Though the National Transportation Safety Board has just begun investigating the mid-air collision over DC last Wednesday that killed 67 people, we already know the cause: wishful thinking.
Elected officials demand the impossible when it suits them. In this case, the problem wasn’t too little faith in supposedly sclerotic, inept government agencies, but too much.
The Washington elite put blind faith in the idea that things would all work out, somehow, even though they were putting themselves in mortal danger.
Unlike the United States’ last major plane crash, which killed 50 in upstate New York 16 years ago, this one can’t be blamed on the airline.
American Airlines Flight 5342 took off from Wichita, Kan., at 5:22 p.m. and, by 8:48 p.m., had seven minutes left to its estimated arrival time when it began to descend on a clear path to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Then, a helicopter — a US Army Black Hawk, with three service members aboard — crashed into it.
The NTSB’s job is to figure out how and why this disaster happened, and that’s the reason why American aviation is so safe: Historically, we learn everything possible from a crash and adapt, so that it doesn’t happen again.
Obvious questions: First, did the Army mismanage its training mission? The military crew was flying out of its approved range, twice as high as allowed. It was outfitted with night-vision goggles — which restrict sight.
As The Wall Street Journal has reported, airline pilots flying into Reagan have warned about the relentless proximity of choppers.
“I cannot imagine what business is so pressing that these helicopters are allowed to cross the path of airliners carrying hundreds of people,” one pilot wondered in 2013.
“Why does the tower allow such nonsense by the military in such a critical area?” another asked.
Yes, pilots need to train, but civilian airline passengers and crew should not be unwittingly dragooned into that training.
Military risk is different from civilian risk. The military just crashed an F-35 in Alaska the day before the DC crash.
Second, were air-traffic controllers’ instructions to the military pilot to watch out for the AA jet clear?
Since the crash, multiple pilots have pointed out that, when the helicopter pilot affirmed to air-traffic control that he had seen the jet, a different jet was also nearby.
So the air-traffic controller and the helicopter pilot may have been talking about two different planes.
If instructions weren’t clear, was the deficiency due to ATC mismanagement, including letting a worker leave a shift early, allowing for “not normal” staffing?
We’ve been warned for years about understaffed and overworked air-traffic controllers.
Training standards are rigorous; perhaps pay and working conditions should improve, to attract candidates who might otherwise go into another high-pressure job, like financial trading, with better compensation.
And yes, notwithstanding Trump’s jumping to conclusions last week about DEI, the Obama-era initiative to recruit ATC candidates for training via a subjective “biographical assessment” was a bad idea — such a bad idea that Congress killed it in 2018.
But the scary thing is that members of Congress and their staffers knew all this, as did presidents and their aides over multiple White House administrations.
They have all read report after report and heard witness testimony after witness testimony that too many near misses at Reagan National Airport indicated a grave peril.
Reagan is the most crowded airspace and runway space in the nation — with 890 daily flights, operating at nearly twice its built capacity.
Yet Congress still increased flights at Reagan — 50 new daily flights over a quarter-century, according to reports.
The cynical way of looking at this is that members of Congress were heedless, because these flights are convenient for them.
But that means top Washington officials are also far more likely to be on one of these flights. Likewise, the military shuttles the same Washington-elite VIPs around in helicopters over this same airspace daily.
Warnings of near misses may have had a pernicious effect: Congress may have taken them as evidence that professional aviators can get out of any jam.
It’s one thing when Congress opts out of the rules by which the rest of us play.
But this time, Congress created more risk for itself.
What do members of Congress and their staffers, and their counterparts at the White House — any White House — think is keeping them safe from the realities of physics and of individual human cognitive capacity: magic?
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
