My Advice to Pundits on the Tragic Midair Collision: Shut Up and Wait for the NTSB to Do Its Vital Work
In his “briefing” today on the devastating midair collision of a commerical airliner and Army helicopter in busy Washington, D.C., airspace, the Divider-in-Chief wasted no time pivoting to toxic fingerpointing from prepared remarks including healing phrases like “We are one family.”
As I said on X and Bluesky and Facebook, Trump’s poisonous instincts have never been on starker display. On CNN tonight, Miles O’Brien, a veteran television journalist and pilot (and old friend of mine), mused about what first responders, investigators and family members of victims must think of a president choosing “to summarily assign blame to something which there’s no data for.”
But of course Trump wasn’t alone in grasping for causes and blame even as dozens of bodies were yet to be pulled from the near-freezing waters of the Potomac.
And of course there is clearly fault to be had. There are no signs of malfunctioning equipment and the night was piercingly clear - allowing a distant webcam to capture the horrific moments as the helicopters’s lights merge with those of the jet, the blinding explosion blossoms, and multiple streaks descend to the river.
At moments like this I always think back to the remarks of the able chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, after the catastrophic derailment of a toxic freight train in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023. “We call things accidents. There is no accident. Every single event that we investigate is preventable.”
The best that can come of the collision over the Potomac is that, as with every other major transportation tragedy, resulting investigations mitigate yet another failure mode through future adjustments to rules, training, technology or other variables.
But that process will take time - not tantrums.
I wish the best for Homendy and her team and all the many partner agencies diving in (some literally) to gather and analyze every shred of evidence to understand all the dimensions and dynamics that took the lives of 64 people aboard aboard the plane and 3 more in the Black Hawk.
Here’s the NTSB briefing - “PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 and Sikorsky H-60 military helicopter collision”
For more, I’ll turn you over below to the brilliance of
, the veteran journalist, author and pilot whose newsletter is essential reading always, but particularly when aviation safety is the issue at hand.Unlike Fallows, I've only deeply covered one deadly plane crash - the midair destruction of TWA Flight 800 and its 230 passengers and crew in July 1996 as the 747 rose from JFK International Airport en route to Paris. It’s worth briefly considering that disaster and how a rush for explanations proved foolhardy. Terrorism was the meta theme that summer and the Justice Department was keen to wrest control of the investigation from the NTSB and was steadily feeding journalists snippets hinting at that cause.
Boeing reps in the wreckage hangar were in the same mode, eager for the cause NOT to be the plane itself, and I was suckered a bit in pursuit of New York Times scoops. But as the months ticked away, the cause turned out to be some still-murky mix of electrical and mechanical failures that ignited fuel vapors. I talked about the lessons of prejudging causes in the case of Flight 800 a couple of years ago on a Sustain What webcast about the UFO rumor mill. Here’s a relevant nugget:
My advice now?
Everyone needs to mourn the dead, help their surviving circles, and shut up so the NTSB can do its vital methodical work.
Here’s the Fallows post. It’s mostly behind a paywall. I just became a paying subscriber after freeloading too long. Below are a couple of excerpts.
How can I get the big picture, of what was happening and what went wrong?
For overall orientation I highly recommend this video recreation, below, from VASAviation. This site is run by a pilot based in Brazil who has made a specialty of matching Air Traffic Control recordings with radar and ADS-B tracks of how planes are moving through the skies. It’s a tremendous service.
This latest eight-minute VASA video takes you through the crucial stages of the unfolding DC tragedy. It shows the regional jet approaching from the south; the controllers recommending (because of wind) a shift in runway-choice for its landing runway; the military helicopter approaching from the north; the controller instructing the helicopter pilot to avoid the jet; and then, once things have gone to hell, the aftermath of controllers calmly-but-urgently routing inbound planes away from the accident-scene airport….
Fallows lays out what’s known about the three human factors - the jet and helicopter crews and the capacity and behavior of the air traffic controllers. He poses some significant questions about the military helicopter piloting, then he explores the possibility of larger issues contributing to the crash:
Might there be a potential fourth participant?
That fourth player would be strain on the aviation system overall. Was this kind of accident “bound” to happen at DCA in particular, with its incredible and intensifying mix of airline, military, police-and-security, VIP, and other traffic, in one tightly confined space? Or “bound” to happen somewhere in the “National Airspace” system, given strains on controllers and the well-publicized string of “close calls” in the past few years? In other ways?
Maybe. (And here’s a new story about an airport in the San Francisco area where all controllers have resigned.) About DCA, it’s worth remembering that this is the first fatal airline crash there in more than 40 years.4 To the best of my knowledge it’s the only airplane collision ever to have happened in its very busy airspace.
So: Maybe this will be a breaking-point moment for a system long under stress. “Something was going to happen. And it finally did.” Or maybe it will prove to have more purely localized bad-luck origins.
We don’t know. That is why we rely on the air-safety system for its careful, methodical parsing of evidence and possibilities.
Fallows closes where I opened this post - with a broadside at Trump. Here’s just a taste:
-He made an event that should have been about victims, consequences, investigations, questions, lessons, all about himself. It was strongly reminiscent of his hogging-the-stage early press spectacles about Covid. This was the aviation version of once of his “ivermectin” rants.
-He made his raft of appointees and officials—the new Transportation Secretary, the new Vice President, the unspeakable new Defense Secretary—perform as North Korean-style adulatory lackies, each beginning his statement with admiration and thanks to the Dear Leader and his guidance. This too was a return to the Covid/ivermectin days.
-He did what no one should ever do in the hours after an airplane disaster, which is to presume to detailed knowledge of what happened and who was to blame.
There’s more, as you might imagine.
I’d love to think Trump’s handlers and family can find a way to guide him past his basest reflexes. But I’m not holding out hope given how he’s consolidated power and sealed himself in an echo chamber.