Wednesday night's deadly mid-air collision in Washington, D.C., between an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter being used on a training mission was "preventable," new Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said Thursday while appearing to agree with a social media post made earlier by President Donald Trump.
"We are going to wait for all the information to come in from this vantage point, but … what I've seen so far, do I think this was preventable? Absolutely," Duffy said during a press conference Thursday morning, CNN reported. "We have early indications of what happened here."
There were reportedly no survivors from the crash over the Potomac River.
Trump early Thursday criticized the three-person crew of the helicopter and air traffic controllers at Reagan National Airport, posting that the collision "should have been prevented."
Duffy did not have information available about the flight record of the personnel in the Black Hawk but said that it does not mean that the crew was inexperienced despite the flight being classified as a training mission.
"We call these missions that are flown in the D.C. area as our pilots are getting hours and experience training missions," Duffy said. "Don't read into that how many hours the pilots on the military aircraft had."
The two pilots on American Airlines Flight 5342 were also not new to complex commercial flight patterns, company CEO Robert Isom said.
"These are experienced pilots," he said. "I know that the captain had … almost six years with PSA (Airlines), and the first officer almost two years."
PSA Airlines, which operated Flight 5342, is a regional airline owned and operated by American Airlines.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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