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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Trump isn’t to blame, Biden isn’t to blame.  Neither is ATC.  They followed protocol, even if short staffed, they still did exactly what they should have done.  I don’t see how the finger can be pointed anywhere other than directly at the helicopter at this point. [/quote]

It can absolutely be pointed at the powers that be that allowed the ATC towers to be half staffed; those that have pressed for DCA to be so overloaded with flights; and the military geniuses that decided that the busiest hour at DCA is the time to do night training exercises that cross the flight path (rather than waiting until midnight when there are no flights). 
[/quote]

But is the “training exercises” thing just a canard? This helicopter had dropped off a VIP someplace (likely Langley) and had to get back to its base. So they call the return flight a training exercise, even though it’s completely unnecessary - essentially some VIP’s desire to avoid traffic and sit in a black SUV for a few minutes longer led to the deaths of 70 people. [/quote]

I suspect "training" is a pretty wide catch-all bucket for any time they are flying without a specific mission, like the return part of dropping off someone could count towards your flight hours. A joyride with a few friends could be "training." I am skeptical this was some meticulously planned out exercise for the benefit of the pilot in a formal sense. It doesn't make sense that as part of formal training a pilot in an instructor role would allow the trainee to fly so wildly out of bounds in terms of height, but if training is basically a coding thing for time tracking and that was not an uncommon practice (and the way I see this helps wilding all over the place makes me think it wasn't...) that makes much more sense.[/quote]

If it was a specifically planned training mission in the way Hegseth describes, it actually raises more questions about military operations than it answers. This was a bad time to be doing a training mission through that corridor -- rush out at National, in the dark. Thank you but as someone who flies in and out of National regularly, I don't want to be a part of a nighttime training mission for one of their pilots. Leave me and my plane out of it. You can do that training flight at 11pm or 1am when very few flights are landing or taking off.

Whereas if they just tacked a training mission on after dropping of some lazy, entitled VIP who didn't want to sit in traffic for 15 minutes at Langley, then I have more sympathy for the military because that's a problem of leadership and abuse of power. Not a rank and file decision that put civilians at risk.

Hegseth would rather pin this on the people who design training exercises than on the bigwig who used a military helicopter to avoid traffic out to McLean. Unsurprising.[/quote]
How has this passenger not been named yet?[/quote]

They likely never will be. Easy to classify that info, especially for a drop off at Langley which is a classified facility. And they can deem it immaterial to the investigation because then passenger was not on the helicopter when the accident occurred. They'll say "it is not relevant who might have been on this helicopter earlier in the day." They will ignore the argument that it is relevant to finding out why that helicopter was in that airspace at that time.[/quote]
Who can be pursued to put pressure on the govt to release this? Senate? I want "vips" to think twice before asking for these unnecessary traffic skipping hops[/quote]

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