#nationalairport — Public Fediverse posts

The streak nobody wanted to see end

Doing anything with a 100 percent success rate is hard, and maintaining that perfect record for almost 16 years in a row is exponentially harder. And yet that’s what the U.S. airline industry had accomplished until Wednesday evening: year after year of having every scheduled takeoff conclude with the plane landing in one piece.

I wanted that streak to continue forever while realizing how improbable that would be. What I did not expect was that it would end a few miles from my house in a fireball over the Potomac River, just east of the airport I’ve probably flown in and out of more than any other in the world.

Wednesday night’s fatal mid-air collision between an American Airlines-marketed CRJ700 regional jet and a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, about 2,000 feet off Runway 33 at National Airport, happened close enough that I might have seen it firsthand had I been outside somewhere at the time.

Some of the thousands of Washingtonians and Arlingtonians who live in buildings overlooking DCA did witness the collision and will never be able to unsee it.

That is chilling to contemplate, though not nearly as upsetting as thinking about the 67 lives lost and how close the 64 passengers and crew on AA 5342 were to wheels down on that runway1.

The first fatal crash of a U.S. airline since February of 2009–and the first involving National Airport since the crash of Air Florida 90 just over 43 years ago, notwithstanding how busy National has become and how many helicopters whir around its airspace–is a horrible break with the culture of safety in U.S. commercial aviation.

People may assume that culture just happens, but it has taken an immense amount of sustained, selfless work. Airlines, airports, air traffic control and government regulators have combined to construct and operate a marvelously complicated machine that transports vast numbers of people–more than 819 million domestic passengers on U.S. carriers in 2023–and almost never fails in a way worse than a delayed or canceled flight.

Car and truck travel, meanwhile, resulted in nearly 41,000 deaths in 2023; the comparison with scheduled air travel is so unflattering that it might look fake. More than once, I’ve said to other people, only somewhat in jest, “If you want to live forever, get on an airplane.”

A critical part of aviation’s culture of safety is documenting what went wrong. Not as in President Trump’s ignorant, bigoted, and hateful press-conference rantings, but as in a National Transportation Safety Board report that will lay out in precise and agonizing detail what factors brought those two aircraft to their deadly intersection, so that everybody in the aviation industry will know what they can do to make sure those things never happen again.

1. Via my habit of window-seat photography, it looks like I last had a flight use Runway 33 in November of 2023, departing Washington for LaGuardia. The picture above shows 33 as seen from a departure off Runway 4 in a United Airlines-marketed CRJ550–a conversion of the CRJ700 to add more first-class and Economy Plus seats. ↩︎

#AA #AA5342 #AmericanAirlines #AmericanEagle #Blackhawk #cultureOfSafety #DCA #H60 #NationalAirport #PSA #safestWayToTravel

The streak nobody wanted to see end

Doing anything with a 100 percent success rate is hard, and maintaining that perfect record for almost 16 years in a row is exponentially harder. And yet that’s what the U.S. airline industry had accomplished until Wednesday evening: year after year of having every scheduled takeoff conclude with the plane landing in one piece.

I wanted that streak to continue forever while realizing how improbable that would be. What I did not expect was that it would end a few miles from my house in a fireball over the Potomac River, just east of the airport I’ve probably flown in and out of more than any other in the world.

Wednesday night’s fatal mid-air collision between an American Airlines-marketed CRJ700 regional jet and a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, about 2,000 feet off Runway 33 at National Airport, happened close enough that I might have seen it firsthand had I been outside somewhere at the time.

Some of the thousands of Washingtonians and Arlingtonians who live in buildings overlooking DCA did witness the collision and will never be able to unsee it.

That is chilling to contemplate, though not nearly as upsetting as thinking about the 67 lives lost and how close the 64 passengers and crew on AA 5342 were to wheels down on that runway1.

The first fatal crash of a U.S. airline since February of 2009–and the first involving National Airport since the crash of Air Florida 90 just over 43 years ago, notwithstanding how busy National has become and how many helicopters whir around its airspace–is a horrible break with the culture of safety in U.S. commercial aviation.

People may assume that culture just happens, but it has taken an immense amount of sustained, selfless work. Airlines, airports, air traffic control and government regulators have combined to construct and operate a marvelously complicated machine that transports vast numbers of people–more than 819 million domestic passengers on U.S. carriers in 2023–and almost never fails in a way worse than a delayed or canceled flight.

