Chris Rocheleau, the Deputy FAA Administrator who led the agency’s response to the January 2025 mid-air collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that killed 67 people, is stepping down next week. He told colleagues he is leaving for a 'new opportunity'. He is returning to the National Business Aviation Association, the trade group where he worked before his most recent stint at the regulator.
Rocheleau had been named acting administrator days before the crash. On the evening of 29 January 2025 an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet, a CRJ700 operated by PSA Airlines collided over the Potomac River while the airliner was on approach. All 64 people on the jet and the three crew members on the helicopter died. It was the deadliest US aviation accident in more than two decades.
The National Transportation Safety Board later determined that the accident was caused in significant part by the FAA’s own decisions. The agency had allowed helicopter routes to operate close to the airport’s approach paths without adequate safeguards to keep the two streams of traffic apart. Controllers had raised concerns for years. Recommendations to move the helicopter traffic had been rejected or stalled. Rocheleau himself told Congress that 'clearly something was missed'. The NTSB recorded more than 15200 earlier occurrences at Reagan in which commercial aircraft and helicopters came within less than one nautical mile laterally and less than 400 feet vertically.
In the immediate aftermath, Rocheleau oversaw emergency measures that included eliminating mixed traffic over the Potomac. He continued as deputy administrator after Bryan Bedford was confirmed as permanent administrator in mid-2025. Safety reforms have been announced and some restrictions made permanent. His departure comes roughly eighteen months after the crash, at a moment when those reforms are still being tested and when the agency is undergoing a broader reorganisation and headquarters relocation.
The timing invites an uncomfortable question. Is this a straightforward career move by an official who served through a crisis or a quiet institutional exit before the full weight of the NTSB’s findings and the practical results of the safety changes become clearer? Rocheleau has described the departure as bittersweet and has praised the agency’s work on air-taxi programmes and artificial-intelligence tools for safety. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy thanked him for jumping into action on the night of the collision and for supporting subsequent reforms. The FAA’s general counsel, Liam McKenna, will serve as acting deputy administrator.
The crash exposed long-standing gaps in how the FAA managed the shared airspace around one of the nation’s busiest and most constrained airports. Rocheleau was the public face of the agency’s response. His exit removes that face just as the harder, slower work of ensuring the gaps stay closed is still underway. Whether the reforms hold will be measured in the years ahead, not in the statement that accompanies a resignation.