Efforts to recover the victims of Wednesday night’s air crash close to Reagan National Airport in Washington DC are continuing, as US president Donald Trump placed the blame for the US’s worst aviation disaster in more than a decade on the diversity, equity and inclusion policies of the previous Democratic administrations.
Sixty-seven people lost their lives after an army helicopter collided with an American Airlines – Flight 5342- passenger plane as it approached the runway on its final descent into Reagan National Airport, the main domestic hub in the city and one of the most congested flight routes in the country.
A preliminary Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) report, reviewed by the New York Times on Thursday, has stated that air traffic tower control staffing at the airport was “not normal” at the time of the air crash.
The collision, captured on grainy webcam images, shows the silhouette of both aircraft meeting and then exploding in a fiery ball shortly before 9pm local time. Both aircraft plummeted into the Potomac river.
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Emergency operations were put in place immediately and although divers worked throughout the night in water still carrying chunks of ice after the January snap freeze, no survivors were located and, by Thursday, the operation had been reclassified as a recovery mission. The bodies of 30 of those who died had been recovered by lunchtime.
Mr Trump followed a midnight social media post with a Thursday press briefing at the White House by explicitly condemning the policies of his political adversaries.
“I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first and they put politics at a level that nobody has ever seen,” he said. “Because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible and their politics was even worse.”
He added: “You have to have natural, talented geniuses. You can’t have regular people doing that job. They won’t be able to do it. But we will restore faith in American air travel. I’ll have more to say about that.
“I do want to point out various articles that appeared prior to my entering office and here’s one: ‘The FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.’ That is amazing.”
The tone of Mr Trump’s remarks stand in sharp contrast to the traditional practice in moments of national disaster in which aviation safety is seen as paramount irrespective of political allegiance.
Former transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was singled out by president Trump as having “a good line in bulls**t”, responded with a post that read: “Despicable. As families grieve, President Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.”
The passenger aeroplane was on a regional flight from Wichita, Kansas and had 64 people on board. Fourteen of those included figure skaters, six of them from a prominent Boston skating club. Two former world championship Russian skaters were confirmed as among those who died.
The soldiers on board the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter were participating in an annual training flight, which took off from the army airfield at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Defence secretary Pete Hegseth described the three-person crew as “fairly experienced”.
The abrasive tone of Mr Trump’s comments reflect his administrative promise to revoke diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies at federal level.
The tragedy presents the president with the first domestic disaster of his new term and occurred just a day after his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, took office. The new government is without key transport and aviation figures, with no administrator of the FAA and no administrator of the Transportation Security Administration.
Mr Trump’s attribution of blame flies in the face of the procedural process in which aviation authorities carry out independent investigations before reaching their conclusion. The president offered his perception of events from the footage that was made available.
“The analysis was based on vision ... There were some warnings, but they were given very, very late. Almost as they were given, a few seconds later there was a crash. It should have been brought up earlier. But the people in the helicopter should have seen where they were going. I can’t imagine people with 20/20 vision not seeing what is happening up there.”
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