An aviation safety bill seeking to address lessons learned from last year's midair collision of a jet with an Army helicopter near the nation's capital is up for a vote Tuesday evening in the House, but key senators and the families of the 67 victims think the bill needs to be strengthened.
The House bill, called the Alert Act, has the backing of key industry groups. The National Transportation Safety Board said recently that the legislation, since amended, now addresses its recommendation to require all aircraft flying around busy airports to have key locator systems that let pilots know more precisely where other aircraft are flying around them.
The NTSB has been recommending the new technology systems since 2008, and Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy has said such a system would have prevented the collision of the American Airlines jet and Army Black Hawk helicopter that plunged into the icy Potomac River on Jan. 29, 2025.
Two key House committees unanimously advanced the bill last month. The bill is now being brought up for a full House vote under rules that won't allow any amendments. But victims’ families said they want to make sure the bill has strict timelines to guarantee the reforms will be completed.
Sponsored by Republican Sam Graves and Democrat Rick Larens, the legislation needs to secure two thirds of House support to advance to the Senate. Separate legislation called the ROTOR Act that the Senate crafted came up one vote short in the House. Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell have also said the Alert Act still needs to be improved.
Earlier this year, the NTSB's Homendy sharply criticized the original version of the bill as a “watered down” measure that wouldn’t do enough to prevent future tragedies. But the board said the revised version would now address the shortcomings their investigation identified and require the Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Department and the military to take needed actions.
National Transportation Safety Board members at a hearing in late January were deeply troubled over years of ignored warnings about helicopter traffic dangers and other problems, long before the collision.
Everyone aboard the American Airlines jet, flying from Wichita, Kansas, and the helicopter died when the two aircraft collided. It was the deadliest plane crash on U.S. soil since 2001, and the victims included 28 members of the figure skating community.
A helicopter route in the approach path of a Reagan National Airport runway didn't ensure enough separation between helicopters and planes landing on the airport's secondary runway, and the route wasn't reviewed regularly, the board said. The poor design of that route was a key factor in the crash along with air traffic controllers relying too much on pilots seeing and avoiding other aircraft.
The bill now requires planes to have Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast In systems that can receive data about the locations of other aircraft. Proponents of the use of such systems said they would have alerted the pilots of an American Airlines jet sooner about the impending collision with the Black Hawk helicopter. Most planes already have the complementary ADS-B Out systems that broadcast their locations.
The NTSB cited systemic weaknesses and years of ignored warnings as the main causes of the crash, but Homendy has said that if both the plane and the Black Hawk had been equipped with ADS-B In and the systems had been turned on, the collision would have been prevented. The Army’s policy at the time of the crash mandated that its helicopters fly without that system on to conceal their locations, although the helicopter involved in this crash was on a training flight, not a sensitive mission.
FILE - A crane offloads a piece of wreckage from a salvage vessel onto a flatbed truck, near the wreckage site in the Potomac River of a mid-air collision between an American Airlines jet and a Black Hawk helicopter, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Feb. 5, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)
FILE - Family members of the victims of American Airlines flight 5342 who perished in a collision with a U.S. military helicopter, comfort each other while listening to the audio of the flight radio transmissions during the NTSB fact-finding hearing on the DCA midair collision accident at the National Transportation and Safety Board boardroom, July 30, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr., File)
FILE - Salvage crews work on recovering wreckage near the site in the Potomac River of a mid-air collision between an American Airlines jet and a Black Hawk helicopter at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Feb. 6, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
STUDIO CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 5, 2026--
PlanetBids continues to release a significant wave of platform enhancements spanning every stage of the public procurement lifecycle, from solicitation creation and vendor management through bid evaluation, contract execution, and insurance compliance. The updates reflect a sustained product investment driven directly by customer feedback and a development cadence that no enterprise ERP competitor can match.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261105726327/en/
Over the past year, PlanetBids has moved with purpose and speed to build the best procurement platform on the market today. That platform is purpose-built for public agencies, continuously improved by the people who use it every day, and sophisticated enough to handle the most complex public procurement programs in the country without the implementation burden, price tag, or rigidity of massive enterprise systems. It’s also flexible and customizable enough to help small, one- or two-person purchasing teams automate and streamline manual processes, without overwhelming them with unnecessary features and costly extras.
