On the evening of Wednesday, January 29, an American Eagle flight operating under the callsign “Blue Streak 5342″ collided with a Sikorsky UH-60L “Black Hawk” helicopter owned by the U.S. Army in mid-air over the Potomac River, as the passenger flight was attempting to land at the nearby Reagan National Airport in Arlington, VA after departing from Wichita, KS.
It has been days since the collision happened, and a few shocking details have come out – as well as a lot of speculation and outright gossip from many reputable and official sources. What we know for certain so far is that all of the passengers and crew aboard both the airliner and the Army helicopter have been reported deceased after rescue operations in the Potomac failed to produce any survivors. Multiple sources reported to CBS News and the British Broadcasting Corporation that just one air traffic control worker was managing all of the helicopters and a majority of the plane traffic in the ATC region of Reagan National, which included the crash site.
Almost immediately though the internet, and even a few politicians, rushed to point fingers and spread misinformation online regarding the collision. Firstly, an online conspiracy theory that floated around platform X (formerly Twitter) stated that the pilot of the Black Hawk helicopter was a transgender woman named Jo Ellis. This was easily disproven, as she was never a member of the U.S. Army, and has only been a part of the Virginia National Guard. The pilot of the Black Hawk has been officially confirmed as Rebecca Lobach, who was a top 20% Army cadet during her time serving our country.
Another still unproven theory is that DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs are to blame for this collision, and this theory has been promoted by President Donald Trump, claiming in a White House press conference that “I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first” – a claim that as of the writing of this article can still not be proven by the White House, GOP, or anyone else with ties to the administration. When asked by reporters if he was getting ahead of himself by blaming diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and the Democrats for the aviation crash, he stated “I have common sense, OK.”
While the plane crash is still under active investigation, there have been some facts released to the public so far. On February 6, all remains of the Black Hawk helicopter were pulled out of the Potomac River as well as the remains of the commercial jet. The NTSB chair also came out on Thursday and said that the pilots of the Black Hawk were believed to have been wearing night vision goggles at the time of the collision – further calling into question whose fault the collision was. In addition, on February 5, all 67 bodies were recovered and successfully identified by investigators, according to the Unified Command.
As of the writing of this article, President Trump still has yet to visit the wreckage site, and details on what his administration will do for the victims’ families are all uncertain. So far, the recently appointed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has stated that the newly-founded and still unofficial government agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE for short, will be helping to “upgrade our aviation system,” but the specific details of this plan have not been announced. This unofficial agency is spearheaded by multibillionaire Elon Musk, whose past experiences include being the CEO of companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, and The Boring Company – also recently acquiring X, formerly known as Twitter, in a business deal a few years ago. While DOGE does post consistently on the social platform owned by its effective leader, the results that they have delivered for the American people are not quite clear yet – as several [often controversial or legally hazy] crackdowns on the finances of several established agencies have come under fire from members of Congress, particularly members of the Democratic Caucus in the House and Senate.
So far, DOGE has been suspected to have potentially caused a nationwide Medicaid blackout that happened on January 28, although the White House has stated that the issue was caused by a simple system outage – one which, if true, has not seemingly been focused on by the administration. The outage came just after Trump’s executive order to freeze federal funding for various programs and agencies, which has left many online to speculate and theorize whether or not this was indeed a simple outage or if it was the DOGE team making a mistake and quickly having to fix it before the media caught wind. Whatever the case might be, we the American people might never know – but anything is still possible. They have also since shut down the USAID, an independent agency of the government that focuses on humanitarian aid for nations and allies in crisis – alleging that the department had been taken over by “a bunch of radical lunatics” on February 2, in conversation with a reporter.
While the situation is still developing as the investigation continues, more and more information continues to be released relatively quickly as investigators attempt to get to the bottom of what caused this mid-air collision to happen.
