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The preliminary speculations I’ve heard so far blame the helicopter pilot, but I have no idea how true they are.
Early twitter speculated it was an incompetent trans "woman" pilot that may have intentionally crashed the chopper. I've seen other sources (I like https://x.com/sentdefender) that says this is nonsense but now two of the pilots names have been released and the third is being withheld "on request of the family." Which does not soothe the twitter beast.
Wouldn't "incompetent" and "intentional" be opposing each other here?
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Moderator of /r/army pretty much confirms it
But isn't it going to be a matter of public record?
/images/17383745212879014.webp
The surreal part of this sort of virtue signalling is that while publicly bragging that they're keeping the secret, they have to let on that it's an explosive truth that the MAGA chuds would salivate over. It's exactly how BART had to announce they were no longer releasing security footage because it "aided racists," rather than saying nothing. The built-in admission of guilt is necessary for the virtue signal to work; you can't have people mistaking that you're doing it out of principle rather than tribal allegiance.
"You call it virtue-signalling, I just call it being a good person" is a common gotcha, but it's easy to counter when behavior is optimized for public status-seeking rather than effectiveness. "Verily I say unto you, They have their reward"
https://news.sky.com/story/captain-rebecca-lobach-third-helicopter-pilot-who-died-in-washington-crash-was-former-white-house-aide-13301558
She's clearly not trans.
I wouldn't make much of the fact that she was a woman either, at least not unless we get some actual hard evidence that DEI was relevant. The white male pilot supervising her, who we hear on the voice recordings, does not seem like he saw the plane either (he was probably looking at the wrong plane when ATC asked him if he had the CRJ in sight). And surely he's equally culpable for the fact that they were flying 100 feet too high.
Plus just the fact they "merely" needed to be a little bit lower while crossing the final approach of a civilian plane says a lot about the situation quite apart from the individual helo pilots.
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/01/female-army-black-hawk-helicopter-named-washington-aircrash/
I haven't been following it but other than the comments here that's the only story I've seen about this, and The Telegraph isn't the kind of paper to shy away from reporting whether someone is trans.
From the pictures I think she’d be very much in the higher percentile of passing trans women if she was.
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That doesn't suggest anything more than a fear that the family could be harassed if the identity is known.
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They are likely correct. ATC advises PAT25 about the plane in its path, PAT25 acknowledges that he has the plane in sight and accepts visual separation.
It is likely (of course in time we'll know more) that PAT25 saw a different plane when it told ATC it had the traffic in sight.
Did ATC give a heading to signify which plane was in concern? Are they supposed to say something like "there is a plane in your path at your 1?"
There's a concept in reviewing events like this that there are typically multiple points of failure, and many things to change. There shouldn't be one single point of failure that could cause this, there are multiple things that went wrong here. (Even if the thing that went wrong here is, "not designing something with multiple points of failure".)
You can listen to the audio yourself :-)
No, they didn't give a heading, they just said "in your path, go under the CRJ"
And yes, in some sense, it's always swiss cheese, but in another valid sense there is a difference between failure of a primary safety mechanism and failure of a failsafe/mitigation.
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All the news articles I've read state that air traffic control received no response from the helicopter when queried in the leadup to the crash, so that probably fuels the speculation.
This is wrong. Helicopter was communicating with tower. Tower was transmitting on VHF, and helicopter on UHF. There is no recording of helicopter yet because we only VHF ones now. Within a couple of days/weeks we’ll have recording including heli pilot responses.
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