Shaped by the Procurement Professionals Who Use It
At the center of PlanetBids’ strategy, the Customer Advisory board is a group of high-use, high-impact public procurement professionals who meet regularly to share feedback, discuss the future of the platform, and influence the product roadmap directly.
The Customer Advisory Board includes some of the most active and sophisticated procurement operations in the country: SamTrans, the City of Sacramento, the City of Reno, San Diego International Airport, San Diego Housing Commission, Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, Long Beach Unified School District, Orange Unified School District, the City of Salisbury (MD), South Coast Water District, Los Angeles Community College District, Corpus Christi Regional Transit Authority (TX), San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments, and Columbia Association (MD).
The enhancements that have been released this year trace directly to conversations with Advisory Board members and the broader PlanetBids customer community. When agencies identify friction in the platform, PlanetBids listens, prioritizes, and ships improvements, building a feedback look that has allowed PlanetBids to move faster than any ERP-driven competitor can replicate.
PlanetBids’ goal is not to be everything to every agency. It is designed to be the best procurement platform available for public agencies, full stop, and because procurement is all it does, it can take direct customer feedback, build it into the roadmap, and release it quickly. The agencies that want to lead in public procurement need a partner that can move at their pace – PlanetBids does.
New Home Page: Putting Everything You Need for the Day in One Place
When procurement professionals log into their PlanetBids system at the beginning of the day, they have a lot of tasks ahead. Between reviewing new approvals, reading and routing new vendor questions, checking insurance certificate expiration dates, and releasing addenda, their day is full of deadlines and action items.
The new PlanetBids Agency Hub Home Page puts all the most important tasks in one place so users can see what needs their attention first as soon as they log in.
The new dashboard now highlights pending requests from other teams, expiring insurance certificates, contracts that need updates, fixes, or missing information, and live solicitations that are currently bidding. It also provides a calendar view to create events and send invites to potential bidders and stakeholders, and it provides vendor insights, including recently registered vendors, top categories, and classifications.
“The hub homepage is a great improvement,” Corrin Fitsemons, Contracting Manager at Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, said at the October Customer Advisory Board meeting. “I love the fact that you can customize it. Being able to configure this page to the user's needs is very exciting.”
For users, the new homepage tells you what tasks you need to work on, which means fewer clicks between logging in and getting work done. More additions to this page are still in the works, including alerts for prequalifications, general business certifications, and vendor activity.
Evaluations: A Fundamentally Better Experience for Evaluators and Facilitators
The evaluations process is one of the most consequential stages of public procurement. PlanetBids has overhauled the experience for both evaluators and facilitators to create a smoother, more connected and collaborative process.
Evaluators can now access proposals and scorecards side by side in a single view, eliminating the multi-tab workflow that forced them to toggle back and forth between documents and scoring interfaces. Multi-screen setups are fully supported, and unnecessary navigation has been removed. Before accessing bid materials, evaluators acknowledge a configurable agreement like a conflict of interest disclosure directly in the system by checking a confirmation box, creating a documented and auditable record of compliance before scoring begins. The visual interface has been modernized throughout as well.
For facilitators, the updates deliver real-time visibility into evaluator progress; streamlined evaluator assignment and management, including the ability to add, replace, or remove evaluators mid-evaluation; and a cleaner, more intuitive evaluation configuration experience. Reporting has been significantly improved, giving facilitators better analytics and collaboration tools to manage complex, multi-round evaluations from start to finish.
Line Items: The Most Flexible Bid Schedule Design Available
Public procurement pricing structures are not simple, and the agencies using PlanetBids have made that clear. The platform’s line item engine has been rebuilt to accommodate the full complexity of modern public agency bidding, including base scope with optional alternates, tiered pricing based on quantity thresholds, multi-year contracts with escalated pricing per renewal period, conditional line items excluded from totals, high-precision unit pricing for utilities, and nutrition program pricing structures that differ entirely from a standard bid schedule.
