Posted on 05/14/2025 6:04:38 PM PDT by Enterprise
A “hotline” between air traffic controllers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and the Pentagon, intended to coordinate aircraft, has not worked since March 2022, the Federal Aviation Administration revealed in a congressional hearing Wednesday.
The FAA was not aware the direct line was broken until a May 1 incident where a helicopter circled the Pentagon and caused two flights to abort landings, Franklin McIntosh, the FAA’s deputy chief operating officer testified.
(Excerpt) Read more at lite.cnn.com ...
Pentagon brass used the army helicopters as their personal shuttle service to and from work at the Pentagon.
Rolls over to the DEI hotline.
Common sense? What’s that? /s
Good Lord...
* March 2022 - Last time a “hotline” DCA and the Pentagon worked
* Jan 29, 2025 - midair collision at DCA between Army helicopter and American Airlines jet
* May 1, 2025 - FAA became aware the hotline was broken
So there’s THREE MONTHS from the January crash to the time the FAA figures the hotline is cold?? And they were “unaware” the hotline was cold for three years?
WTH?
I’ll bet Potato Joe was on the case.
Reagan’s fault. /s
Buttigieg.
Probably an old copper line. The phone companies do not properly maintain them anymore.
Such numbers should be tested daily if used in a control center, and the results posted to the log. Assume nothing is working until confirmed.
Honestly, it should be tested at the start of every shift. If you are the boss, logging in should require a “check in” call. It would take less than a minute and it would verify that important systems are running.
Up until i retired in 2019, we used POTS (Copper wire, plain old telephone service) as our redundant, back up service in the hospital. We had “direct” lines to every floor. Our main service was all Voice over IP, and it was located in Ohio…while we were in MA.
One day a back hoe outside of the facility in Ohio dug up a fiber. We lost most of our telephone service in New England.
There was hell to pay for that! Putting all of your eggs into a “cheap” basket can bite you in the rear end.
Sometimes the old way is the most reliable.
Copper is good as long as the wire is replaced when the insulation deteriorates and is no longer good. The problem with the old land lines is that the insulation goes bad and water gets in the wires causing them to fail. Yet the phone company does not want to invest any more money in that system. Therefore it has become totally unreliable.
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