Quotes
I am in the process of developing an initial plan to fix the @FAANews. I hope to put it out very shortly,
Duffy said on X on Thursday
We expect to recover all of the bodies,
he saidIt was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???
Trump saidBoth pilots had flown this specific route before, at night. This wasn’t something new to either one of them,
said Jonathan Koziol, chief of staff for Army aviation
You need to train as you fight, you need to rehearse in ways that would reflect a real world scenario,
Hegseth saidThe position configuration was not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,
the report saidThere was communication between the air traffic control tower and the helicopter pilot about whether they can see the CRJ [the American Eagle Bombardier jet] – did the controller give too much authority to the helicopter crew, or did the helicopter crew mistake what they saw?”
Chalk asked
The military tend to have a bit of a law-unto-themselves approach,
he said, explainingGiven that these are everyday training flights over known congested areas,
he said, referring to a nearby antennaOn 3/29/2024 at 1503 hours I observed two US army UH-60s nearly collide over 1-495 near Annandale,
he wrote in one complaint to the FAA from last March, noting they passed each other above the highway only “about 50-100 meters apart”.
There’s so many places they could have been doing training. Why did they have to do it at the end of the runways of DCA?”
Johnson continued, referring to the airport code of Reagan National airport
As we have said countless times before, DCA’s runway is already the busiest in the country,
Virginia US senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Maryland’s senator Chris Van Hollen and then senator Ben Cardin, all Democrats, said in a joint statement months before the law was passedWe lost more than 60 people, and two aircraft, and we shut down a major airport, and it was completely avoidable,
he saidI do think the military was right to pause these flights now,
Cantwell said
I think we might need to look at where is an appropriate time to take training risk, and it may not be near an airport like Reagan,
Driscoll addedIt was a fairly experienced crew and it was doing a required annual night evaluation,
Hegseth said
The big question I have is why do you have a military training flight so close to the route that people are supposed to land... Why is that corridor right on top of the flight corridor?,
said Senator Maria Cantwell in an interview
This is the busiest runway in all of America, and there's military helicopters in this area,
Marshall said
I think with past administrations, you wouldn't have known those facts,
Marshal saidEvery time I get on that flight, I probably recognize half the people and certainly know of all of them, ... This is a gut punch.”
Marshall said on “National Report.”