Trump’s Investigator: “We Will Look At All the Humans” Pssst: One “Human” Was Doing Two Jobs
This is Lady Karma stepping in here. Jennifer Homendy was nominated to head the National Traffic Safety Board in 2018. Joe Biden kept her in that post. What that means is that Trump is now going to have a vastly more complicated time trying to pin fault for the Wednesday night fatal crash at Reagan National on diversity.
There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that this gal would be on the hot seat right now, labeled as incompetent and responsible for this tragedy, due to being a DEI hire — but since Trump hired her, damn, that dog won’t hunt.
And the plot thickens. Turns out that the traffic controller on duty at the time was doing the work of two employees. Could that be because Elon Musk forced out the head of the FAA because the guy had fined him? Plus Trump got rid of the advisory safety boards because he deems them unnecessary? That’s what’s going to come out in an investigation and since one of *Trump’s girls* is heading the investigation it should be an interesting story. Or are the females he chooses not DEI hires?
At an NTSB press conference following Trump’s remarks on the mid-air collision in Washington, D.C., Homendy was asked to respond to the president’s accusations.
“Sir, we’ve heard from President Trump today, talking about DEI hiring policies within the FAA and associating that with the cause of this accident,” one reporter noted.
“As part of any investigation, we look at the human, the machine, and the environment.
“So we will look at all the humans that were involved in this accident,” Homendy replied. “Again, we will look at the aircraft, we will look at the helicopter, we will look at the environment in which they were operating in.”
“That is part of, that is standard in any part of our investigation.”
A second reporter wondered if Trump “hurt” the investigation by pre-judging the cause of the crash. […]
“With all due respect, I think the press also likes to state what probable cause is before we get to the probable cause,” Homendy shot back. “So what I’m going to say is you need to give us time. You need to give NTSB — it’s not that we don’t have information. We do have information. We have data. We have substantial amounts of information. We need to verify information.”
“We need to take our time to make sure it is accurate,” she added. “It’s important for legislators who are seeking answers to try to figure out what they’re going to do about this. And so it will take time.”
Definitely look at all the humans. Look at this poor soul trying to cover two posts. It’s a wonder tragedy didn’t strike sooner.
One of the air traffic controllers at the Washington D.C. National Airport was reportedly doing the work of two employees before the deadly mid-air collision that killed dozens of people Wednesday night.
According to the New York Times, staffing at the airport’s control tower on Wednesday was “not normal for the time of day and the volume of traffic.” The paper cited an internal preliminary safety report from the Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.), which apparently mentioned that one unnamed air traffic controller who was communicating with helicopters was also “instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways.” Typically, those jobs are assigned to two controllers, rather than one.
CNN reporter Omar Jimenez corroborated that reporting on Thursday. He tweeted that an unnamed “air traffic control source” confided to the network’s transportation reporter Pete Muntean: “there was one air traffic controller working two different tower positions at the time of the collision Wednesday night.”
The Times reported that the reason there are usually two air traffic controllers handling communication between planes and helicopters is that pilots of those aircraft can sometimes use different radio frequencies. This means that sometimes helicopter and airline pilots may not be able to hear each other, which adds layers of complication if just one lone controller is handling that job.
It sounds like a complete madhouse. My commendations to the man or woman on the job who even attempted to keep it all together with those kinds of impossible variables in play. Maybe now we’ll keep the advisory boards that Trump is so anxious to quash and also not be so quick to hatchet Elon Musk’s enemies.
As Anthony Scaramucci used to like to say, “the fish rots from the head down.” And we have no head on this fish. We have only a bad combover and a skull with no brain in it. So when the NTSB is investigating, maybe they could take a look at this particular human.
