Resist the temptation to use plane crash for politics (01-30-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] So last night, American Eagle Flight 5342 with service from Wichita, Kansas to Washington's Reagan National Airport collided with a Black Hawk helicopter. Everyone on board the plane, all three of the service members on the chopper were all killed. The wreckage obviously ended up in the Potomac River.

[00:00:58] Rescue operations. We're unable to find anybody still alive. They're in a recovery mode now. And it's just a sad story, tragic story. Investigations are underway. I know a lot of questions are being asked.

[00:01:19] I will do what I do in all of these types of circumstances. I will wait for more information. I will allow investigations to occur. And I will not stand on the graves of dead people to score political points.

[00:01:44] You may do whatever you wish to do. I won't be doing those things because a lot of information changes within 24, 48 hours of any kind of mass casualty event. When you're trying to piece together what exactly happened, first reads, hot takes, all of that stuff, usually not very helpful.

[00:02:10] Just usually they're not very helpful. They don't actually, you speculating on, or not you, but people speculating on what they think might be the reason why something terrible happened provides no comfort to anybody except maybe yourself. Because it helps you to compartmentalize. Again, I keep saying you. I'm not attacking you. I'm just saying it helps people compartmentalize.

[00:02:36] It helps people focus their attention away from the sheer grief and the magnitude of the disaster, the lives lost, the pain, the suffering. But it is through pain and suffering that we are called to help our fellow man. And so that's why I also say in the wake of all of these types of tragedies is to look for the helpers.

[00:03:04] Because it's easy to focus on the negative. It's easy to focus on the tragedy. And then it's easy to get depressed. And to feel sad. And I'm not saying you shouldn't feel sad and be a little depressed. You know, get the blues. I'm not saying any of that. But look for the helpers. They will restore your faith in humanity. Because there are always people rushing to the scene to help. Always.

[00:03:35] They will restore your faith in humanity. NBC News, the local affiliate up there in D.C., they've got a running, you know, live update feed on their website, NBCWashington.com. There were 64 people on the passenger plane. I believe it was four crew and 60 passengers. They were all killed. Reagan National Airport opened at 11 a.m.

[00:04:04] An American Airlines flight and a military helicopter collided. Officials believe everybody on both aircraft died. Recovery is underway. There's a report from NBC that the ice-breaking Washington, D.C. fireboat was out of service at the time. There are boats that actually, and my brother-in-law actually did this for the Coast Guard.

[00:04:30] He would, he rode on a vessel that would ride up the Hudson River from New York City all the way up to Canada, which is anything north of the Bronx to me. But he would, and they would go all the way up and they would break the ice in the river.

[00:04:48] I don't know if that had any material impact on anything, but the boat could have helped break up some of the ice that was covering the Potomac, or parts of the Potomac River.

[00:05:03] It is very similar to the crash that occurred 38 years ago now or something, where the plane took off and it hit the bridge and then crashed into the Potomac, killing almost everybody on board. And I do have more on that flight. There is a clip here I want to play for you.

[00:05:26] This is David Soucy, former FAA safety inspector, and he appeared on CNN yesterday, last night, with Omar Jimenez. Based on what you saw there, what may have gone wrong? I mean, what is the communication sort of structure in a situation like that, when you have a plane coming into land and perhaps another helicopter flying in a either similar or nearby path?

[00:05:57] There are so many safety vulnerabilities. You know, I've done a lot of aircraft accidents, investigated them, and I've never seen one that had one singular cause. It's a culmination, it's a disastrous combination of these failures, the safety system failures. And that's what we have here are multiple failures, one of them which could very well be the communications. There are different frequencies between the military.

[00:06:20] They operate on communications with the military at one frequency, and then they operate at the airport communications commercially with a different frequency. So they're not directly connected to each other. They're not calling each other saying, hey, I have you in sight or anything like that, like you would in visual rules. At night, that's one of the problems that I see in it. The other thing is that you can over-rely on the TCAS system, the traffic control that allows you to know whether there's an aircraft coming at you or not.

[00:06:49] So that air traffic control system, the TCAS, will warn you if there's aircraft coming approaching at you. The faulty part of that is the fact that if that aircraft isn't approaching you, it only looks forward. So if the helicopter, if this airplane was coming to the north and turning left, or excuse me, if the airplane was doing that and the helicopter is coming the opposite way, if it's to the side of the airplane, which appears to me that that is what happened, the TCAS would not have given a warning to the pilot. So that's two of the vulnerabilities.

