Did Trump's War On Competence Cause DC Plane Crash, Or Was It The Gay?
Expert analysis: 'I have helicopters. You can stop a helicopter very quickly. It had the ability to go up or down.'
Donald Trump wasted no time Thursday in blaming Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and diversity for Wednesday night’s fatal collision between an airliner and an Army helicopter, the US’s first fatal commercial airliner crash since 2009. The cause of the crash, which killed all 60 passengers and four crew on the airliner and three Army soldiers on the helicopter, has not yet been determined.
But that didn’t stop Trump from insisting that it had to be because hiring women, minorities, and people with disabilities had led to dangerously lax standards in the nation’s airlines and air traffic control system. It was all bullshit, but that’s how Trump does things, at least after he finished reciting the “differences between Americans fade to nothing compared to the bonds of affection and loyalty that unite us all” crap that his speechwriters made him say.
If you want to watch the speech, it’s here on YouTube, but we won’t embed it because one Trump video per week is about as much as anyone should have inflicted on them.
All Lies, All The Time
Once he had that kumbaya garbage out of the way, Trump got to what was clearly the thing that mattered most for him: explaining that even though the cause of the crash is undetermined, it was obviously diversity, because that was just “common sense.”
Trump claimed repeatedly that the FAA under Barack and Joe had long discriminated against white controllers, and crowed that instead,
“I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary, you remember that. Only the highest aptitude, they have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people, were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers.”
You knew exactly what he meant: Only straight white men have high aptitude, high intellect, and are “psychologically superior,” like his unhinged drunk of a Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Trump referred to one of his stupid executive orders ending diversity programs in government and repeatedly lied about a FAA diversity program aimed at hiring people with disabilities. Truth sandwich time: That program sought applicants targeted for recruitment by the federal government, including folks with disabilities including
“hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
However, as the FAA pointed out in 2024 when Fox News ran a DEI-scare story about the program (republished at the New York Post), the agency
employs tens of thousands of people for a wide range of positions, from administrative roles to oversight and execution of critical safety functions. Like many large employers, the agency proactively seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible, all of whom must meet rigorous qualifications that of course will vary by position.
And as a former FAA official explained to ABC News, diversity programs at the agency simply don’t give preferential treatment or lower standards for any applicants. The programs were there to widen the candidate pool, but all air traffic controllers must meet rigorous standards.
Trump skipped that nuance and lied in the news conference that the FAA routinely hires people with intellectual disabilities and psychiatric disorders to work as air traffic controllers, because that’s a much scarier story than the boring reality that the majority of FAA workers aren’t in the control tower anyway; they’re doing data entry or filing or all the other jobs necessary to run a federal agency.
None of the rightwing freakout stories have actually identified a single air traffic controller who’s not fit for the job, and the FAA’s ATC training is notoriously rigorous, with a washout rage of between 20 and 30 percent per class.
Trump returned again and again to the idea that people with severe intellectual disabilities are in air traffic control towers, reading the list of disabilities several times and exclaiming at one point, “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.” Again, that’s some bullshit.
Trump did at least hold back from saying the FAA hired R-words for the job. No problem; Twitter Chuds have been gleefully shouting the word ever since the Fox story last year, and they doubled down after the crash.
Oh, yes, here’s the kicker: That policy continued uninterrupted under Trump. At the Wayback Machine, you can find the very disability outreach language on images of FAA websites in June 2017 and in announcing a new initiative launched under Trump’s FAA in July 2019.
There’s also good reason to be glad the program existed, since it led to the hiring of people with serious physical disabilities. As an article on the program’s initial successful graduates noted in 2021, those in the program
must meet the same qualifications as any other air traffic controller student. Those who demonstrate the aptitude and ability may receive an appointment to the FAA’s Air Traffic Control Academy and, upon graduation, an air traffic control specialist position.
So nah, no lower standards, you bigot.
What We Know So Far About What Really Happened
But it’s definitely possible that a problem with air traffic control may have contributed to the collision. It had nothing to do with the color of controllers’ skin, or their gender, or even whether they were disabled. Rather, it’s that there simply weren’t enough of them. As the New York Times reported Thursday (gift link), the tower at Reagan National was understaffed Wednesday night. A preliminary FAA report on the accident said that staffing was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” and that
The controller who was handling helicopters in the airport’s vicinity Wednesday night was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways. Those jobs typically are assigned to two controllers, rather than one.
Oh. OK, but was that controller using a wheelchair? That was probably the problem, not being overworked and potentially distracted. The Times goes on to explain that it isn’t simply that a controller in that situation is handling two types of traffic, but also that different frequencies are generally used for civilian traffic (the jet, in this case) and military helicopters. “While the controller is communicating with pilots of the helicopter and the jet, the two sets of pilots may not be able to hear each other.”
The tower at Reagan National has been understaffed for years, thanks to budget constraints and high turnover, and on its best days has just 19 fully certified controllers instead of the target of 30 that both the FAA and the ATC union call for. The Times didn’t specify how many controllers were on duty at the time of the accident; just not enough.
As a result of the staff shortage, controllers have often had to work six-day weeks, for 10 hours a day, in one of the most stressful jobs in the world.
Who’s Actually Trying To Hollow Out The Federal Workforce?
Gee, did we really have to ask? For months before Trump took office, co-president Elon Musk, angry about the FAA fining him for shoddy operations at his rocket company, constantly harassed FAA administrator Michael Whitaker on Twitter, demanding he resign, and on January 20, Whitaker quit the agency. Trump didn’t bother to appoint an acting head of the FAA until yesterday, formally choosing deputy administrator Chris Rocheleau to be the acting administrator.
Among Trump’s first moves as president, he fired every member of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee without replacing them, as well as firing the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard. He also froze hiring of new flight controllers. On top of that, Trump’s letter telling federal employees to resign in hopes of not being fired, so they could keep their benefits, was terrible for morale. Same for the freeze/not freeze on federal spending.
As University of Maryland, Baltimore County political science prof Thomas Schaller noted on Twitter Wednesday morning, before the crash, things were already grim at the agency:
An FAA employee I know confirms agency already lacks sufficient air traffic controllers. The so-called “buyouts” and other attacks on federal employees won’t help.
Remember that fact when the flight delays (crashes?) commence and Trumpers start falsely blaming DEI or Biden.
Aviation safety experts point out that it would be difficult to show that any of those actions caused the DC crash, which is both a logical statement about causality and also misses the point. Trump readily admitted yesterday that the direct cause of the collision isn’t yet known, but that lack of evidence didn’t keep him from wildly speculating that DEI just obviously was connected somehow.
Democrats should play a similar game, noting that Trump has hollowed out the FAA and aviation safety and pointing out the actions he’s taken, which are far more relevant to safety in the air than any of the nonsense he’s spouted about DEI. The man cares far more about bringing back discrimination than he does about the safety of air travel, and that’s a completely valid point.
[AP / ABC News / AP / CNN / NYT (gift link) / WaPo (gift link)
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I like the idea that if you have to show a picture of Trump make it as silly as possible. Good job Dok!