Fox News chief Washington correspondent Mike Emanuel has the latest on Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's statements about recent air traffic control incidents on'Special Report.' Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently announced that artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to detect and address air traffic risks, following a slew of near-misses and fatal plane crashes across the country. Duffy told FOX 5 DC that officials are implementing AI to "identify and address potential air traffic risks nationwide," potentially aiding in preventing tragedies like the fatal Jan. 29 midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) that claimed the lives of 67 people. Following the Potomac River crash, which involved a commercial plane and an Army Black Hawk helicopter, Duffy announced a plan to build a new "state-of-the-art" traffic control system that will equip locations with better technology to reduce outages, improve efficiency and reinforce safety. Duffy told FOX 5 that when investigators were looking into how to prevent collisions, they asked themselves, "Are there any other DCAs out there?" Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks during a news conference following up on the issuance of the National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report on the mid-air collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, on Tuesday, March 11.

This highly scalable approach may finally open the skies to a host of commercial drone applications that have yet to materialize. Amazon Prime Air launched in 2022 but was put on hold after crashes at a testing facility, for example. On any given day, only 8,500 or so unmanned aircraft fly in US airspace, the vast majority of which are used for recreational purposes rather than for services like search and rescue missions, real estate inspections, video surveillance, or farmland surveys. One obstacle to wider use has been concern over possible midair drone-to-drone collisions. This prevents most collisions but also most use cases, such as delivering medication to a patient's doorstep or dispatching a police drone to an active crime scene so first responders can better prepare before arriving.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy delves into his take on DEI, DOGE, infrastructure projects and his first weeks in his new role on'My View with Lara Trump.' Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced plans to bolster airport air traffic control systems with the latest technology over the next four years, while also using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify "hot spots" where close encounters between aircraft occur frequently. The announcement came after an update on an investigation into a crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, when a U.S. Army helicopter and an American Airlines-operated passenger jet collided over the Potomac River Jan. 29. "We're here because 67 souls lost their lives on Jan. 29," Duffy told reporters Tuesday, noting that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) unveiled its preliminary findings into the crash earlier in the day. The findings noted that, over the last 2½ years, there have been 85 near misses or close calls at Reagan National. Close calls were identified as incidents when there are less than 200 feet of vertical separation and 1,500 feet of lateral separation between aircraft.

Britain's air traffic control systems have been hit by a'huge network failure' today -- prompting confusion, chaos and huge delays for thousands of holidaymakers. NATS, the national air traffic controllers, stressed that UK airspace is not closed but it has brought in traffic restrictions to'maintain safety'. Engineers are working hard to fix the fault but hundreds of flights in and out of the country have been delayed – some for'at least 12 hours' – and there are fears the knock-on effect could last days. No cause of the technical issue has been revealed but social media is rife with claims that a cyber attack might be to blame. It comes just months after all flights across America were grounded for the first time since 9/11, when an unexplained computer system failure prompted fears that hackers had targeted the network.

The first part of President Trump's $1 trillion infrastructure plan took flight Monday when the president called for the privatization of the country's air traffic control system. "We're still stuck with an ancient, broken, antiquated, horrible system that doesn't work," Trump said of the current air traffic control organization run by the FAA. Flights are delayed and flying sucks, the president argued, and the best way to change that is to take the responsibility for managing airspace away from the bureaucrats at the Federal Aviation Administration and hand it over to a private nonprofit organization. Such a plan won't cost taxpayers a dime, he said, and will improve efficiency. This idea dates to the 1970s, but has never gotten anywhere.

With companies like Amazon and Google pushing for commercial use of drones, the U.S. government is under tremendous pressure to develop a control system that keeps order when hordes of drones flock to the skies. Professional drone-maker PrecisionHawk is one of the companies working on this problem. At the drone Data X Conference in San Francisco last week, the company showed off LATAS (Low Altitude Traffic and Airspace Safety), a system which uses cell networks and satellites to map the flying area around a drone and ensure that is has a clear airspace. Such systems are vital if commercial drone services such as package delivery, photography and surveying are to get off the ground. Current regulations restrict drone use to line-of-sight and impose restrictions on flight that could be eased if safety is assured. "We are taking lots of satellite data that we collect via satellites and we are processing that data into a very high resolution, 3D map of the Earth.