the accident.

The NTSB made a number of different recommendations on what can be done to improve the situation, and this bill implements those recommendations. This is far beyond just the paths that helicopters and aircraft take, which need to be separated. It goes to things like the staffing of air traffic control towers, the technology behind collision avoidance systems, military training routes and the ways that those are communicated, and a host of different things that, implemented together, will ensure that these types of accidents do not happen in the future.

Madam Speaker, I am so proud to be a cosponsor of this bill. I thank my friend and fellow pilot, Chairman Graves, for his tireless advocacy in seeing this through to fruition. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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