[00:07:19] The other vulnerability, when I was based in Washington, D.C., in the FAA headquarters for many years, and I would fly mostly at night doing surveillance. I'd sit in the cockpit in the jump seat and watch these flights go in and out, watch the pilots, how they act. That was part of my job as a safety inspector. So literally hundreds of flights in and out of DCA at night, going over that black piece of water at the bottom, and it literally is like turning off all the lights. You cannot see anything out there. There's a light here, a light there.

[00:07:49] They don't mean anything to you, so you really have to pay attention to exactly where you're going. And if that light from the helicopter wasn't present, which it wouldn't have been if he was turning away from it, they would have had no clue what was coming at them at all. So you combine all of those things together, the fact that this is one of the busiest airports. Not only is it the busiest, it's the most complex airport. There's military and commercial together. There's flight restrictions on where you can fly, what kind of approaches you have to make.

[00:08:18] And there's demands on how quickly those airplanes have to come in and out. You can't just say, wait, I'm going to go around again without having a lot to do to get to that place. So there's so many factors. I am surprised that there hasn't had something happen before. Okay, so a lot of different things. My takeaway was that these types of crashes are usually due to a disastrous combination of multiple failures that all converge at one point.

[00:08:50] Don't know why the pilots in the chopper were allowed to cross, you know, make their way across a landing strip. The pilot of the commercial plane seemed, you know, they were cleared for approach. They were on their way. I mean, this only happened like 300 feet off the ground, very low to the ground. They were about to land. And that seems to me to be like they had. I don't know who gets, you know, the right away there.

[00:09:19] FAA air traffic control is supposed to make sure they're not going to do this very thing. If the pilot was flying in the chopper without their lights on, according to the Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, they were doing a continuity of government training exercise, which is if the president, vice president, whatever, if the leadership, the civilian leadership is killed.

[00:09:46] Right. This is like the this is the chain of command, the line of command, like who does the who comes next in succession and what do you do? And so they're running this training op. And if they were doing this training op, you know, Hegseth says this. He said it should not have happened. Sean Duffy, secretary of Department of Transportation, said it should not have happened. Hegseth said there's no excuses. We'll get to the bottom of it.

[00:10:17] But then they say, you know, there are some things that they kind of know right now and that the helicopter, according to Donald Trump in that press briefing, the chopper was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Right. So. It seems like they have some good bit of information already. And he also said, you know, it usually takes years and years for these investigations to conclude. And he's right.

[00:10:44] Right. So I think the better they can get the or the more quickly they can get some sort of initial assessment out as to, like, what happened, an explanation. I think it is better. And I think it's expected, you know, especially for something like this. There's so much video of it. There's so much audio recordings of the the comms and all that stuff that you can you can answer a lot of these questions, hopefully within the next 24 hours.

[00:11:09] And so I'm I'm I'm willing to give them that space so we can get accurate information when they look at it. And it seems like the administration is going to be turning over this stuff to the public pretty quickly. They already have done some of this. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in Western North Carolina? Just a quick drive up the mountain. And Cabins of Asheville is your connection, whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon.

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[00:12:29] Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. I do have some messages I will get to. First, we'll talk to Ray here. Hello, Ray. Welcome to the show. Hello, Pete. How are you doing? Hey, I'm good. What's up? I had a little disagreement about your statement of dancing on the grays to score political points.

[00:12:53] It's because when I watched Trump start doing that, at first it struck me a little bit like, you know, he shouldn't do that. And then a few seconds later it came to me. Better time to do that than to strike while the iron is hot and people are listening and make them aware.

[00:13:20] I've been caused by some of the incompetence of people in policy-making positions. And I've tried to put myself in the place of people that have been killed on that flight. And I said to myself, I would be okay with this if it saves this from happening to other people in the future. That's kind of my point. So I find it interesting.

[00:13:47] You thought that I was accusing Donald Trump of dancing on the graves? Yes, I did. Yeah, that, no. I don't, I didn't, I don't think I said anybody specifically. No. In fact, I understand why Donald Trump did what he did because he, for the last probably 14 hours or so, he and his administration have been getting dragged by Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself,

[00:14:16] over policy changes, these very policy changes. And they've been sharing this narrative all around that his dangerous freeze of air traffic control hiring. There's a statement that was put out by Transportation and, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. So this was under the first term, I guess? Yes.

