'I know that flight': Kansas Sen. Moran says plane crash is 'personal'?! BREAKING NEWS

WASHINGTON — Several members of Congress are expressing concerns about the amount of air congestion in an area where a commercial passenger jet collided with a military helicopter over the Potomac River Wednesday night.

Lawmakers didn’t ascribe any blame for the accident and said they trusted the National Transportation Safety Board would do a lengthy, in-depth investigation. But they said the deadly crash reinforced worries about traffic in a busy transportation corridor where military and other helicopters are sharing airspace with passenger jets flying in and out of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, known as DCA.

“I’ve been very worried about this for a long time, and I continue to be worried about it. The National Transportation Safety Board will do an investigation of this, and I have high confidence in them. They’ll look and see what was the cause of this devastating tragedy, and I’m not going to speculate. They’ll do the work. They’re good at it. They’ll give us answers,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told reporters Thursday.

“But yeah, I’ve been very, very concerned about this very complex airspace — commercial, military — and the way that the security demands of being the nation’s capital puts some significant restrictions on it. And I am really worried about that,” Kaine continued.

“I’ve been praying that there wouldn’t be something like last night,” he said, “but kind of dreading in my heart that there would be.”

There were 60 passengers and four crew members aboard the American Eagle jet, which was flying from Wichita, Kansas, to DCA, which sits on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. Three were aboard the Army Black Hawk helicopter. President Donald Trump said at a White House briefing that there were no survivors in the crash.

The airspace above Washington is complex for a variety of reasons. DCA is one of the busiest airports in the country, with hundreds of flights arriving and departing each day. DCA saw a record 25.5 million passengers in 2023.

Some airspace above Washington is restricted due to security issues. On top of that, there is a plethora of other aircraft — military, National Park Service, Metropolitan Police Department, not to mention Marine One — that use the airspace due to the fact that the District is the nation’s capital and that it sits in between Maryland and Virginia. Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling also is just across the Potomac from DCA.

Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and who previously spent two decades on the Armed Services Committee, said he’s flown out of DCA countless times and never has been worried about congestion there in the past.

But he said in a phone call Thursday that “certainly this tragedy raises my concerns about the amount of traffic in that area.” Larsen added that the focus now should be on the victims, their family members and the first responders who rushed to the scene Wednesday night.

He said the NTSB assigned 40 investigators and staff to the crash, and that their probe could take more than a year.

“The slow process begins of investigating the root cause. So, the timeline is the timeline. I expect a preliminary report in several weeks,” Larsen said. “But the investigation will take a long time to get done. … It could take 18 months.”