February 4, 2025

Mid-Air Collision: Public Safety vs. Politics

The president sends the right message at the wrong time and place.

Last week, our incessant political firefights were suddenly preempted by a real-time horror show. But the pause didn’t last long.

Before 10 p.m. on January 29, TV broadcasts were interrupted by reports of a possible aviation accident near Washington, DC. In short order, the magnitude of the accident became clear. We learned that an American Airlines commuter jet on final approach to landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport had collided with a U.S. Army helicopter, sending both aircraft careening into the Potomac River below.

First responders entered the pitch black, freezing water in a frantic — and unsuccessful — effort to locate and rescue any possible survivors among the 67 individuals aboard the two aircraft. There were none. As of Monday, 55 of the 67 bodies have been recovered.

It was the most severe U.S. commercial airline accident in decades. The following morning, President Donald Trump weighed in personally, expressing his condolences to the victims’ grieving families and his commitment to finding and correcting the cause of what seemed to be a wholly preventable accident. But then the familiar Trump bombast took over as he wandered clumsily into speculation that the DEI policies and practices that he detests may have been a contributing factor.

Trump’s views on DEI are well-known and widely supported. But with details of the accident still taking shape and grieving families hanging on his every word, his conjecture about possible DEI implications was delivered at absolutely the wrong time and place. It was jarring and undoubtedly hurtful to many. A day later, he tempered his comments, but not enough to clear the air.

Trump critics seized on the opportunity. In an instant, social media commentary about the accident shifted from the tragic loss of 67 lives to unbridled outrage that the president had blamed it all on skin color. That’s not true, but it plays to the narrative, and it spread like wildfire.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) — an independent, nonpartisan panel of aviation safety experts — is charged with examining every detail and getting to the bottom of this tragedy. Until their work is done, all conclusions are premature. But from the information already available, the cause of the collision will likely be human error on the part of the helicopter crew and/or the FAA aircraft traffic controllers. The NTSB investigation is also likely to conclude that the potential for human error is significantly increased by the inherently dangerous practice of conducting military helicopter training in close proximity to commercial jet landing patterns.

Trump’s conjecture about DEI implications may have been out of place, but those who accuse him of racism are well aware that his war on DEI is precisely the opposite of racism — it’s a move to eliminate racism from the practice of choosing competent people for important jobs. With respect to last week’s tragic accident, it is obvious that competence matters — in both aircraft cockpits and airport control towers — and that skin color and gender don’t matter at all.

Moreover, if it is true, as widely reported, that the FAA is facing shortages in qualified aircraft traffic controllers and nevertheless regularly rejects candidates who meet all standards except for conformance with FAA’s DEI constraints (read: “quotas”) regarding race, gender, and ethnicity, then there is good reason for concern about the public safety implications of its DEI policies.

Takeaways from this tragic event:

1.) Airline travel remains remarkably safe. We creatures of habit tend to be comfortable with transportation methods we know, like safe and reliable travel by auto. But despite much action and substantial improvement in automobile safety, annual vehicle fatalities in the U.S. remain at about 40,000 — over 100 per day.

2.) The NTSB’s likely attribution of accident fault to human error does not necessarily imply dereliction of duty or incompetence. Instead, it is recognition of human fallibility in the face of daunting, daily challenges such as controlling huge, complex aircraft in congested airspace and dicey weather. The fact that fallible humans consistently handle those challenges so well implies fundamentally sound training, leadership, and work ethic in the aviation profession.

3.) NTSB recommendations for correction and improvement may include replacement of the antiquated hardware and software relied upon in FAA air control. Last week’s accident may prove to be an overdue and expensive (in human life) wake-up call on aviation safety.

4.) While the president’s rambling about DEI and operator competence was intemperate, his underlying message is sensible. Much of the concerns we hear about DEI policy regard unfair organizational inefficiency and loss of opportunity (e.g., in university admissions). But in the context of positions critical to public safety, he reminds us that personnel selections based solely on ethnicity or gender can affect more than livelihoods — they can impact lives.

And both sides, please leave your partisan politics at the door while we grapple with matters of public safety.

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