President Donald Trump said on Friday that his previous remarks regarding the investigation into the midair collision at a Washington D.C. airport will not impact any formal investigation.
On Wednesday evening a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter collided with a PSA-operated CRJ700 that was making a descent into the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport just before 9 pm. In total 67 lives were lost from both aircraft.
During a press conference for the signing on an executive order a reporter asked, “Mr. President, do you have any concerns that your commentary about things you have described as common sense, your observations, could in any way interfere with a thorough investigation of the crash?”
“No,” Trump answered. “I think they’ll do an investigation, it will probably come out the way I said it. I like to put it up front. I’m so tired of listening to things happen to our country and then people say, ‘We’ll do an investigation,’ and three years later they come out with the report that nobody looks at.”
On Thursday, after opening a news conference with a moment of silence for the crash victims, Trump blamed former President Joe Biden and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for lowering aviation standards under the implementation of DEI requirements.
“We have to have the best people, the smartest people, the sharpest people as control tower experts,” he said. “We didn’t have our best. If you read the quote that I read yesterday in the news conference, they talked about people that were psychologically injured were OK and people that had lots of problems were OK.”
“This was all because of weak rules in the Biden administration. And we’re just not going to let that kind of thing happen again. Again, I could wait, and people report in two years like they always do. Sometimes it’s obvious, and in this case its very obvious, and I think I’ve proven to be very correct,” Trump added.
Trump also said the Black Hawk helicopter was “too high” noting that it was “above the 200 limit by double. It shouldn’t have been there. And there were other mistakes made too, I pointed them out too — they’ll still do an investigation, just to check it out."
Another reporter followed up and asked, “As commander in chief are you at all concerned about opining about the Army and the conduct of that aircraft when you are commander in chief and these are the people that report to you?”
“No,” Trump again answered. “This was all caused by bad rules, regulations and other things by Biden, the Biden administration, and when you look at the way they ran things, in fact, if you look, we hired — one of the first things I told them to do is get talented people in those beautiful towers overlooking the runway,” Trump said.
James Morley III ✉
James Morley III is a writer with more than two decades of experience in entertainment, travel, technology, and science and nature.
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