[00:14:43] And they've been sharing this all around, blaming him for the crash. That's what I was talking about. And so when I watched him today, I recognized what he's doing as a response to the politicization of the crash. That's what he's doing. He's fighting back against this narrative that Democrats and media are pushing and have been pushing before, like, before emergency responders had even, like, arrived at the crash scene.

[00:15:11] This stuff was already spreading all over social media. Okay. One other quick thing. Could you explain what you meant by that dancing on the grave remark? Sure. It's whenever, like, for example, in any kind of, like, school shooting or mass shooting of any kind, people rush to the microphones and to social media, and they use the event without knowing any information.

[00:15:38] They use the event to push their political agenda, essentially saying, had you not done what we demanded you do, then these people would still be alive. And so there's almost like a happiness that people have, that's hence the dancing part, that, or, you know, they can merely be standing if they're not necessarily happy, but they utilize it for a political end.

[00:16:03] The agenda comes first, the sympathy last, if ever. Also, what you're saying is, since Donald Trump didn't appear to be happy about this, then that he wasn't dancing on the grave. No, I think, no, I don't believe he was. His first statement that he put out last night, or early this morning, I should say, did not mention anything about DEI or anything like that. But his specific remarks about the DEI stuff and the merit-based hiring and all of that,

[00:16:33] like, that's obviously, like, all three of the people that spoke at the press conference about an hour ago, they all mentioned that same theme. And that's not a coincidence in my mind. To me, they're pushing back against this pro-DEI narrative. So the left is using the crash. They came out last night. They were saying this stuff last night. They came out immediately, and they were like,

[00:16:59] see, this is what Donald Trump did by rolling back hirings or whatever, freezing hirings and all this other stuff. And this is his pushback to that narrative. Because, like I said, the original statements didn't include anything about that theme. I got you. One other quick thing, if I may. So I gather from what you're saying that you kind of agree with what I just,

[00:17:25] my explanation or analysis of it was about making a political point while the iron was hot. Am I wrong or right on that? I think reasonable people can disagree about whether they thought that what he did was appropriate. But this is Donald Trump. I am immune any longer to the kinds of attacks that people would say, oh my gosh, I can't believe it was Donald Trump. Well, this is Donald Trump. He's been this guy forever. Everybody knew what they were voting for. This is what he does. He did it during the pandemic.

[00:17:54] He did it on the campaign trail. He's doing it now. This is what he does. So if you don't like it, well, that's who he is. And if you do like it, then I'm sure, you know, people are happy with his performance today. So I don't know if I agree necessarily or disagree. I just like I know what I'm getting with Donald Trump. And so, no, I don't expect him to behave anything any other way. All right. I hope you had a happy holiday season. But tell me if something like this happened at your house.

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[00:19:14] Trust the experts at Create A Video, conveniently located in Mint Hill right off I-485. And online at createavideo.com. A post from Bridget Phetasy. She's a social media writer and I think she was on The Blaze or something. She was a, well, doesn't matter.

[00:19:37] So she says, blaming anybody right now for this crash right now is ghoulish. That includes Trump, she says. Can anyone in this bleeping country learn how to unite a country in grief? Or is it just like this forever now? Again, that's not what Trump does. He never has.

[00:20:01] So if people are surprised by Trump going to the press conference and ripping into his political opponents who have been blaming him for the crash, which they have. And I've got the receipts here. Then you're like, what have you been watching for the last eight years? This is what he does. So. Yeah, we all we all knew that going in.

[00:20:31] That was already baked into the cake. Do I wish he would have gotten up there and done it differently? Sure. Sure. But that doesn't change the reality of what's on the ground. So I, you know, I I try to meet people where they are and that's where Trump is. And I mentioned that I saw these types of responses like immediately after the crash, like almost immediately.

[00:20:57] Like the the the wreckage was still in the water and what still is in the water. But they were out there trying to, you know, find survivors and stuff. And people were taking to social media, posting things like Aaron Rupar noted catfisher. He farms. He's he's an engagement farmer and he posts.

[00:21:21] He takes videos and he chops out the contextual relevant pieces and they puts up a clip to make everybody look the worst they could look, which, of course, is what's going to happen now with the Donald Trump appearance at the press conference. But this guy, he's always at the forefront of these efforts. And he posts an AP headline from last week.

[00:21:45] He says headlines from a week ago as an incident near Reagan National appears to be the deadliest aviation disaster in the U.S. since 9-11. And here's the AP headline. Trump guts key aviation safety committee fires heads of TSA Coast Guard.

