The Trump administration immediately and inappropriately played the DEI card, because that works for their audience. (Identity politics is played by all political parties) That same government is now acknowledging negligence.
U.S. government admits negligence in January helicopter-plane collision near Washington
The U.S. government admitted Wednesday that the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army played a role in causing the collision last January between an airliner and a Black Hawk helicopter near the nation’s capital, killing 67 people in the deadliest crash on American soil in more than two decades.
The official response to the first lawsuit filed by a family of one of the victims said that the government is liable in the crash partly because the air traffic controller violated procedures that night. The filing also said the failure of the Army helicopter pilots “to maintain vigilance so as to see and avoid” the airline jet makes the government liable.
The government’s lawyers said in the filing that “the United States admits that it owed a duty of care to plaintiffs, which it breached, thereby proximately causing the tragic accident.”
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will release its report on the cause of the crash early next year, but investigators have already highlighted a number of factors that contributed, including the helicopter flying 24 metres higher than the 61-metre limit on a route that allowed only scant separation between planes landing on Reagan’s secondary runway and helicopters passing below.
The NTSB also said that the FAA failed to recognize the dangers around the busy airport even after 85 near misses in the three years before the crash.
The government admitted in its filing that the United States “was on notice of certain near-miss events between its Army-operated Black Hawk helicopters and aircraft traffic transiting in and around helicopter Routes 1 and 4” around Washington.