Congress has opened cross-chamber negotiations over two competing aviation safety bills, more than 15 months after the Jan. 29, 2025 midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport killed 67 people — the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in more than two decades.

The talks remain in a "super preliminary" phase, according to a person familiar with the state of play. The House passed its version, the ALERT Act, on April 14, 2026. The Senate approved its own measure, the ROTOR Act, on Dec. 17, 2025. Each bill takes a different approach to addressing the collision between a regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter over Washington.

The negotiations now set up a test of wills between the two chambers' Republican committee chairs: Transportation Chair Sam Graves of Missouri, who backs the House bill, and Commerce Chair Ted Cruz of Texas, who championed the Senate measure.

The monthslong clash over the rival bills has raised concerns among victims' families about whether Congress will act at all. The calendar is tight, and House-Senate talks are only now beginning.

The friction has also produced a previously unreported public blowup between a committee chair and the nation's top transportation accident investigator, according to the source material.

The stakes of the negotiation extend beyond the two chambers' institutional prerogatives. The Jan. 29, 2025 disaster involved a regional airliner operating into one of the most constrained airspace corridors in the United States, and the military helicopter traffic that shares it. How the final legislation addresses that coexistence — and whatever fixes each bill proposes — will shape the operational and regulatory response to the deadliest domestic aviation accident since 2001.

Both bills respond to the same event, but the House and Senate have taken different legislative routes, and bridging them now falls to negotiators working against a compressed schedule. Families of the 67 people killed have watched the process drag across two sessions of Congress, from the Senate's December 2025 vote to the House's April 2026 passage, with no final law yet on the books.

The outcome depends on whether Graves and Cruz can reconcile their competing frameworks — and whether leadership in both chambers finds floor time to move a compromise before the session ends. Until then, the legislative response to the worst U.S. aviation disaster in more than 20 years remains unresolved, and the families waiting for it remain, in the words of one observer, "very worried."