Author: Josh Funk Associated Press

Air traffic controllers at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport will be offered crisis counseling and additional supervision after a fight in the tower and another alarming near miss two months after a midair collision between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter killed 67 people. The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday it is also evaluating whether the current arrival rate at Reagan is too high. The agency said it would extend extra support to the controllers who direct flights around the busy airport while Congress and the National Transportation Safety Board continue investigating the deadly January crash. Sen. Ted Cruz, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said that troubling missteps since the crash “underscore the precarious situation in the nation’s airspace.” Expressing frustration with the Army’s refusal to turn over a memo detailing its flight rules, Cruz said during a Wednesday hearing that any deaths resulting from another collision near Reagan “will be on the Army’s hands.” The FAA’s decision to bring in crisis counselors followed the Thursday arrest of a 39-year-old employee from Maryland on suspicion of assault and battery after the control tower fight, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority confirmed in a statement. No details were released about the altercation. The FAA said the employee was put on administrative leave while the fight is investigated. The next day, a Delta passenger jet had to take evasive action as it took off from Reagan because of the proximity of a flight of four Air Force jets involved in a flyover at Arlington National Cemetery. The incident continued a pattern of close calls that the NTSB has said went on for years around the airport as commercial flights repeatedly got dangerously close to helicopters and other aircraft. The FAA said Wednesday that it was reviewing the “current arrival rate of aircraft per hour, which is disproportionately concentrated within the last 30 minutes of each hour.” After January’s crash between an American Airlines jet and