Trump calls for overhaul of air traffic control system at prayer breakfast

President Trump on Thursday said he would speak to congressional leaders about legislation to overhaul the country’s air safety systems in the aftermath of a deadly midair collision outside of Washington last month.

Trump addressed lawmakers at the Capitol for the National Prayer Breakfast, where he argued the country needed to “bring religion back” more strongly and recounted his own brush with death during the first assassination attempt on his life during a campaign rally over the summer.

The president also highlighted the collision between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter that killed more than 60 people, calling for significant technological changes to the nation’s air traffic control and aviation safety systems.

“The tragedy last week should remind us all that we have to make the most out of every single day we have,” Trump told lawmakers and other global leaders. “We should have had better equipment. They were understaffed for whatever reason. I guess the helicopter was high and we’ll find out exactly what happened.

“I think that’s going to be used for good,” he added. “We’re going to do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new, not pieced together, obsolete…We spent billions and billions of dollars trying to renovate an old broken system instead of just saying ‘let's cut it loose, and let's spend less money and build a great system.’”

Trump said he would talk to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) about passing “a single bill where we get the best control system.”

About 67 people died after a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines flight that was on its final approach to Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Va., earlier this month.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Pentagon are investigating the cause of the crash. Trump has publicly speculated that the military helicopter was flying too high at the time of the incident and questioned whether hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration were partially to blame. The latter has sparked a slew of criticism.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted Wednesday on social platform X that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team being led by Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, was going to “plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.”