Commercial airlines have picked up the phone and called the head of the National Transportation Safety Board to deliver a blunt message: the next midair collision in America will happen at Hollywood Burbank Airport. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy disclosed this during a January 27, 2026, hearing about the investigation into last year's deadly midair crash near Washington, D.C., between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines plane.
Homendy told officials she keeps hearing about dangerous areas in the national airspace, singling out Burbank as the one where airlines have directly warned her that "the next mid-air is going to be at Burbank, and nobody at FAA is paying attention to us."
The warning arrived during a hearing about last year's midair collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people. Homendy called that crash "100% preventable." Now she is telling the country another disaster is brewing in Southern California, and the FAA still isn't listening.
Homendy laid out what she called a series of institutional failures by the FAA that preceded the January 2025 crash, pointing to concerns about the mixing of commercial airplane and helicopter traffic and noting extensive data about air traffic pointing to the danger of such a collision. She then noted she has heard from airline officials about similar concerns at other airports.
The concern at Burbank centers on the volume of traffic coming and going from Burbank Airport and Van Nuys Airport in a relatively small airspace. Van Nuys handles up to 700 daily non-commercial flights, including private jets, corporate aircraft, and helicopters, creating overlapping paths with Burbank's commercial jets, The U.S Sun reported. According to the Aviation Safety Reporting System, there have been six near midair collisions at Burbank Airport since January 1, 2021.
Six near misses in five years. Not one of them produced a course correction that satisfied the airlines actually flying passengers into that airspace.
The frustration is earned. In the D.C. crash investigation, Homendy expressed disbelief that the FAA didn't realize the helicopter route in use didn't provide adequate separation from planes landing on Reagan's secondary runway. She noted the FAA had refused to add detailed information about helicopter routes to pilots' charts, and said concerns were "raised repeatedly, went unheard, squashed" and stuck in bureaucratic red tape.
The same agency that failed to act on years of warnings at Reagan National is now being asked to guarantee safety at Burbank. History does not inspire confidence.
The FAA fired back after Homendy's remarks, saying it "acted immediately to improve safety following the tragic midair collision, both at DCA and around the country." The agency said that in February 2025, it began using AI tools to identify hotspots with high volumes of mixed helicopter and airplane traffic. One of its primary focus areas was Van Nuys Airport and nearby Hollywood Burbank Airport. Based on its safety analysis, the FAA lowered the Van Nuys traffic pattern by 200 feet during an evaluation in 2025, and preliminary data indicated the change reduced Traffic Collision Avoidance System alerts for Burbank arrivals. That change became permanent on January 5, 2026.
Lowering a traffic pattern by 200 feet is something. But it took a crash that killed 67 people to prompt that adjustment. And even after making it, airlines are still calling the NTSB chair to report that the problem persists.
In a statement, Burbank Airport did not specifically address Homendy's warnings from the hearing. Instead, it pointed to FAA efforts, deflecting the question to the agency that Homendy just spent hours criticizing.
The NTSB's final report on the D.C. crash cited "FAA's placement of a helicopter route in close proximity to a runway approach path; their failure to regularly review and evaluate helicopter routes and available data, and their failure to act on recommendations to mitigate the risk of a midair collision" as part of the probable cause.
The board's findings go deeper than one bad route design. The NTSB also cited "the air traffic system's over-reliance on visual separation in order to promote efficient traffic flow without consideration for the limitations of the 'see and avoid' concept," along with degraded controller performance due to high workload and combined control positions.
Consider the specifics:
Homendy was blunt: "This was 100% preventable." She added that with ADS-B In, crews would have "gotten an alert at 59 seconds before the collision and been able to take measures to avert it."
Fifty-nine seconds. That's what stood between 67 people and survival: a piece of technology the NTSB has been recommending for nearly two decades.
The Senate unanimously passed the ROTOR Act on December 17, 2025. The legislation requires all aircraft, civil and military, to be equipped with the necessary technology to receive ADS-B broadcasting signals. The bill also directs the FAA to comprehensively evaluate the safety of airspaces around airports across the country and improves aviation safety information sharing between the FAA and the military.
The ROTOR Act has the backing of the White House, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, and the National Transportation Safety Board. One hundred senators voted for it. The administration supports it.
And it is sitting in the House.
Congressman Bob Onder, a licensed pilot, is leading the House companion to the bill, working alongside Senator Ted Cruz. Cruz has urged the House to act, saying the NTSB findings "make it clear" that it is time to pass the ROTOR Act.
The families of Flight 5342 asked Congress to pass the bill before the one-year anniversary of their loved ones' deaths. That date has now passed, and the legislation still awaits House action.
Credit where it is due: the Trump administration has moved aggressively on the broader infrastructure problem. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a plan to build a brand new air traffic control system, saying "decades of neglect have left us with an outdated system that is showing its age" and calling it "an economic and national security necessity."
The plan includes building six new air traffic control centers for the first time since the 1960s, replacing towers and TRACONs, and installing new modern hardware and software across all air traffic facilities. Congressional Republicans put $12.5 billion in the Working Families Tax Cut Act for air traffic modernization, and Secretary Duffy has already replaced one-third of the FAA's antiquated telecommunications system with 21st century fiber, satellite, and wireless coverage.
Nonessential helicopter operations over the Potomac River airspace near Reagan National have been permanently restricted, and the use of "visual separation" has ended, meaning planes must now use radar-based data to help avoid collisions.
These are real, tangible steps. But modernization takes years. Burbank's airspace is dangerous now.
The pattern here is unmistakable. Before the D.C. crash, there was at least one near midair collision each month at National Airport for more than 15 years. In 2013, after a helicopter and plane on approach to Reagan nearly crashed, controllers and helicopter operators formed a working group to improve coordination. That group elevated recommendations to revise flight routes. Their suggestions were ignored.
Twelve years later, 67 people died.
Now airlines are calling the NTSB about Burbank. Six near midair collisions have been reported since January 2021. Commercial carriers have bypassed the FAA entirely to contact Homendy directly. The agency tasked with keeping these skies safe is learning about the danger from the safety board, not from its own analysis.
The FAA's 200-foot traffic pattern adjustment may have reduced alerts on a computer screen. It has not reduced the fear of the pilots flying those approaches every day. When the people whose lives depend on getting this right are telling regulators they are still scared, that is not a data problem. That is a leadership problem.
Sixty-seven families buried someone because the FAA treated warnings as background noise. The warnings at Burbank are no longer background noise. They are a siren. The only question is whether anyone acts before it becomes a eulogy.
