By David Shepardson and Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) – U.S. senators on Thursday criticized the brief shutdown of El Paso airport over safety concerns around the use of a military laser-based anti-drone system, saying at a hearing that the incident exposed an unacceptable lack of coordination between the Federal Aviation Administration and the Pentagon.
Air travelers in Texas were stranded and medical evacuation flights were disrupted late on Tuesday, the FAA abruptly said it was shutting down the airport for 10 days, an unprecedented action involving a single airport. After about eight hours, the agency reversed course and lifted the shutdown early on Wednesday.
The sudden closure of the airport, which serves 4 million passengers a year, caused mass confusion. Officials from different agencies have offered varying and sometimes conflicting accounts of the circumstances that led to it.
“We have a real problem of coordination between DOD and FAA, so we need to resolve that,” Senator Maria Cantwell, top Democrat on the Commerce Committee, said at the hearing, originally scheduled to probe the January 2025 Washington, D.C., collision between a passenger jet and a U.S. Army helicopter that killed 67 people.
Government and airline officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the FAA closed the airspace due to concerns that the Army counter-drone system could pose risks to commercial air traffic.
The FAA told the Pentagon late Tuesday it would move forward with closing the airport for 10 days unless defense officials agreed to delay testing of the military system. FAA officials said a required safety analysis had not been completed.
Three U.S. military officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection had been using the technology without issues before Tuesday’s shutdown and expressed confusion as to why the shutdown was deemed necessary.
The Pentagon has not publicly given a detailed explanation of what happened.
‘THIS CAN’T HAPPEN AGAIN’
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who oversees the FAA, said the closure had been prompted by a drone incursion by a Mexican drug cartel.
However, a drone sighting near an airport would typically lead to a brief pause on traffic, not an extended closure. The Pentagon says there are more than 1,000 such incidents each month along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Senator Ben Ray Lujan, a New Mexico Democrat, said on Thursday that the failure by President Donald Trump’s administration to answer questions about what happened was unacceptable.
“They said they were going to shut down air traffic for 10 days without calling the White House, without calling the Department of Defense,” Lujan said at the hearing. “We need people to coordinate… That can’t happen again.”
Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas who chairs the Commerce Committee, said he wants a classified briefing to understand what happened that could occur as soon as later Thursday.
Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that systemic FAA failures led to the deadly 2025 accident. The NTSB recommended dozens of changes at both the FAA and the Army.
NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy told the committee that the Army and FAA had failed to properly work together going back years before the fatal crash.
“I will say there has been miscommunication, or no communication, between at least the Army and FAA for years now,” she said.
(Reporting by David Shepardson and Idrees Ali in WashingtonEditing by Scott Malone, Rod Nickel and David Gregorio)
Comments