SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Aviation safety experts were already skeptical of President Trump's plan to build a 250-foot arch on the approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Then he announced that the structure would double as a military complex with snipers and drones. And Piers Rachel Treisman has been covering this, and she joins me now in the studio to talk about it. Hi, Rachel.
RACHEL TREISMAN, BYLINE: Hey there.
PFEIFFER: All right, so talk about exactly what aviation experts have concerns about.
TREISMAN: So DCA has one of the busiest runways in the entire country, and landing there is notoriously tricky. There's that high volume of traffic. There are a bunch of no-fly zones, like, around the White House, and there's really only one main landing approach.
JEFF GUZZETTI: That arch is going to be, you know, maybe two or three football fields to the right of where your flight path is.
TREISMAN: Guzzetti is a former accident investigator with the FAA and NTSB. He is one of a bunch of aviation safety experts I talked to who agreed, basically, if everything is going right, the arch itself shouldn't pose a major risk to most aircraft, but it would add another layer of risk in a really complicated environment.
And ever since that midair collision at National that killed 67 people in January 2025, there have been some changes made to D.C. airspace, and yet there have also been more close calls, including one involving President Trump's own helicopter back in August.
I spoke with Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth. She's the top Democrat on the Aviation Safety Subcommittee.
TAMMY DUCKWORTH: If he really wanted to make anyone safer, he wouldn't be rushing to build a taxpayer-funded - you know, a golden safety risk.
PFEIFFER: What safety measures, if any, could reduce the chance of risk?
TREISMAN: Well, that's exactly what I asked Guzzetti.
GUZZETTI: The best and the most basic option is simply not to build it.
TREISMAN: The Federal Aviation Administration did release a report last month basically saying the arch won't pose a hazard to aircraft as long as it's lit in a very specific way.
PFEIFFER: As long as the arch is lit in a certain way?
TREISMAN: Yes, exactly.
PFEIFFER: OK.
TREISMAN: But it's actually the lighting that now has experts even more worried. For example, the FAA is recommending floodlights at the bottom of the arch pointing upwards, and experts are worried that could cause glare issues for pilots at night.
And perhaps most confoundingly, the agency is recommending what it calls a nonstandard eternal flame on top of the arch, presumably something continuously burning like that at JFK's grave. And experts say that is not the standard for aviation. Usually tall structures like the Washington Monument are lit with blinking red lights, not a burning fire.
Shawn Pruchnicki has flown this approach a lot. He's a former airline pilot and accident investigator who's now at Ohio State.
SHAWN PRUCHNICKI: When you add this many dangerous things to already such challenging airspace, your luck will run out.
PFEIFFER: As we mentioned before, President Trump has also said the arch will be a military complex with snipers and drones. What does that factor add to this already complicated situation?
TREISMAN: It raises a lot of questions, not just in the aviation world. I stopped by, yesterday, this anti-arch protest happening at Memorial Circle, which is where Trump wants the arch to be built. And many of the veterans and Democratic lawmakers who spoke yesterday raised this topic. Here's Duckworth again.
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DUCKWORTH: How do you put drones and snipers and tourists on top of the same monument?
TREISMAN: Now, the administration isn't sharing a lot of details publicly, but as of this week, it seems it is still trying to get approval for the original plan, so one that talks about the arch as more of a tourist site rather than a military site.
PFEIFFER: And the timeline for planning and approval - how is that coming along?
TREISMAN: It has been moving really fast all year. The next milestone is the next meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission, which is the first week of November. So in theory, that could be on the table for final approval from that federal body the same week as the midterm elections. And remember, a shift in power in Congress could be bad news for the arch later. Congressman Don Bayer of Virginia is one of many Democrats who is vowing to block it.
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DON BEYER: He's about to lose the midterms, and the new majority in Congress will stop it.
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TREISMAN: And there's still a separate lawsuit under way. That's led by a group of Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian who say the arch actually can't be built at all unless Congress approves.
PFEIFFER: That is NPR's Rachel Treisman. Rachel, thank you.
TREISMAN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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