America’s chief of safety for public transportation said today she is angered and devastated for the families of 67 people killed in the collision of an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter on January 29th. There is just not enough separation between commercial flights and helicopter transportation around Washington Reagan National Airport, said Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board who called on Monday for an immediate halt to helicopter through traffic when airlines are arriving and departing on two runways at the busy airport.

As part of the investigation, which is routine for the board, the NTSB discovered that over the last three years, near collisions at the airport were happening on one and a half percent of all commercial flights at the airport. It was this discovery that led Homendy to repeatedly characterize the risk of another similar accident as “intolerable”.

“We remain concerned about the significant potential for a future mid-air collision at DCA, which is why we are recommending a permanent solution today,” Homendy said.

With notable speed, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy endorsed the NTSB’s proposal, telling reporters that with the exception of presidential and vice presidential transport, life-saving and law enforcement operations, the NTSB’s plan will be adopted.

Emergency recommendations by the NTSB are not common. They can be an effective way to target an emerging hazard while still allowing investigators time to discover all the factors that led to an accident, a process that can sometimes take years.

A time-consuming solution is not what the transportation secretary is asking for. After 6 weeks on the job during which there have been 3 crashes, several other serious incidents, a worried population and disgruntled airline executives, Duffy wants fixes and he wants them now.

“There’s no common theme to the crashes that have taken place,” he told reporters following the NTSB news conference, during which Homendy said there was nothing abnormal about operations at the DCA tower on the night of the accident, but that ATC staffing is part of the NTSB probe. Nevertheless, Duffy said at the DOT, recent accidents “have made us focus on our air traffic control system.”

Fixing an antiquated system that has been under-staffed since the 1981 PATCO strike that led to the firing of 11-thousand air traffic controllers and the dissolution of their union, is a challenge those of us who have been around for a few decades have heard discussed again and again, though rarely with Duffy’s bright-eyed optimism.

“We’re going to do it all at the same time,” Duffy said of modernizing air traffic control and incorporating artificial intelligence to data mine for hazards. “I need companies that are going to move at the speed of Donald Trump,” he said.

If Duffy is concerned that the chaos the President is known to bring to other areas of governmental policy might interfere with his goal, or with the NTSB’s more deliberate look at whether and what air traffic control issues might have played a role in the crash, he did not mention it.

Like his boss, he did not get into specifics, promising a more detailed plan in the near future.