Agencies can now add, remove, rename, and reorder columns; group rows and define column data types; set formulas on computed columns; configure numeric precision up to eight decimal places; and save formula configurations for reuse across solicitations. Vendors can intentionally skip a line item or group rather than leaving a blank, eliminating ambiguity in bid responses. Updated tabulation includes price highlighting, column-based sorting, vendor filtering, completeness indicators, side-by-side vendor comparison, saved highlight configurations, and scalable export options. These updates create a bid schedule tool that handles what agencies bid, not a simplified overview of it.
Insurance Certificates: AI-Assisted Intake and Smart Reminders
Certificate of Insurance management has been upgraded in two important ways. First, vendors can now upload their own COI directly to the PlanetBids system, with AI reading the certificate and automatically populating the relevant details for agency and vendor review and approval. This eliminates the manual data entry that has historically made COI management one of the most time-consuming compliance tasks in a procurement department.
Second, insurance reminders now support a configurable, multi-touch notification sequence that fires before, on, and after a certificate’s expiration date, targeting vendors, producers, and agency summary recipients automatically. This update prevents lapses in coverage due to missed reminders or lack of follow-up.
Coming Soon! Vendor Teams: One Company, Many Users
PlanetBids’ new Vendor Teams feature fundamentally changes how vendor organizations interact with the platform. Rather than sharing a single company-wide login, each company can now hold a primary account with individual sub-profiles for every employee who needs access, from project managers to estimators to business development staff and subcontractors. Each person logs into their own PlanetBids account connected to the company’s larger account, giving vendors a more professional, secure, and organized way to engage with public agency solicitations across the network.
Coming Soon! Staff Report: One Click to a Board-Ready Summary
The new Staff Report feature generates a complete, agency-branded PDF export of a solicitation record with a single click, pulling solicitation details, vendor notifications, email history, and awarded data into a clean, formatted document ready for board or council presentation. For procurement professionals who have spent hours manually assembling solicitation summaries for governing board meetings, this quality-of-life improvement saves time and reduces the risk of incomplete or unclear reporting.
This report is now available in Beta testing for PlanetBids member agencies, who can request early access through their Customer Success team member.
What’s Next for PlanetBids
The enhancements announced today represent a year of focused, customer-driven development across the procurement lifecycle, but they are not the end of that work, by far. PlanetBids’ development cadence continues to accelerate, its Customer Advisory Board continues to shape the roadmap, and the agencies that use PlanetBids as their procurement platform continue to provide feedback with the understanding that they can expect the platform to keep improving around them.
Public procurement is changing, and the agencies leading that change deserve a platform that is built for what procurement is becoming, not a legacy system adapted for it or an amalgamation of purchased systems cobbled together into a hybrid solution. PlanetBids is the purpose-built solution designed for public procurement and public procurement only, and the best is still ahead.
“Our customers have told us exactly what a best-in-breed procurement platform looks like from where they sit, and we have worked hard to build it,” said David DiGiacomo, PlanetBids’ CEO. “The enhancements we are releasing touch every stage of the lifecycle, from how vendors engage with our platform to how agencies evaluate proposals and report results to their governing boards. We move faster than any ERP competitor because procurement is all we do, because procurement professionals are building our product, and because the best procurement professionals in the country are telling us directly what to create next. This is what best-in-breed looks like, and we are just getting started.”
About PlanetBids
PlanetBids’ lifecycle procurement platform helps procurement professionals in the public, private, education, and non-profit sectors streamline their purchasing operations and improve vendor and supplier relationships for better budget and resource management. With tools for bid and vendor management, business certification and insurance tracking, contract and document management, and reporting, PlanetBids is purpose-built by procurement industry experts for agencies of all sizes and budgets. To learn more or schedule a demo, visit https://planetbids.com.
The new PlanetBids home page puts all of a user's tasks for the day at front and center, making sure the most important work is done first.
