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I'm going to head this off right now: This was between the pilots of the American Airlines flight and the Blackhawk, and the ATC at Reagan. Short of the controllers being literally understaffed, which I assume is not the case, the focus of this investigation should be what the sincere hell happened in the air there.

This was a wholly preventable incident, hell this should have not happened period. Something likely very basic and fundamental failed catastrophically, and we need to figure out what and why. Bringing politics into this at this stage is unnecessary and deleterious noise unless findings implicating politics come to light.

Yeah, it's just a mountain of coherent circumstantial evidence at this point. We can infer that liquidation of leadership and oversight in the agencies responsible for the safety of air travel might distract and strain remaining operational staff, but we don't know for a fact yet that that's the case. Maybe we'll find that all relevant pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance people, etc were all completely insulated from and oblivious to the active public campaign to eliminate their roles including the emails they would have received on Tuesday from the US Govt Office of Personnel Management [0].

I really don't see a way to eliminate Trump's chaos as at least a partial cause, and it could only be ruled out if the investigators are cognizant of political context.

[0] https://www.opm.gov/fork

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