Car and truck travel, meanwhile, resulted in nearly 41,000 deaths in 2023; the comparison with scheduled air travel is so unflattering that it might look fake. More than once, I’ve said to other people, only somewhat in jest, “If you want to live forever, get on an airplane.”

A critical part of aviation’s culture of safety is documenting what went wrong. Not as in President Trump’s ignorant, bigoted, and hateful press-conference rantings, but as in a National Transportation Safety Board report that will lay out in precise and agonizing detail what factors brought those two aircraft to their deadly intersection, so that everybody in the aviation industry will know what they can do to make sure those things never happen again.

1. Via my habit of window-seat photography, it looks like I last had a flight use Runway 33 in November of 2023, departing Washington for LaGuardia. The picture above shows 33 as seen from a departure off Runway 4 in a United Airlines-marketed CRJ550–a conversion of the CRJ700 to add more first-class and Economy Plus seats. ↩︎

#AA #AA5342 #AmericanAirlines #AmericanEagle #Blackhawk #cultureOfSafety #DCA #H60 #NationalAirport #PSA #safestWayToTravel

The streak nobody wanted to see end

Doing anything with a 100 percent success rate is hard, and maintaining that perfect record for almost 16 years in a row is exponentially harder. And yet that’s what the U.S. airline industry had accomplished until Wednesday evening: year after year of having every scheduled takeoff conclude with the plane landing in one piece.

I wanted that streak to continue forever while realizing how improbable that would be. What I did not expect was that it would end a few miles from my house in a fireball over the Potomac River, just east of the airport I’ve probably flown in and out of more than any other in the world.

Wednesday night’s fatal mid-air collision between an American Airlines-marketed CRJ700 regional jet and a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, about 2,000 feet off Runway 33 at National Airport, happened close enough that I might have seen it firsthand had I been outside somewhere at the time.

Some of the thousands of Washingtonians and Arlingtonians who live in buildings overlooking DCA did witness the collision and will never be able to unsee it.

That is chilling to contemplate, though not nearly as upsetting as thinking about the 67 lives lost and how close the 64 passengers and crew on AA 5342 were to wheels down on that runway1.

The first fatal crash of a U.S. airline since February of 2009–and the first involving National Airport since the crash of Air Florida 90 just over 43 years ago, notwithstanding how busy National has become and how many helicopters whir around its airspace–is a horrible break with the culture of safety in U.S. commercial aviation.

People may assume that culture just happens, but it has taken an immense amount of sustained, selfless work. Airlines, airports, air traffic control and government regulators have combined to construct and operate a marvelously complicated machine that transports vast numbers of people–more than 819 million domestic passengers on U.S. carriers in 2023–and almost never fails in a way worse than a delayed or canceled flight.

Car and truck travel, meanwhile, resulted in nearly 41,000 deaths in 2023; the comparison with scheduled air travel is so unflattering that it might look fake. More than once, I’ve said to other people, only somewhat in jest, “If you want to live forever, get on an airplane.”

A critical part of aviation’s culture of safety is documenting what went wrong. Not as in President Trump’s ignorant, bigoted, and hateful press-conference rantings, but as in a National Transportation Safety Board report that will lay out in precise and agonizing detail what factors brought those two aircraft to their deadly intersection, so that everybody in the aviation industry will know what they can do to make sure those things never happen again.

1. Via my habit of window-seat photography, it looks like I last had a flight use Runway 33 in November of 2023, departing Washington for LaGuardia. The picture above shows 33 as seen from a departure off Runway 4 in a United Airlines-marketed CRJ550–a conversion of the CRJ700 to add more first-class and Economy Plus seats. ↩︎

#AA #AA5342 #AmericanAirlines #AmericanEagle #Blackhawk #cultureOfSafety #DCA #H60 #NationalAirport #PSA #safestWayToTravel

The streak nobody wanted to see end

Doing anything with a 100 percent success rate is hard, and maintaining that perfect record for almost 16 years in a row is exponentially harder. And yet that’s what the U.S. airline industry had accomplished until Wednesday evening: year after year of having every scheduled takeoff conclude with the plane landing in one piece.

I wanted that streak to continue forever while realizing how improbable that would be. What I did not expect was that it would end a few miles from my house in a fireball over the Potomac River, just east of the airport I’ve probably flown in and out of more than any other in the world.

Wednesday night’s fatal mid-air collision between an American Airlines-marketed CRJ700 regional jet and a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, about 2,000 feet off Runway 33 at National Airport, happened close enough that I might have seen it firsthand had I been outside somewhere at the time.

Some of the thousands of Washingtonians and Arlingtonians who live in buildings overlooking DCA did witness the collision and will never be able to unsee it.