[00:22:02] So, like, I don't know what kind of idiot you need to be to think that removing these individuals a week ago created that that crash. Right. That's this is what I mean when I say dancing on the graves. This is what I'm talking about. It is, yay, I get to pin this on my political opponent. Right.

[00:22:30] And that's what the left has been doing in the last 24 hours, somehow connecting whatever Trump has been doing in his first week or eight days, nine days, whatever it's been in office as somehow connected to the crash. It's absurd. The tragedy is not the fault of the Trump administration. It looks like at this stage an accident. And we used to be a people that could see something and say, wow, this looks like an accident.

[00:23:00] Let's wait and see what it turns up. Now, it may very well turn up to have other influences and factors and stuff, and then we can reassess at that point. But nobody knows right now. Nobody knows. According to the administration, they think the helicopter pilot was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's what it like. That's what they're saying. And that may be the case. That's what it appears to me to be at this stage. But I don't know.

[00:23:29] I don't know. And then there was the screenshot that they were sharing around from the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. I mentioned this earlier. They were sharing this around, I guess it's from a couple of years ago when Democrats controlled this committee. Trump's dangerous freeze of air traffic control hiring. So this is from, what, five, six, seven years ago? Did Biden not lift the freeze? Are we to believe that there wasn't anybody there at the air traffic control? No, we know there was.

[00:23:59] We have the recordings. There was somebody there. And I will leave it to people with far more expertise in aviation to determine whether or not all of those comms were appropriate. I've got one from a pilot who says, As a pilot, I have reviewed the available information and ATC air traffic control radio traffic communications between ATC and the Black Hawk helicopter.

[00:24:29] I believe this was tragic human error. The Black Hawk was flying VFR. So visual. So like you're not using your instruments or anything. That's called IFR, if I recall. And was crossing runway 33. So going like perpendicular or diagonal across that runway. But the commercial airliner was on short final approach to they were about to land. He says,

[00:24:55] The issue I see is that ATC air traffic did notify the Black Hawk to look for the plane and to come in behind it. But they never said to the commercial jet that was on short final approach, which would have told the Black Hawk pilot to look left where he immediately would have seen the commercial plane all lit up with a million candle watt landing lights on.

[00:25:26] Right. So is that what this came down to? Like we also have been told that they may have been wearing in the in the chopper. They may have been wearing night vision goggles. Did that impair their vision? It may have. I don't know. Were they flying all dark? Right. Are they doing like a you know, if they're doing like this training where they're supposed to have like no lights on so nobody can see them. Was that part of the training? And if so. That could that would be a factor as well.

[00:25:53] But these are just things that I have seen reported, heard reported, and I don't know them to be true at this point. Which is why I urge caution and patience, as I always do in these types of situations, unlike, say, Phil Williams, who posted that screenshot and then deleted it. Phil Williams is an NBC reporter in Philadelphia and then deleted his post. And he said he deleted it because it unfortunately was interpreted as blaming tonight's tragedy on policies in Washington.

[00:26:23] That was certainly not my intent, which is garbage. Of course it is. Trump's dangerous freeze of air traffic control hiring. That's exactly what you're saying. Right. As someone who has covered aviation safety for many, many years, I know that you cannot suddenly pull people out of an ATC system that is already stretched to a breaking point and still keep people safe. I do fear the consequences of political decisions made without careful deliberation about the impact on human lives. Right. But he shared that.

[00:26:49] Bakari Sellers, former South Carolina House of Representatives member. Now he's a CNN contributor. He shared it eight days ago and then he, too, deleted it. He said, because timing matters. Politics at this point doesn't. He says, I messed up. I own that. I'm very prayerful, but I'm also very frustrated, upset and disturbed with where we are as a country. I recognize I will do better. The only thing that matters is rescuing survivors and ensuring this never happens again.

[00:27:19] So note what he just said there. Rescuing survivors. He tweeted this stuff out while they were still trying to pull people from the wreckage when they thought they were still survivors. And I think this is what Trump is responding to. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know, I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News.

[00:27:47] It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place. So you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description, too. I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.

[00:28:13] The Blind Spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news slash Pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Gary sends a tweet. It's a Pete tweet.

[00:28:43] Gary says Trump is a response to the left going too far. He was back in 2016. Biden went further and pushed horrible policies. So he got more Trump and more support for Trump. I realize that the media and the left don't want to take responsibility for getting Trump, but people are tired of one side bulldozing the country with what the left has.

