Rep. Tom Barrett (R., Mich.) spent 22 years in the Army logging thousands of flight hours in advanced helicopters, like the Black Hawk helicopter that was involved in the fatal plane crash at Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport in early 2025.

In the year since that tragic accident in which 67 people died, Barrett has worked to reform how planes take off and land in America. In light of the one-year anniversary of the crash, Barrett is introducing two more bills, obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter, that will help update technology to help prevent similar collisions in the future.

One of Barrett’s bills, the Military ADS-B Out Loophole Act, clarifies current law, which allows the Department of War (DOW) to turn off Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) equipment in an aircraft if the aircraft is “performing a sensitive government mission for national defense, homeland security, intelligence or law enforcement purposes and transmitting would compromise the operations security of the mission or pose a safety risk to the aircraft, crew, or people and property in the air or on the ground.” The Black Hawk involved in the 2025 crash had its ADS-B turned off.

Barrett’s bill would require that the term “sensitive government mission” in the ADS-B Out mandate, which went into full effect in 2020, be narrowly construed and limited to the portion of the flight during which sensitive activities are carried out. That change would allow for aircraft to continue going dark when needed, but Barrett does not believe that planes and helicopters flying over busy air space like the Potomac River always need that level of secrecy.

Barrett’s second bill, the Next-Gen Collision Avoidance Assistance Act, builds on the Senate’s agreement to advance Airborne Collision Avoidance System-X (ACAS-X) and its variants that can deliver strong improvements for aviation safety. Next-generation collision avoidance systems can provide better traffic conflict resolution alerts to pilots; they also can better prevent mid-air aircraft collisions in lower altitudes, where existing collision avoidance tools don’t activate. The 2025 crash occurred only about 300 feet in the air.

This bill directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to develop a strategic plan and roadmap for the widespread adoption of the technology among aviation operators.

“We learned from that [accident] some of the systemic failures that took place that we needed to improve upon,” Barrett said. “I worked closely with members of the military back home in Michigan in the same unit that I retired from to work on improvements that we could make to upgrade our military fleet to have the same collision avoidance systems that our civilian airlines have. Had those systems been in place on that Army Black Hawk helicopter, I think there’s a high likelihood that this tragedy could have been avoided.”

“We want to make sure that that technology gets integrated into our military fleet and that we also change the process that our military follows so that everybody can know that they are traveling in the safest way possible,” Barrett added.