She noted that the NTSB released 50 recommendations a year after the accident and pointed to her time serving as a staff director for the House railroads, pipelines, and hazardous materials subcommittee, saying, “I know how it can come together quickly.” She added that she doesn’t see any reason why an aviation safety bill can’t finish on Capitol Hill.

Homendy’s remarks were just ahead of when she and Ambrosi headed to Capitol Hill for a gathering with Senate Commerce Committee chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and ranking member Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), along with the families of the victims of the collision of a PSA Airlines CRJ700 and U.S. Army Black Hawk, to generate support for action on the bill.

The Senate passed the Rotor Act addressing some of the 50 recommendations last December, while the House in April followed with its own version, the Alert Act, touching upon all 50 recommendations. Beyond that scope, a chief difference between them is an approach to implementing a key recommendation for a mandate for ADS-B In in the flight deck. The Senate is pushing for it to be integrated into the avionics, and the House provides more latitude.

Ambrosi reiterated support for having the technology integrated into the cockpit. He noted special interests “want to carve something out for a certain segment or cost benefit analysis [with] tired talking points of ‘You can’t do that on this kind of airplane type.’” However, Ambrosi maintained, “You absolutely can…The solutions are out there, so continuing this battle is essential.”

Homendy, meanwhile, noted that the Senate bill was released before the NTSB completed its work on the investigation and believes that lawmakers could take the strongest points between the House and Senate and come up with a compromise.

When asked what the biggest safety threat to aviation is right now, Homendy said she could not point to a single one but noted that the NTSB has 235 open recommendations to the FAA—those that the agency has not satisfactorily implemented—and 40% of those are “open-unacceptable.”

“We can conduct investigation after investigation, but until we implement our safety recommendations, safety hasn’t changed,” she added.

Homendy touched on a range of topics during the fireside chat, including a move to redact personal information from investigative materials released to the public. Ambrosi noted that it has been about a year since the NTSB went in that direction and said, “From an ALPA standpoint, we support these new practices. It’ll encourage involvement in the investigation and the investigatory process.”

She responded that redacting names was a priority for her and that she had created a working group, which put the policy in place. “I think it’s important,” Homendy said. “We live in a different world and I certainly [wouldn’t] want a pilot or air traffic controller or others to face any sort of safety or security issue after a terrible tragedy. We had to be mindful of that, so we took that into account.”

During the NTSB’s second press conference on the September 6 runway overrun accident of a Boeing 767-300 freighter operated by 21 Air (Amazon Air Flight 7598), the Safety Board did not release the cockpit voice recorder summary.

The NTSB had delayed the press conference while officials discussed whether to release that information as it normally would. But the pilots were to be interviewed by investigators the next day. “I could see from media already the negativity towards the flight crew, and I knew that if we did that it would be worse going into those interviews,” Homendy said. The NTSB wanted to have the opportunity to conduct the interviews before the pilots were publicly condemned.

She also discussed NTSB’s limited use of AI, which includes mining for incidents that the Safety Board would not necessarily investigate. But with that, she said, it still needs work for development, and the NTSB has strict guardrails for its use. However, the NTSB does not use AI for its investigatory process, given that investigations are confidential, she stressed.