🌎 Plane Crashes

[PurlJam]

CRJ 700 collided with a Blackhawk midair on its approach to Reagan National. No news on if there are any survivors yet.

 

[alabama mike]

Flipping between the crash, Bama basketball and Chicago PD.

 

[TerryP]

CRJ 700

From Wichita to Arlington in a puddle jumper. That's a rough flight.

 

[PurlJam]

From Wichita to Arlington in a puddle jumper. That's a rough flight.

Yes it is. Seeing the video, its a miracle anyone survived.

 

[PurlJam]

Flipping between the crash, Bama basketball and Chicago PD.

I flipped over to catch the weather during HT.

 

[It Takes Eleven]

Man, I really hate this. I've flown in and out of there for 38 years. When the winds call for a southern approach, that's the easy way in coming up the river. Coming in from the north is when you have to make the last second adjustment to stay out of protected airspace.

I went in and out of National about ten days ago and the Potomac was really iced in. I can't imagine search and rescue in that jumble, a difficult job by special people.

They have flights packed into that airport, pushing as many flights as they can. The airport authority is constantly pushing back on requests for more flights into it from Congress. Where I fly, it's probably the best example of convenience when you compare the in-town legacy strip with the modern expanded location. Dulles is pretty far out and a time suck. Love/DFW, Midway/O'Hare, LGA/JFK, etc.

From Wichita to Arlington in a puddle jumper. That's a rough flight.

The only route I have to take a CRJ 700 with Delta is into Charleston, WV (that's an interesting hilltop airport). It's not a bad plane, a definite upgrade over the turboprops that used to cover these routes. That old Embraer Brasilia they had, that was a problem, they used the props to slow it down, it would feel like it was hitting a wall. It had a prop overspin issue that would pluck them out of the air, same equipment that got Senator Tower and an astronaut on that Sea Island flight.

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/plane-crash-dca-potomac-washington-dc-01-29-25/index.html

This is probably going to hinge on the helicopter pilot's instruction to avoid the commercial traffic. They have the commercial flights coming in on a rail. Supposedly they have the helicopter pilot saying he was seeking to avoid the incoming flight, then he was told twice quickly by ATC to avoid the approaching jet.

It's all really sad.

 

[TerryP]

Flipping between the crash, Bama basketball and Chicago PD.

I flipped over to catch the weather during HT.

Over the last several weeks there's been this 'advertising bit' from X about how the site has replaced the legacy/main stream media when it comes to reporting the news. Last night was an example.

I was watching X following different basketball scores when I first saw a post from a guy at the airport a minute after he heard the "boom." It was a good five minutes later before I found it on a national TV outlet. A military aircraft involved hit X about 10 minutes before it hit the national airwaves.

 

[TerryP]

The only route I have to take a CRJ 700 with Delta is into Charleston, WV (that's an interesting hilltop airport). It's not a bad plane, a definite upgrade over the turboprops that used to cover these routes.

Charleston to Houston on the CRJ. I only ordered one drink because I got tired of wiping off the tray table.
Charleston to Columbia on the 'prop. Might have been smoother to drive a truck.

 

[TideatMileHigh]

This is probably the worst American aviation incident since probably 2001 when that American Airlines A300 crashed in that neighborhood in New York or New Jersey. Real crazy.

 

[It Takes Eleven]

When I first started flying in and out of DCA in the eighties, you could see the newly rebuilt rail section of the 14th Street Bridge. It was taken out by the Air Florida flight that had the deicing malfunction/negligence. I always thought about that flight, particularly when I was sitting in a plane subject to a deicing routine. Most folks know the name Lenny Skutnik, the government employee who leaped into the icy Potomac to complete the rescue of one of the five survivors. He was at Reagan's State of the Union address a few weeks after the crash, beginning a long tradition of recognizing unsung heroes, and they're called "Skutniks" for that reason. The Park Service helicopter crew ferried five to safety (counting the one Skutnik got the rest of the way), because one surviving passenger was handing off life jackets and handed the rescue line to at least two of the five survivors. The "Man in the Water" as he became known, was tangled in the remains of his seat and was pinned in the wreckage. When the helicopter returned for him on its sixth run, the wreckage had rolled, taking him to his death.

It took about a year for the investigation to determine that the Man in the Water was Arland Williams, Jr., a bank examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and a Citadel graduate. The 14th Street Bridge is named after Williams today, but a Time Magazine essay was written in his honor before he was identified:

So the man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do.

— Rosenblatt, R., "The Man in the Water", Time, January 25, 1982

It seems an appropriate Thought of the Day today.

 

[TerryP]

— Rosenblatt, R., "The Man in the Water", Time, January 25, 1982

As disasters go, this one was terrible, but not unique, certainly not among the worst on the roster of U.S. air crashes. There was the unusual element of the bridge, of course, and the fact that the plane clipped it at a moment of high traffic, one routine thus intersecting another and disrupting both. Then, too, there was the location of the event. Washington, the city of form and regulations, turned chaotic, deregulated, by a blast of real winter and a single slap of metal on metal. The jets from Washington National Airport that normally swoop around the presidential monuments like famished gulls are, for the moment, emblemized by the one that fell; so there is that detail. And there was the aesthetic clash as well—blue-and-green Air Florida, the name a flying garden, sunk down among gray chunks in a black river. All that was worth noticing, to be sure. Still, there was nothing very special in any of it, except death, which, while always special, does not necessarily bring millions to tears or to attention. Why, then, the shock here?