[00:29:10] Yeah, I think that's that's how I when I was watching the Trump press conference after having seen all of this stuff and prepared my show notes for what I would be focusing on. And then Trump comes on and does the press conference and I'm sitting there listening to it. And it's very clear what he's to me, what he's responding to. He's responding to the stuff that I just went over. Now, will it be framed like that? Of course not.

[00:29:38] And if you didn't know all of that other stuff, then you just see Trump come out, say what he says. And it's like, oh, this is not the right time to be saying these things. Or maybe you think it was the right time to say those things. Like I told you can have whatever opinion about it you want. I'm not telling you to agree with me, but I I can I can see the thing for for multiple or through multiple lenses. Right. Like, number one, I would have preferred that he just united everybody and he could have addressed it in a different way.

[00:30:08] But I also recognize that Trump is Trump and this is what he's going to do. And so he's hammering away at the DEI stuff, saying we're going to end all of this stuff. Because that's what they were accusing him of. They're accusing him of causing the crash because of hiring freezes and whatever. So they're trying to protect the DEI stuff. And so they come out and say, no, we're doing this. It should be merit based. And you've got to have, you know, qualified, intelligent people, psychologically strong people doing this work. So I understood what he was doing.

[00:30:41] But I'm sure, you know, media will wash it through whatever whatever they're going to wash it through. Oh, I can guess. All right. Let me go to the phones. I got a lot of people waiting. Let's go to Dave. Hello, Dave. Welcome to the show. Hey, Pete. Thanks a lot. I want you to know I've been pulled over on the side of the road up here in the West North Carolina mountains for about 10 minutes just so I could continue to listen to your show but also weigh in. You need to share your notes with your buddy Vince Coakley.

[00:31:09] He really screwed the pooch, in my opinion, with his comments this morning. I didn't hear him. He has an earlier time slot. He may not have had a chance to do the homework that you did. Thank you for doing your homework. By the way, can I change voices with Ray that made that a very important call earlier where he was trying to clarify what you were talking about?

[00:31:33] Because, quite frankly, Pete, your communication was able to be taken the way he was taking it before you clarified. Well, I think people are really deeply appreciate that. Yeah, Dave, I think people take it because they are hypersensitive to any criticism of Donald Trump. I really do. No, I really do. I think there is. I resemble that remark. No, I get it. Look, I understand that.

[00:31:58] I just think it's interesting because it's happened so many times over the last eight years that Trump supporters think any kind of critique on something when not even... I'm talking about Trump, but they think I'm talking about Donald Trump. It's like everything gets washed through this prism. And this is why I keep saying people need to... You know, when Trump breaks people's brains, it goes both ways. Yeah, I mean, people cannot see anything else.

[00:32:24] It's the same affliction, but from a different angle. The left is... Right. They see everything through Trump, too. And it's like... But it doesn't have to be that way. You're the one making it that way. That's all. Yeah, here's the other thing I want to mention. You know, you hit it nail on the head, man. Our country is... It's like a pendulum, okay? The pendulum swings a little bit, and it swings a little bit the other way. Our pendulum is swinging more and more severely. Yeah, I agree. To the left, to the right.

[00:32:53] And that is not a healthy thing for our nation. And somebody has got to, at some point, say, look, we have got to get this thing. And I believe, quite frankly, that the merit-based focus is the path forward. And we need to be sensitive. We need to absolutely combat racism. Absolutely combat any unfairness that we interact with.

[00:33:21] But merit-based is the best way to do that. I agree. And so, yeah, hey, man, I'm sorry. Tying up all your time. I know you got... No, no, I appreciate the call. Yeah, be safe up there in the mountains, man. I appreciate the call. And I did not hear anything that Vince said I can only speak for what I do on my show and things that I have said. But, yeah, so I can't address that. I do agree with the pendulum swinging. And I do wish... I do.

[00:33:48] And, again, you can take this as a criticism of Donald Trump. But I do wish that Trump was more tactful in these types of scenarios. But he's not. He can be... I've seen him, like... I've seen him be a sympathetic person and that kind of thing. But he wasn't in this case. He, you know, he did express sympathy and all that. But then he goes, you know, onto the DEI stuff and starts hammering away at all of that stuff,

[00:34:17] cussing on, you know, on the radio, on the live radio broadcast. Got to hear Donald Trump say BS live on the air. But that's what people voted for. I would have preferred it go differently. But, you know, here we are. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too. And tell them you heard it here.

[00:34:44] You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening. And don't break anything while I'm gone.