Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has tried to deflect all the FAA problems (and other transportation problems) to President Donald Trump’s administration.
It all started when an Army helicopter and an American Airlines plane collided and crashed into the Potomac River on January 29.
On May 1, another Army helicopter “approached the approach path of civilian aircraft, forcing two commercial airliners to abort their landing approaches.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been outing Buttigieg:
The Washington Post, of all places, added another strike against Buttigieg and the Biden administration: National Airport, Pentagon hotline had been disconnected for three years.
Yup, an FAA official confirmed the hotline connecting the Reagan National Airport air traffic controllers and the Pentagon ones went out in 2022:
The line is maintained by the Defense Department, and the aviation agency was not aware of the outage during the three years it was down, Franklin McIntosh, the FAA’s deputy head of air traffic control, testified at a Senate hearing Wednesday. Aviation officials discovered the hotline wasn’t working after May 1, when controllers at National ordered two passenger jets to abandon landings because an Army helicopter was circling nearby at the Pentagon.“We’re insisting on that line to be fixed before we resume any operations out of the Pentagon,” McIntosh said.Ongoing disputes over how to ensure safety have led to unusual finger-pointing among Cabinet departments. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy has accused the military of violating safety protocols, while military officials have insisted they have followed the FAA’s restrictions.
How…how did they discover the hotline didn’t work after the May 1 incident? You mean to tell me that no one else noticed it in three years?
The Washington Post called McIntosh’s revelation that the “responsibility in National’s tower for guiding helicopters and other local traffic was combined under one person” a “fresh disclosure.”
Except…it’s not fresh or new.
The FAA already admitted that the airport had one controller “responsible for coordinating helicopter traffic and arriving and departing planes.”
Another report revealed numerous factors in the January crash.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) went off on the Trump administration on Wednesday: “The administration’s lack of a more aggressive, proactive mitigation approach is simply inexcusable.”
It looks like Duckworth needs to focus her criticism on Biden and Buttigieg.
Buttigieg did nothing during his term as secretary. He was a DEI pick, a checkmark for the Biden administration to boast about diversity.
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