Small regional Bombadier crashes in Washington river

[spot]

Not in a good way. This is not a repeat of the heroics on the Hudson, this is a plane and a helicopter on the bottom of the Potomac with divers in attendance and nobody rescued. The plane is in about 8 feet of water so perhaps the divers are there for the helicopter crew ("Divers have made their way inside the helicopter").

President Donald Trump's knee-jerk tweet was that the crash “should have been prevented”, which just goes to show what a prat the man can be on occasion.

2h ago06.26 GMT

Officials who held a press conference at Reagan National Airport did not announce any deaths, but they all had a sombre tone, writes AFP.

Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas said “when one person dies it’s a tragedy, but when many, many, many people die it’s an unbearable sorrow.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/liv ... ollow-live

American Senators misquoting after midnight are presumably the worse for drink, I can only hope he apologizes in the morning. The original wasn't Stalin, though all the world thinks it was. It was a German satirist in 1932, Kurt Tucholsky, whose "books were among the first to be burned by the Nazi party in 1933", writing from Swedish exile on the lightness and delicacy of the French language with this observation : "A diplomat from the Quai d'Orsay then says: "The war? I can't find it so terrible! The death of one person: that is a catastrophe. A hundred thousand dead: that is a statistic!". From Tucholsky it was clearly a trivial pleasantry about the French. In the mouth of Stalin, had Stalin in fact ever quoted it which is undocumented, it would have been chilling. From Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas it can only be an ill-judged platitude.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/ ... sef-Stalin

[spot]

It would appear the plane (near its final approach to land) and helicopter (on a training flight) were flying at each other head on for the final minute. The plane pilot turned to bear onto the runway it was landing on. The helicopter pilot (apparently seeing the plane only when it was five seconds from colliding) jinked up and right to avoid it not realizing the plane had now turned that way as well, thereby hitting each other. The helicopter had been asked by traffic control whether it had the plane it was approaching in sight and said yes, but there was another plane just taken off - perhaps the focus of the helicopter pilot's attention until they jinked.

The systemic problem is mixing military helicopter taxi flights in and out of the Capitol, White House and Pentagon with civilian flights in and out of Reagan regional airport a couple of minute's combined flight time distant, with both streams using the river as a motorway to avoid flying over a built up city centre. You clearly can't separate the streams by height if planes are landing or departing, or keep them parallel as they're joining or leaving the river's airspace.

potomac.jpg (121.72 KiB) Viewed 694 times

https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close- ... st11816845

[Bryn Mawr]

Does Trump truly believe that this accident was caused by having diverse air traffic controllers or is he just trying to make political advantage out of the deaths of 67 people - either way he is sick in the head. His speech tonight was disgusting.

[spot]

President Trump has no regard whatever for truth in any context. He takes any situation and invents any reason which conforms with his intended outcome. The day before, he had no idea he wanted to go there. The opportunity arises and he veers toward it, it's like watching a moth repeatedly banging the glass cover of the floodlight. It's all he knows. Name me a moment when this isn't an accurate description of events.

[LarsMac]

Does Trump truly believe that this accident was caused by having diverse air traffic controllers or is he just trying to make political advantage out of the deaths of 67 people - either way he is sick in the head. His speech tonight was disgusting.

I doubt Trump "truly believes" anything. I hate that whenever anything happens the Media automatically asks him what he thinks about it. He doesn't think about it. Asking him is like dropping a Quarter in a juke box, and blindly hitting a button. You never really know what you're going to get.

[LarsMac]

As for the passenger plane, several of the passengers were a group of Figure skaters and their families and Coaches coming home from a meet in Wichita, KS.
I never liked flying in to that airport. When the plane makes the final turn to the approach, you are looking out the window on the left straight into the water. It's a bit unnerving. And if anything happens, you are going into the river. It has happened a few times.

[Zenin000]

I really hope the divers can get everyone out safely. And that senator’s comment was just off.

[spot]

I find it hard to imagine anyone was alive within five seconds of the collision. The system was pretty well guaranteed to lead to a crash eventually, that was not a clever use of airspace.