Like all of you, I’m following updates about Wednesday night’s mid-air collision over the Potomac River in Washington DC. It’s big news, the first fatal U.S. commercial airliner accident since 2009.
While we know there’ll be an investigation, and that anything we hear this early is speculation, it’s hard not to form opinions — but responsible people in important positions know to keep those opinions to themselves. Or should know. Or used to know. Times have changed.
Donna had the TV on in the family room Thursday morning and from our home office at the other end of the house I could hear our nation’s leader blathering about the accident, sounding like nothing so much as a cross between the microwave installer in Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing and Archie Bunker in All In the Family. And then, while recovery operations in the river were ongoing and before any sort of investigation had begun, he — in an official statement to the nation on TV — laid the blame for the accident on former presidents Obama and Biden and said the cause was diversity hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration.
Click here for the full transcript of Trump’s press briefing on the DC midair. Would you believe dwarves are one of the targets of his bigotry? Here’s a quote:
Brilliant people have to be in those positions [he’s talking about air traffic controllers — me] and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened because of the stress. Where you have many, many planes coming into one target and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it. Targeted disabilities are those disabilities at the federal government as a matter of policy, as identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring, the FAA’s website states. They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism all qualify for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country, pouring into a little spot, a little dot on the map, a little runway.
Archie Bunker. That’s who’s in the White House. In the 1980s, I could not have imagined my country would ever have a president as ludicrously unfit as the one we have now. Nor can I today, but here we are.
I keep thinking about two of my own experiences that seem related, in a general way, to this horrible accident. Okay if I share them with you?
In the mid-1980s I was a major in the U.S. Air Force, attending Armed Forces Staff College at Norfolk, Virginia. I hitched a ride from Norfolk Naval Air Station to the Pentagon with the four-star admiral in charge of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet, CINCLANT as he was called in those days. I was going up to interview for a follow-on assignment. CINCLANT and some members of his staff were on big-deal four-star business and there was a spare seat for me. Our ride was a Marine Corps Sikorski, the same VIP-configured version used as presidential helicopters in those days: fancy green and white paint, a wood-paneled interior with soundproofing, a steward to serve coffee and hot rolls, the works. We flew up (and later, back) at low altitude, following roads and rivers, and over DC itself along the Potomac at very low altitude. We landed right at the Pentagon. The flight along the Potomac has always stuck in my memory. It was a routine operation for military and VIP helos transiting DC airspace, but new and exciting to me. I remember passing right by National Airport, below the path of arriving and departing airliners — again, routine stuff, using well-established and understood routes & procedures. I’m guessing those routes and procedures haven’t changed much over the years.
I also have vivid memories of my intro flight at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa in 1989. I was at the controls of a two-seater F-15 with my new squadron commander in the back (he liked to check out his new guys personally). As I entered the traffic pattern on our return from a working area over the East China Sea, the controller alerted me to a Marine KC-130 conducting a search for a helicopter and crew that had just gone into the water off Futenma Marine Corps Air Station (our two air bases were very close together). We immediately went heads out looking for the conflicting traffic. My boss saw it before I did and shouted. It was heading right for us, nose to nose, co-altitude, less than two miles away. I pulled up sharply and got us out of the pattern until we heard the controller tell us it was no longer in Kadena airspace. This was in broad daylight, unlike the circumstances of the other night over the Potomac, but it happened in crowded airspace at a time when air traffic control was saturated, and I’m pretty sure the crew members on that KC-130 were busy looking for survivors in the water, not for us. See and avoid is the rule of first and last resort, day or night, and it saved our bacon that day (I’ve always wondered if I’d have seen that big-ass airplane in time if my boss hadn’t shouted). There were no survivors on that USMC helo, by the way, and oh also by the way Donna and I later became friends with the commander of the Marine KC-130 squadron and his wife, fellow members of the Okinawa Hash House Harriers running club, and still are today, exchanging visits between their place in Long Beach and ours in Tucson.