I don’t agree at all. Before the crash even happened the controllers sounded stressed. There was absolutely an opportunity for ATC to call out to the helicopter pilot again to clearly state how close they were, but there was so much else going on that no one could monitor the helicopter that closely. When you have a helicopter flying through an active landing path it’s not enough to simply tell the pilot “don’t fuck up”. Why was there a training flight there in the first place? Unless the training was how to fly in the D.C. airspace, it could have taken place somewhere else. There were plenty of opportunities to do things differently so that a mistake from the pilot couldn’t have caused this many deaths.
In reality, the root cause of the accident is more likely from the airspace being far too crowded and the the lack of enough controllers to properly manage the area. The pilot couldn’t have made the fatal mistake if he was never in that situation in the first place. This is more a symptom of the long term staffing shortage in ATC, but the added stress of the head of the agency being fired, hundreds of their colleagues being fired (or maybe not, no one seems to really know), and the chance that they could wake up tomorrow without a job certainly meant that the controllers had more stress to deal with than just the aircraft in the air. We’re probably just going to have to wait a few months for the NTSB report to fully understand this.
Trump didn’t directly cause the accident, but his actions very likely could have contributed to it. Aviation safely is built on is built on layers and layers of systems to prevent the conditions for an accident in the first place. At the end of the day, taking a sledgehammer to a federal agency is going to make it run worse, and when the agency in question is the FAA, that means a higher risk of accidents.
I don’t agree at all. Before the crash even happened the controllers sounded stressed. There was absolutely an opportunity for ATC to call out to the helicopter pilot again to clearly state how close they were, but there was so much else going on that no one could monitor the helicopter that closely. When you have a helicopter flying through an active landing path it’s not enough to simply tell the pilot “don’t fuck up”. Why was there a training flight there in the first place? Unless the training was how to fly in the D.C. airspace, it could have taken place somewhere else. There were plenty of opportunities to do things differently so that a mistake from the pilot couldn’t have caused this many deaths.
In reality, the root cause of the accident is more likely from the airspace being far too crowded and the the lack of enough controllers to properly manage the area. The pilot couldn’t have made the fatal mistake if he was never in that situation in the first place. This is more a symptom of the long term staffing shortage in ATC, but the added stress of the head of the agency being fired, hundreds of their colleagues being fired (or maybe not, no one seems to really know), and the chance that they could wake up tomorrow without a job certainly meant that the controllers had more stress to deal with than just the aircraft in the air. We’re probably just going to have to wait a few months for the NTSB report to fully understand this.
Trump didn’t directly cause the accident, but his actions very likely could have contributed to it. Aviation safely is built on is built on layers and layers of systems to prevent the conditions for an accident in the first place. At the end of the day, taking a sledgehammer to a federal agency is going to make it run worse, and when the agency in question is the FAA, that means a higher risk of accidents.