Continue reading. Or listen to it on Sargent's Daily Blast podcast episode.Sargent: This jet had 64 people on board and crashed into the Potomac River after colliding with a military helicopter at around 9 p.m. on Wednesday night. The helicopter appeared to be on a training flight.
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Kayyem: The why is still being reviewed; obviously it’s just been a few hours. On the basic facts, American Airlines regional plane collided with an Army helicopter. Conditions were clear, as we know. The passenger jet from Wichita, Kansas, was just about to arrive at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, one in a succession of airliners landing about two minutes apart, and that’s not abnormal for national airport. The Black Hawk was on a very typical training mission from Virginia’s Fort Belvoir. And we had been told, and I think the basic census, both of them were on standard flight patterns, well known for the D.C. area. [...] That’s why the investigation has to determine what, in fact, happened.
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There’s only three places where the error could have occurred, especially since we know that the circumstances were pretty normal: the pilot of the airplane, the pilot of the helicopter where there’s a lot of focus on what was going on, or something happened in the air traffic control room.
We have audio of the air traffic control room. It does not appear that someone wasn’t.... The helicopter pilot was notified of a visual concern. In other words, he needed visual on an airplane. He says he has it. We don’t know if he’s looking at the right plane. So in terms of miscommunication, the air traffic controller could have been more specific about which plane, or the helicopter pilot misunderstood it. Now that has nothing to do with any of the hirings that the FAA was looking at because in particular, all three of those positions—only three people who were in charge of that time—have to go through a training and standards process that are not diversity based.
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The unsophisticated nature of how [Trump] deals with complexity is while most of us in the field are looking at this saying, We have a normal thing. Lots of traffic, that’s normal. Weather was normal. No suspicion of anything weird. And then a tragedy. What’s the why?, Donald Trump thinks he can answer that with his right-wing infused media consumption. He tries to fill the airwaves at a press conference that, while nothing should shock me now, I think I had forgotten how bad he is in this particular role of crisis management. [...] If you just go back to the Covid press conferences, this felt very similar to that: just a bunch of BS and then anger when those lies are confronted.
Sargent: So Trump immediately goes out there at a time when we really just don’t know a whole lot and blames Democrats and DEI for the crash.
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He lumps himself in with a superior species of some amorphous type that who the hell knows exactly what he means, but I do think that there’s a deep racial component to it on some level. He’s also asked at one point what evidence he has that DEI hires were to blame, and he said, “Just could have been.” Really sloppy shit.
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What actually happened over the last few administrations with the FAA?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE 08:32 am:
Hmmm. Give me a second.
Trump is insane. What else is new, Chris? Also, surely Biden and DEI are still somehow responsible for the helicopter flying too high.
Yes.
UPDATE 08:48 pm:
[I]t turns out that the program to offer FAA careers to people with disabilities—the program Trump specifically decried yesterday—was a Trump administration initiative from 2019.
Bulwark
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