Perhaps because the nation saw in this disaster something more than a mechanical failure. Perhaps because people saw in it no failure at all, but rather something successful about their makeup. Here, after all, were two forms of nature in collision: the elements and human character. Last Wednesday, the elements, indifferent as ever, brought down Flight 90. And on that same afternoon, human nature—groping and flailing in mysteries of its own—rose to the occasion.

Of the four acknowledged heroes of the event, three are able to account for their behavior. Donald Usher and Eugene Windsor, a park police helicopter team, risked their lives every time they dipped the skids into the water to pick up survivors. On television, side by side in bright blue jumpsuits, they described their courage as all in the line of duty. Lenny Skutnik, a 28year-old employee of the Congressional Budget Office, said: “It’s something I never thought I would do”— referring to his jumping into the water to drag an injured woman to shore. Skutnik added that “somebody had to go in the water,” delivering every hero’s line nobody is no less admirable for its repetitions. In fact, nobody had to of into the water. That somebody actually did so is part of the reason this particular tragedy sticks in the mind.

But the person most responsible for the emotional impact of the disaster is the one known at first simply as “the man in the water.”(Balding, probably in his 50s, an extravagant mustache.) He was seen clinging with five other survivors to the tail section of the airplane. This man was described by Usher and Windsor as appearing alert and in control. Every time they lowered a lifeline and flotation ring to him, he passed it on to another of the passengers. In a mass casualty, you’ll find people like him,” said Windsor. “But I’ve never seen one with that commitment.” When the helicopter came back for him, the man had gone under. His selflessness was one reason the story held national attention; his anonymity another. The fact that he went unidentified invested him with a universal character. For a while he was Everyman, and with a universal character. For a while he was Everyman, and thus proof (as if one needed it) that no man is ordinary.

Still, he could never have imagined such a capacity in himself. Only minutes before his character was tested, he was sitting in the ordinary plane among the ordinary passengers, dutifully listening to the stewardess telling him to fasten his seat belt and saying something about the “no smoking sign.” So our man relaxed with the others, some of whom would owe their lives to him. Perhaps he started to read, or to doze, or to regret some harsh remark made in the office that morning. Then suddenly he knew that the trip would not be ordinary. Like every other person on that flight, he was desperate to live, which makes his final act so stunning.

For at some moment in the water he must have realized that he would not live if he continued to hand over the rope and ring to others. He had to know it, no matter how gradual the effect of the cold. In his judgment he had no choice. When the helicopter took off with what was to be the last survivor, he watched everything in the world move away from him, and he deliberately let it happen.

Yet there was something else about the man that kept our thoughts on him, and which keeps our thoughts on him still. He was there, in the essential, classic circumstance. Man in nature. The man in the water. For its part, nature cared nothing about the five passengers. Our man, on the other hand, cared totally. So the timeless battle commenced in the Potomac. For as long as that man could last, they went at each other, nature and man; the one making no distinctions of good and evil, acting on no principles, offering no lifelines; the other acting wholly on distinctions, principles and, one supposes, on faith.

Since it was he who lost the fight, we ought to come again to the conclusion that people are powerless in the world. In reality, we believe the reverse, and it takes the act of the man in the water to remind us of our true feelings in this matter. It is not to say that everyone would have acted as he did, or as Usher, Windsor and Skutnik. Yet whatever moved these men to challenge death on behalf of their fellows is not peculiar to them. Everyone feels the possibility in himself. That is the abiding wonder of the story. That is why we would not let go of it. If the man in the water gave a lifeline to the people gasping for survival, he was likewise giving a lifeline to those who observed him.

The odd thing is that we do not even really believe that the man in the water lost his fight. “Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature,” said Emerson. Exactly. So the man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do. —By Roger Rosenblatt

 

[RTB X Bot]

 

[It Takes Eleven]

There is a similarity.

Ralph Lauren Makes Fashion History With Top Civilian Honor

 

[TerryP]

I just caught an update that said they've recovered all the bodies but there is still one left unidentified. Am I the only one wondering how that's possible? If the manifest matches the body count?

 

[It Takes Eleven]

I just caught an update that said they've recovered all the bodies but there is still one left unidentified. Am I the only one wondering how that's possible? If the manifest matches the body count?

I get the process of elimination approach, but that's not how they ID bodies. They may not have a next of kin available for DNA testing.

 

[TerryP]

They may not have a next of kin available for DNA testing.

I thought about that after I posted. And then I thought about the "Real ID," LKA, and it seems like it would be pretty easy to get a comparison.

 

[TerryP]

 

[24and7]

Trump in office less than a month and planes start crashing…People will die if the deep state don’t get its way…

 

[TerryP]

Trump in office less than a month and planes start crashing…People will die if the deep state don’t get its way…

Over 1150 last year which was around 30 less than 2023. 74, to date, this year.

There's nothing starting here other than casting blame and that's not new.