That is chilling to contemplate, though not nearly as upsetting as thinking about the 67 lives lost and how close the 64 passengers and crew on AA 5342 were to wheels down on that runway1.

The first fatal crash of a U.S. airline since February of 2009–and the first involving National Airport since the crash of Air Florida 90 just over 43 years ago, notwithstanding how busy National has become and how many helicopters whir around its airspace–is a horrible break with the culture of safety in U.S. commercial aviation.

People may assume that culture just happens, but it has taken an immense amount of sustained, selfless work. Airlines, airports, air traffic control and government regulators have combined to construct and operate a marvelously complicated machine that transports vast numbers of people–more than 819 million domestic passengers on U.S. carriers in 2023–and almost never fails in a way worse than a delayed or canceled flight.

Car and truck travel, meanwhile, resulted in nearly 41,000 deaths in 2023; the comparison with scheduled air travel is so unflattering that it might look fake. More than once, I’ve said to other people, only somewhat in jest, “If you want to live forever, get on an airplane.”

A critical part of aviation’s culture of safety is documenting what went wrong. Not as in President Trump’s ignorant, bigoted, and hateful press-conference rantings, but as in a National Transportation Safety Board report that will lay out in precise and agonizing detail what factors brought those two aircraft to their deadly intersection, so that everybody in the aviation industry will know what they can do to make sure those things never happen again.

1. Via my habit of window-seat photography, it looks like I last had a flight use Runway 33 in November of 2023, departing Washington for LaGuardia. The picture above shows 33 as seen from a departure off Runway 4 in a United Airlines-marketed CRJ550–a conversion of the CRJ700 to add more first-class and Economy Plus seats. ↩︎

#AA #AA5342 #AmericanAirlines #AmericanEagle #Blackhawk #cultureOfSafety #DCA #H60 #NationalAirport #PSA #safestWayToTravel

@froomkin
The Lever: Transportation Secretary and former Rep. Sean Duffy voted for airline-backed legislation to expand flight traffic at #NationalAirport, despite dire safety warnings about heavy air traffic…
Jan 29, 2025 Before D.C. Airport #Collision, Lawmakers Brushed Off Warnings, Boosted Flights
Despite midflight near-misses & dire pleas, airline-bankrolled lawmakers expanded flight traffic at Washington’s busy airport
https://www.levernews.com/before-d-c-airport-collision-lawmakers-brushed-off-warnings-and-boosted-flights/
#DOT #SeanDuffy #TheLever #Flight5342 #AA5342

The trade-off of travel

I’m in the middle of an unprecedented amount of travel. Two weeks ago, I flew out to L.A. to give a talk at an Edmunds.com conference; tonight, I’m flying to Berlin to cover the IFA consumer-electronics show there; two Sundays from now, I’m off to San Francisco for TechCrunch Disrupt; a week and a half after that, the Online News Association’s annual conference takes place in the same city; one week later, the Demo conference happens in Santa Clara.

I feel tired just reading the preceding sentence. In a normal month, I might have one trip out of town, certainly none requiring my passport.

I have business reasons for all this flying back and forth. I’ve never gone to some of these events before and would like to learn what I’ve missed; I expect to see interesting products debuted and demoed at them; they should represent good networking opportunities for me; at least for this year, I can afford the expense.

(The IFA trip is largely subsidized: The organizers have a pot of money set aside to bring some U.S. journalists there, with no requirement that I can discern to cover a particular vendor or technology. My regular editors were okay with that.)

But I have seriously mixed emotions every time I start to pack.

I hate the part of travel where I have to tear myself away from my lovely wife and our bubbly two-year-old. That dread often sets in not one but two nights before a departure, and it hasn’t gotten that much easier since my first business trip as a dad.

But I like travel itself–seeing the ground fall away from the wing at takeoff and then draw near again as we settle onto the runway, then finding my way around some new part of the world–and that allows the gloom to lift once I reach the airport. (Especially if it’s my beloved National Airport instead of, say, United’s grim C/D concourse at Dulles.)

The other part of traveling as a parent is the spouse debt I run up every time my lovely wife has to care for our bubbly two-year-old solo–something I have done for all of maybe four nights myself. I try to even the balance by setting aside a few nights’ worth of dinner in the fridge and freezer before I head out, but I know I couldn’t do this without the support of my family. And I know how fantastic it will be to come home to them this Sunday afternoon.

#airlines #DCA #DullesAirport #IAD #NationalAirport #parenthood #travel #UnitedAirlines