Summary
Army Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, a highly accomplished pilot and top 20% ROTC cadet, was among 67 killed when her Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines jet near Washington, D.C.
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth blamed “DEI” for the crash despite no official cause being determined.
Lobach had 450+ flight hours and numerous military honors.
It just so happens I’ve been reading the book The Invisible Gorilla, and shortly before this accident, I read the part about flight simulators and how they would insert planes turning onto a runway that the simulated plane is trying to land on. Some of the people in the simulator never even saw it.
This is a rather common event IRL - called a “runway incursion”. The book says in 2007, the FAA recorded 370 at American airports. Most of these don’t end up in collisions.
But I couldn’t help but wonder if something like this was in play here…humans are not as attentive as we would like to think we are - in other words, “looking is not really seeing”. I wonder what will come of a longer, less politically-charged investigation into all factors here. I doubt it’s going to be “DEI”, but I also don’t know if donvict and fElon’s actions played a role either - although they probably are not meant to help the situation.
(And I recommend the book, even though I’ve not finished it. It’s quite good)
Are women considered “diversity” in the US now? At this point only underrated-overweight-white-trash will have the right to work. Good luck lol
Trump clearly wants to go back to the 1900s where women weren’t allowed to served, especially colored people
Indeed they are, there’s a place for the woman and it’s not considered the workforce by these backwards psychotics.
Yes and they always have. It just marks the success of the programs that women working in top roles has become so normalized that people don’t even realize it was different.
I mean, white women were the single demographic group to benefit most from affirmative action, despite racists preferring to paint it as a program that only benefited African Americans in their reverse racism arguments, so yeah, they count in my book. Especially when you consider that a large portion of far-right white men want them to occupy the trad wife role and not been seen outside the home and church again.
In America, no.
In Trumpistan, yes.
Has he even heard of the concept of dignity? How can someone be so loathsome and lack such awareness of it.
He says the Military has gotten weak and mocks them. Lloyd Austin whom Trump replaced with a FOX entertainment anchor served in the military from 1975-2016 as a 4 star general holding several high ranking positions working his way up to Secretary of Defense. So that would point to me that he believes the military has been weak for 50 years. Then again when he was called to service he said his little footsies hurt and dodged the draft. So what he really knows of the interworking and what our soilders go through for training is nothing.
Or, he simply doesn’t want any competent military members to stand in his way while he’s breaking laws.
Lloyd Austin would not have deployed troops on US soil. That’s a major Trump goal.
I might not know much about the military other than having lots of ex-military family, but I know enough about flying and in particular, helicopters to know you don’t get to fly that sort of kit without a LOT of hard work and skill. ‘Rotary wing’ pilots are absolutely batshit crazy. This sinister DEI dogwhistle is abhorrent.
You don’t fly a helicopter, you constantly avoid crashing one.
Maybe this is what he was trying to draw with his sharpie.
He’s literally blaming it on a woman driver, what a geriatric sexist prick
They didn’t make that DEI accusation because they expected it to be true, so the fact that it’s so patemtly false doesn’t matter.
They made the accusation just because they’re hateful, bigoted pieces of shit trying to appeal to other hateful, bigoted pieces of shit.
Truth means nothing. Hate and greed are the only things that matter to them.
I think the made that statment regardless of what the thought.
Firehose* of disinformation, which is par for the course.
The complicit media companies rush to cover every absurdity he spouts, thereby passively covers up the fact that his own rushed policies are likely the ultimate culprit of this crash!
His federal worker hiring freeze, and forcing the head of the FAA to resign/step down apparently led to there only being 1 flight controller in the tower; where there needed to be a minimum of 2.
So Trump falls back on his usual strategy of deny early, deny often, deny 100 ways.
…and y’all less than one month into his 48(+?) month term.
Nah. They made it to force a fake alternative reality for their supporters. Now they can start to hate DEI workers in their normal life!!! Yay!!!
Nah. They made it to force a fake alternative reality for their supporters. Now they can start to hate
DEIany non-white-male worker in their normal life!!! Yay!!!FTFY
Now they can start to hate
DEIany queer, disabled, or non-white-male worker in their normal life!!! Yay!!!FTFY
Don’t forget “dwarves” and amputees, cause he initially tried to blame them too. I’m pretty sure that even if they’re white and male, he doesn’t believe they are worthy of existence either
Fair edit lol
Exactly! And disputing it in this way just adds credence to the argument. Failing to rejection the premicr wholesale gives tacit approval that sometimes it might be the case, and sets us up to keep having to respond like this, rather than saying any argument centered on DEI is bullshit.
Yeah, if she weren’t allowed to be in the military and instead was at home making babies (like a real woman), there would’ve been an objectively worse male pilot instead and wouldn’t have been allowed to fly. Thus preventing the tragedy. Won’t someone think of the children?
/s
I know an incel “anti-DEI in gaming” type, he literally suggests women should be removed from the workforce.
It’s sleight of hand. Distract people with some baseless accusation that’ll go nowhere, while hiding the true disaster of bad policy making. They’ve been doing this for years.
Then we’re free to say white DEI (aka plain old racism) hires up till the 60s allowed unqualified people to mess up systems in the US.
This must be the first president in the history of this country to display this much callousness towards innocent victims of a terrible accident and get away with it.
That is what he was voted in to do. Be a bully to everyone the worst of us dislike.
We did not. Some did. Those that didn’t need to stand up and be heard.
Your chance was at the polls. They knew he was a snake when they picked him up. Too late now.
Our Constitution was designed around the notion that we should be careful of a tyranny of the majority, one of democracy’s biggest flaws.
Trump is showing us the Constitution is just a piece of paper.
Also the first (and second) republican president to shit on the military.
