Pavan Acharya

Working every day to deliver policy news you can't find anywhere else.

My Recent Work

POLITICO •

Trump has fired a Democrat on a federal railroad board. He's the latest to refuse to leave his post.

“I plan to continue to discharge my duties as a member of the Board and, if I’m prevented from doing so, I will explore my legal options,” Primus wrote. He also defended his record on the board, where he’s served since Trump appointed him in 2020. It’s the latest example of personnel unrest and tension throughout the Trump administration, which is managing blowback from the recent firings of Federal Reserve Board Gov. Lisa Cook and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monare...
POLITICO •

DOT secretary says agency will ‘take over’ Washington’s Union Station, building it already owns

Duffy said he believes DOT’s takeover will increase the station’s income and entice more development and investments in the building as a result. In its reasoning for the change, DOT said it expects “improved security” will also play a role in drawing in more private investors for a “potential expansion of the station.”Union Station is owned by the Federal Railroad Administration, a subagency of DOT. For many years, the station’s retail concessions were leased to a private company. Last year, Am...
POLITICO •

How a fragile aviation system led to disaster near Washington

Indeed, one of the most common threads during the long inquiry was that nobody seemed shocked that a PSA Airlines passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided in January, killing all 67 on board both aircraft.“I was chairman of the board for almost eight years. I’ve followed aviation for several decades. Nothing in this surprises me,” said Jim Hall, who served as NTSB chair under then-President Bill Clinton and watched part of this week’s NTSB proceedings. It “only demonstrates that...
POLITICO •

Controllers asked for fewer flights at Reagan National before a midair collision. That never happened.

“Yes,” Lehman replied. “It needs to be addressed and we didn’t address it.”Lehman said he brought it to the attention of his district manager, and believed “she had other conversations with other people” about it. But “it died right there,” he said. Later, Njuen Mandi Chendi, an air traffic management officer at the FAA, clarified that the clear weather maximum per hour arrival rate hadn’t gone up since 2019 —but the maximum allowable under poor weather conditions has.In a statement, transportat...
POLITICO •

130 feet from disaster: What we learned about the deadliest airline crash in decades

Here are some details revealed Wednesday about what went wrong in the skies near Washington:The Army Black Hawk helicopter’s altimeter wasn’t sensitive enough.Air traffic controllers cleared the helicopter to cross behind the commercial airplane as it was landing, relying on the military pilots to see the plane and avoid it. But preliminary data shows that the helicopter had been flying at about 300 feet above the ground — about 100 feet higher than it should have been — placing it on a collisio...
POLITICO •

Some air traffic controllers wanted to close a helicopter route near Washington’s airport. It was abandoned as ‘too political.’

The FAA could not immediately be reached for comment. The documents were released Wednesday on the first day of a three-day fact-finding hearing into the crash, where significant attention focused on the limitations of instruments on the Black Hawk helicopter involved in the crash and the complicated and congested nature of the airspace around the airport. NTSB investigators grilled Army witnesses about the Black Hawk’s altimeters, an instrument that helps pilots gauge how high above the ground...
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