OPINION: An Evening Crash and a Valuable Lesson

Last Wednesday evening, January 29, a terrible mid-air collision occurred at Reagan National Airport, as a small regional jet and a military helicopter collided upon approach, presumably killing all passengers and crew aboard both.

It is, of course, a horrific tragedy for all involved, and for their friends and relatives, now devastated by this unexpected loss. Obviously, all onlookers have compassion for both the casualties and their loved ones.

But it is also a news event – the first serious midair collision in the United States in years. Air travel is extremely safe in the United States, so when something like this happens, it is a newsworthy event. The press is right to cover it as such; they just have to be delicate in their questioning.

There are times when the cause of a collision is painfully obvious – a driver has a heart attack, a driver is drunk or high, a vehicle’s mechanical failure causes the driver to lose control. Sometimes such things are obvious from the start.

Other times, however, an investigation is needed; it will take weeks or months to be sure. This one likely falls into that group; the NTSB has recovered the “black boxes” from the wreckage, and they are deep in the process of analyzing the evidence. It may take the full 30 days or even longer to properly evaluate the evidence and make their determination.

But that’s not good enough for the modern news cycle, with 24 hour media and the omnipresent internet. So press conferences and news shows with unlimited experts ensure that we learn more than we thought there was to know about air travel. It fills time, it educates, and it gives politicians a chance to take digs at each other. To an extent, the coverage is worthwhile – even if the main issue – the question of what caused this crash, is really beyond our grasp for a month.

Objectively, there are things that we can say with confidence; these are things we know for a fact:

• Reagan National – being the most convenient airport to our nation’s capital – is a very busy airport, extremely busy for its size. Perhaps too busy.
• A couple of runways are short, which, combined with the space allotted in this congested region and the multitude of no-fly and prohibited areas in and around DC, makes it a  very challenging airport even for experienced pilots, arguably the most challenging major airport in the USA, if not the world.
• This airport is staffed at under two-thirds the number of air traffic controllers (ATCs) that the FAA believes is right for it, and at the time of this crash, one controller had just been stuck with manning two posts at the same time, handling both planes and helicopters.
• Helicopters are especially challenging when sharing space with regular planes, Blackhawks in particular. Planes and helicopters operate so differently, and helicopters are so hard to see and be seen, there are a lot of near misses at Reagan National; some say it’s surprising this doesn’t happen much more often.
• The Blackhawk was reportedly on a training or retraining flight as part of Continuity of Government training, a worthwhile effort.  But all training becomes more dangerous when any of the external factors are compromised, such as by a sudden rerouting of another plane or a sudden assumption of double duties by an ATC.

From just this information, we know this much for sure: it could have been an unavoidable accident with nobody to directly “blame” for it. Transportation is extremely safe in the United States, but nothing is perfect; there is always human error. With this much congestion, the slightest mistake – such as a helicopter pilot hearing an air traffic controller refer to a regional jet and thinking they were talking about the one straight ahead that he sees, not the other one just out of sight to the side or behind – could easily cause a disaster.

However, there are other possibilities, and even if some can be discounted in this case, they must always be considered at the beginning.

• For years, there have been proposals to restrict military helicopters from Reagan National except at non-peak times. Why haven’t these proposals been accepted?  Why do so many politicians and other VIPs get transported by helicopter in this congested area?
• For years, there have been proposals to reduce the number of flights at Reagan National. Has the desire for a slightly quicker commute than the drive to Dulles or Baltimore really trumped safety measures over the years?
• Were all the people involved as experienced as they should have been for their roles? The pilots of the jet, the pilots of the Blackhawk, the ATC? Did any assignment choices cause an unnecessary compromise in safety that day?
• Who approved the Blackhawk’s training flight at that busy hour?  Why wasn’t there someone to deny permission until the area was lighter, after midnight for example?
• To be effective, training should take place in all possible conditions, which means that it can’t only take place when the airport is empty; it must sometimes be done at busy times. But if so, could or should the air base coordinate in advance with Reagan National, warning that “we want to send in a couple helicopter training flights this evening; are your ATCs at full strength or should we postpone it?” When teaching our kids to drive, we check the highway to see if there’s a construction project, parade or other road closures; there’s no reason not to take the same measures here.

In addition, there is always the possibility of sabotage or homicide. Not to say it’s likely; hopefully it’s extremely rare. In this particular case, sabotage or homicide is probably not a possibility. But they must be among the first things we look at.

• The downing of an airplane to kill a single target is not unknown in history. Rep. Larry McDonald, Ron Brown, Dag Hammerskjold, Italo Balbo, and many others died in crashes or attacks, generally believed to have been specifically engineered to assassinate a single occupant of the plane.
• The September 11 attacks are not the only time that a pilot (in that case, hijackers who assumed the role of pilots) crashed a plane on purpose, in the support of islamic jihad. In at least one recent case, it wasn’t suspected until the flight recorders were retrieved, and the final muslim prayers were heard as the plane crashed into a mountainside, killing everyone aboard. But for a cult that prizes mass murder as an honorable way to go, this possibility, however rare, can never be discounted until disproven.
• There are times, too, when a depressed person is just so suicidal that he or she doesn’t think about the dozens or hundreds of other people who might be killed as a result of his suicide. Without drugs or alcohol, without a killing contract or allegiance to a death cult, there are times when a single person’s depression – combined with a lack of empathy for the others in his care – might lead to a suicidal turn of the steering wheel. It has happened before; the possibility can’t be discounted until disproven.

