The streak nobody wanted to see end
Doing anything with a 100 percent success rate is hard, and maintaining that perfect record for almost 16 years in a row is exponentially harder. And yet that’s what the U.S. airline industry had accomplished until Wednesday evening: year after year of having every scheduled takeoff conclude with the plane landing in one piece.
I wanted that streak to continue forever while realizing how improbable that would be. What I did not expect was that it would end a few miles from my house in a fireball over the Potomac River, just east of the airport I’ve probably flown in and out of more than any other in the world.
Wednesday night’s fatal mid-air collision between an American Airlines-marketed CRJ700 regional jet and a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, about 2,000 feet off Runway 33 at National Airport, happened close enough that I might have seen it firsthand had I been outside somewhere at the time.
Some of the thousands of Washingtonians and Arlingtonians who live in buildings overlooking DCA did witness the collision and will never be able to unsee it.
That is chilling to contemplate, though not nearly as upsetting as thinking about the 67 lives lost and how close the 64 passengers and crew on AA 5342 were to wheels down on that runway1.
The first fatal crash of a U.S. airline since February of 2009–and the first involving National Airport since the crash of Air Florida 90 just over 43 years ago, notwithstanding how busy National has become and how many helicopters whir around its airspace–is a horrible break with the culture of safety in U.S. commercial aviation.
People may assume that culture just happens, but it has taken an immense amount of sustained, selfless work. Airlines, airports, air traffic control and government regulators have combined to construct and operate a marvelously complicated machine that transports vast numbers of people–more than 819 million domestic passengers on U.S. carriers in 2023–and almost never fails in a way worse than a delayed or canceled flight.
Car and truck travel, meanwhile, resulted in nearly 41,000 deaths in 2023; the comparison with scheduled air travel is so unflattering that it might look fake. More than once, I’ve said to other people, only somewhat in jest, “If you want to live forever, get on an airplane.”
A critical part of aviation’s culture of safety is documenting what went wrong. Not as in President Trump’s ignorant, bigoted, and hateful press-conference rantings, but as in a National Transportation Safety Board report that will lay out in precise and agonizing detail what factors brought those two aircraft to their deadly intersection, so that everybody in the aviation industry will know what they can do to make sure those things never happen again.
Via my habit of window-seat photography, it looks like I last had a flight use Runway 33 in November of 2023, departing Washington for LaGuardia. The picture above shows 33 as seen from a departure off Runway 4 in a United Airlines-marketed CRJ550–a conversion of the CRJ700 to add more first-class and Economy Plus seats. ↩︎#AA #AA5342 #AmericanAirlines #AmericanEagle #Blackhawk #cultureOfSafety #DCA #H60 #NationalAirport #PSA #safestWayToTravel
Aerobuzz / JumpSeat
zceline
wifi_freak
Jimmy Tsui
Nonilex
nullagent
Errol Cavit
Rob Pegoraro
Doug Grinbergs
Ian Kluft ✅✈️🎈🌋