Technology that would have allowed air traffic controllers to better track the movement of an Army helicopter before it collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River last week was turned off at the time of the crash, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said in an interview on Thursday.
Members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, of which Mr. Cruz is chairman, received a closed-door briefing with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board on the midair collision between an American Airlines commercial jet and a Black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan National Airport that killed 67 people last week.
Senators, including Mr. Cruz, were updated on the investigation and told that the N.T.S.B. needed to collect valuable evidence from the helicopter still resting in the Potomac. The wreckage of the helicopter is expected to be recovered on Thursday.
Senators shared few details after the briefing, saying that many more questions needed to be answered before they could make a determination about what went wrong that night. What is known is that the Army was performing a training mission in the Black Hawk in an effort to allow one of the pilots to receive her annual certification.
But Mr. Cruz expressed concern that tracking technology for the Black Hawk was turned off during the training mission. When in use, the technology, called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, broadcasts an aircraft’s position, altitude and speed.
It allows air traffic controllers to not rely solely on radar tracking, which can have a delay of a few seconds. It thus provides an extra safety layer to help prevent crashes.
Military helicopters can turn off the technology during what are called “continuity of government” missions so that no one can track where government officials are being flown. But Mr. Cruz said that was not the case on Jan. 29, the night of the crash.
“In this instance, this was a training mission, so there was no compelling national security reason for ADS-B to be turned off,” Mr. Cruz said.
The Army declined to comment on what Mr. Cruz said about the helicopter and the technology.
“We’re going to allow the investigation to play out and not get ahead of the N.T.S.B. findings,” said Col. Roger Cabiness, an Army spokesman.
Mr. Cruz said the helicopter was equipped with a transponder, a device that broadcasts its location, but ADS-B is considered far superior technology.
Mr. Cruz also called for the F.A.A. to review all helicopter routes that pass through commercial airspace to see whether other widespread changes needed to be made for how they travel along busy routes.
Also on Thursday, the F.A.A. said it would slightly reduce the number of flights per hour in and out of Reagan National because of inclement weather and the fact that one runway remains closed during the investigation of the crash.
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