And veterans
And disabled people
And women
…I still can’t fathom by which feat of mass idiocy a man who showed that much disrespect to that many sections of the population won the election…
beCAusE hE tEllS iT lIkE it iS
Basically his voter base hates everyone like he does.
The military is important to note because GOP is the “pro military” party.
That’s why they hate veterans. They are only pro military. Veterans don’t contribute to the war machine anymore. They have no purpose unless they use their veteran status to recruit fresh meat for the war machine
Trump just said the quiet part out loud. They never had respect for veterans. Republicans have always been screwing over veterans
Yeah but MAGA isn’t the GOP. The old GOP, for all its faults, and however much I disagreed with it, was a respectable party with true values. MAGA is a crass personality cult that venerates ignorance, mediocrity, hatred and violence. Very much like… well, the NSDAP.
MAGA sure seem like a direct continuation and very minor evolution of the character of GOP I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.
Yeah, around what like 2008 (?) there was a faction within the party known as The Tea Party, which was already starting in this direction. That’s where stuff like the “long form birth certificate” bullshit started, and mass shooting crisis actors, and various conspiracies and lies in the media. A lot of it was already there, but this was bringing it out more into the open.
To me, it seems like it was steady refinement from at least Nixon all the way to today. Jair always being as shitty as they can get away with.
And the first president to advocate a complete gun ban.
That didn’t go away either. Fascist aren’t too keen on personal weapon ownership.
The next four years of American politics will be bankrolls of precedence for callousness and getting away with it. Please welcome Neo-America to the stage.
Stop talking as though this will go away in 4 years with an election. This is the US for the foreseeable future. No dictator has ever been removed from power through an election. You can’t vote him away. The only thing that will change this is resistance, protest, and revolution.
I never said it was going to fade away? I’m well aware of the extreme state of US politics, as well as the realization that peaceful revolution is now impossible after this last US presidential election.
If this was the only thing to talk about, for a few weeks (like in a normal presidency), it would be a 10% drop in approval rating at least.
But we’ve got the DOD, HHS, CDC, OPM, Treasury, and DOJ all being dismantled, looted, or turning into autocratic institutions.
The magic of Trump’s flooding the zone is that there is a finite amount of attention we have and that a week or two is all it takes to lose urgency on any issue. Not only is it impossible for us to respond to this because of all the other things, this distraction helps make it similarly impossible to respond to the rest.
I held a slim hope this fascist creep would take long enough that opposition could be organized. Nope, Project 2025 absolutely thought this through.
He gets away with everything.
Everything.I mean Reagan gave medals to the guys who shot down an Iranian passenger jet and eulogized the nun-raping Contras. But yeah, it’s unusual for the president to display such callousness, they usually have the common sense to pretend to care, after making decisions that end the lives of hundreds of thousands to millions of children.
Reminder: The wording of the trans military ban made no reference to medical issues caused by transition, and outright claimed we were “Without honor, discipline, or an obligation to truth.”
The point is to claim the accomplishments of the “other” are unearned
RIP Captain Lobach and all those who perished. Mango Mussolini and his side kick Hegseth are shitstains that belong in a broken Russian toilet.
I hope nobody expects him to learn anything. This will actually just reinforce his anti-DEI beliefs. He’ll blame the crash on the fact that the pilot was a woman, use that as proof that “DEI is making our military weaker”, and then start issuing executive orders banning women from piloting or even doing anything noteworthy in the military at all. Because doubling down on the stupid is what Trump does. It’s all he does. God help us if that woman was even 1% non-white.
53% of white women voters approve the rapist.
Wasn’t one of the Jan 6th rioters (who got shot) a white woman in the military?
How many spaces do you have between sentences? Asking for a friend.
Am I the only one that sees 3?
Yes?Weird, Jerboa looks like this
Hmmm. Voyager here. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Stop writing articles debunking the stupid, obviously untrue shit that Trump says. Anyone who seriously believes DEI was responsible for this crash is functionally retarded. They are out of reach. Giving this bullshit attention is why we have to deal with so much of it now and clearly we haven’t learned that lesson. All we’re doing is exposing more dumb people to dumb ideas.
Seems it was her fault though. She said she had the CRJ in sight, but was obviously looking at a different aircraft.
Here’s the Pilot Debrief video on it.
Here’s the audio from atc
The point is anybody could have missed seeing that plane. It’s not even certain they had an angle that allowed them to see it. And what about the plane pilots? Her helicopter was 100 feet high but there was supposed to be 200 feet of separation between the ceiling and floor of the respective paths. Ergo, the plane was 100 feet low.
It was a stupidly difficult situation for both crews and that’s why they’ve indefinitely closed the helicopter path.
I’m not confident in the altitudes yet. Maybe you have better data, but everything I’ve seen indicating those values is based on GPS, which is not always very accurate. I suspect we’ll know more soon but I don’t know that we’ll ever have the full story about if PAT25 had the wrong CRJ visual or what.
Yeah, my main point is that blaming just one person for this entire tragedy requires ignoring a lot of other factors.
The helicopter confirmed visual. Plane pilots were on the approach with clearance to land. Controller gave the helicopter the CRJ’s height and vector. They knew we’re to look to see it.
And it’s still not that easy.
Perhaps it was, but the argument isn’t that DEI candidates are infallible it’s that she was already an established high performer. Seems like it’s ok to move beyond this ridiculous DEI argument and try to figure out why one our best was able to get into this predicament and what we can learn from it for the future. Pretty sure that’s where we would be already if it was either a white male pilot or we didn’t have a country full of idiotic bigots.
Agree completely. Diversity has nothing to do with this other than our dumbass president whinging.
This just goes to show that they shouldn’t be flying helicopters next to airports. Like, duh?