And there is one more possibility worth mentioning, because it’s the direction that President Trump went when asked about the issue in a press conference. Perhaps – not with certainty, but perhaps – it might have been DEI in one or several ways.

This was of course a dangerous direction to go, from a political perspective. It gave the press and the Democratic party a way to focus anger at President Trump. Instead of continuing to be frustrated by the fact that NTSB refused to speak out of turn and preemptively guess at the cause, instead of having to wait a month until the story was no longer fresh to get a conclusion, they could unify around their favorite punching bag: “President Trump is hijacking a tragedy to serve a pet issue.”

But was he really wrong?

This is the thing about DEI. It is so omnipresent in our lives right now, it’s difficult to imagine how DEI might not have affected the issue at hand.

The Left naturally assumed that a DEI accusation meant something personal – that this pilot or copilot, this air traffic controller or this mechanic, was less experienced than he or she should have been, because he or she was a DEI hire.

That might be the case, but not necessarily. That’s not necessarily the DEI problem.

Before the term was even widely known, DEI methodology had infested every branch of both our public and private sectors. We hire to meet quotas – quotas of men and women, quotas of blacks and whites, quotas of fully able and handicapped.

Sometimes this means that we hire the less qualified instead of the more qualified; there have been plenty of reports of people who’ve studied to be air traffic controllers but couldn’t get a slot because they didn’t check enough boxes, and the people who did check enough boxes weren’t as good.

But sometimes – perhaps more of the time, even – this means that we don’t hire at all, because we are aiming for that target demographic. If we can’t find someone who’s black or Hispanic, or wheelchair-bound or vision impaired, or mentally ill or mentally handicapped, we don’t fill the position.

We are currently, approximately a thousand ATCs short, partially because too many of the people who applied, and scored well on the test, just don’t check the DEI boxes.

As soon as this issue was raised Wednesday night, the Left got defensive. They insist that they aren’t saying they insist on hiring mentally ill people for this job, or mentally handicapped for that job, only for other jobs where it won’t hurt anything. We just want to hire them for something, it doesn’t have to be anything that will compromise safety. So they say.

But we also know how they apply these quotas in real life. People who live by the quota mentality – who know they judge and are judged by their demographics – sometimes won’t fill any positions until they can get those demographics up elsewhere.

Even if they wouldn’t hire, say, a manic depressive as an ATC, they’re just looking for one to hire to work on the switchboard or maintenance or facilities, the fact remains that they feel they have to leave that ATC position vacant until they meet that demographic need somewhere first. So the most important position at the airport remains chronically understaffed.

Look at the CAFÉ standards as applied to an automobile manufacturer. They don’t have to make sure their SUVs and luxury trucks get 40mpg, but until they sell enough of their little super-efficient economy sedans that do, they can’t make any more of those big SUVs. Once you play in the quota sandbox, everything is affected by it, whether you want it to be or not.

So the real message of President Trump’s DEI warning isn’t an insult, calling this or that person incompetent at all.

In fact, it’s a warning that much of what’s wrong with our system itself – the employment shortages, the lack of experience, the poor judgment – is often caused by the DEI mentality.

Why don’t we have enough controllers on staff at a time, at a busy place like Reagan National? Maybe it’s not that DEI caused them to hire bad people, but DEI stopped them from hiring enough good people.

Why do we have almost invisible Blackhawk helicopters flying into Reagan National in a busy evening? Maybe because DEI practices require us to schedule training missions for good people at illogical hours, considering the conditions.

And why do we have too many flights at Reagan National in the first place? Perhaps because DEI required that the wrong people be in the position to make that kind of judgment call in the first place. We have to support the old, the young, the important, the connected, the minority, the powerful; so many people want to be able to fly in and out of the most “convenient” airport, we can’t say “No” to anybody, so we authorize more flights than a small, crowded airport can handle safely.

And when you can’t say “No” to anybody because you have to bow to diversity, equity and inclusion – instead of honoring a foremost commitment to safety and common sense – then yes, that’s a DEI move.

So President Trump was right to mention this point, and nobody should be offended by it. We’re not insulting people or groups here; we’re just pointing out that the mission must outrank the color, sex, ethnicity, and other demographics of the people involved.

In a month or so, we might find out for certain whether this awful crash was caused by human error, mechanical error, malicious intent, or something else. Or we might never know for sure.

But in any case, the lessons we’ve learned in this analysis – about judgment, and special privileges, and competing interests – just might help, even beyond the narrow realm of aircraft safety, as this new administration tries to steer the government back onto the path of liberty and prosperity that it was intended for.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant.  President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.

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