BySuzanne Rowan Kelleher,
Forbes Staff.
The midair collision between a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and a PSA Airlines jet that killed 67 people in Washington nearly a year ago was the result of a "multitude of errors" and “deep, underlying, systemic failures” at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. Army, the nation’s top transportation accident investigator said Tuesday.
Neither the Air Traffic Organization (ATO), the operational arm of the FAA in charge of ensuring the safety of the national airspace, nor the U.S. Army fostered a “positive safety culture,” accident investigators said at a daylong hearing on Tuesday to determine the main factors leading to the midair crash that killed 67 people at Washington’s Reagan National Airport nearly a year ago.
ATO staff “feared retaliation for raising safety issues, and management often discouraged filing reports because it made the facility look bad,” Dr. Jana Price, a senior human performance investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board, reported.
