Not long ago, Americans were living through a historic era of airline safety. Over nearly a 16-year period, starting Feb. 12, 2009, after a commuter jet crashed on an icy night near Buffalo, the major U.S. airlines handled a total of some 10 billion passenger journeys. And of those 10 billion souls, not a single one was lost to a crash. This achievement — the longest disaster-free period ever for U.S. air travel — was on par with the government-led effort to create a polio vaccine in the 1950s or the Apollo project that put the first human beings on the moon. It came to an end on Jan. 29, 2025, when an Army helicopter and an American Eagle commuter jet collided over the Potomac River.
The Potomac crash happened during airline rush hour at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport. The two-person cockpit crew on the jet was following controllers’ instructions for a change in its assigned landing runway. The three people in the Army helicopter had allowed it to drift higher than its assigned altitude and did not see the inbound jet until an instant before they flew straight into it. The two aircraft plunged into the icy river; all 67 people aboard both were killed.
When safety measures fail and a plane goes down, or even when there’s a frightening close call, the National Transportation Safety Board leads the effort to find out how the “accident chain” was started, and why no existing safety measures stopped it. Its investigators interview everyone with any connection to the flight, from mechanics to gate agents. They recover the black box, with precise flight data from the aircraft, and listen to the cockpit conversations. They prepare flight-simulator recreations of what pilots would have seen out their windows and on their instrument panels. They take their time, often a year or more, in trying to provide the best-available answer to the central question: Why did people die?
Air travel has become so safe in large part because of a profound commitment from the people in charge to learn from tragedies — what aviation experts call “lessons written in blood.” In 1956, the Eisenhower administration responded to an airline collision over the Grand Canyon by beginning the decades-long process that would eventually make U.S. airline travel one of the safest forms of transportation the world has ever known. In 2009, the Obama administration responded to the Buffalo crash by overseeing a new set of reforms. With the Potomac crash of 2025, another reckoning was at hand. It would be up to the Trump administration to learn from this lesson written in blood.
Source: www.nytimes.com
