To a hammer, all things look like a nail, and to people who are hyper-vigilant about such stuff, all females in high positions are ‘diversity hires’. Well, to be fair, that’s a not-unreasonable consequence of the “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” fanaticists. Which is perhaps the most damning thing about DEI and quotas: women and minorities who really have achieved high status by dint of intelligence and hard work are inevitably dragged down by the hordes of quota troughers.
Consider, for instance, former Australian politician Kristina Keneally, the ‘Quota Queen’. Time and again, Keneally was parachuted by Labor’s backroom powerbrokers into safe seats, to fill their Emily’s List-mandated quotas. And every time, voters tossed her out, first chance they got. Rinse and repeat.
On the other hand, conservative female politician Moira Deeming has had to fight even her own party to get to where she is. Suffice to say, Deeming is no DEI hire.
All of this is a long way of getting to the controversy surrounding the January crash between a Black Hawk military helicopter and a passenger jet in the skies over Washington, DC, killing 67 people.
Almost before the wreckage hit the water, some on the right were shrieking, ‘diversity hire!’ Which was every bit as tasteless and crass as it sounds.
But, just because a bunch of right-wing hammers are seeing nails everywhere they look, doesn’t mean there are no nails. And, very soon, the whole crash saga took some very weird turns.
The name of the pilot, Captain Rebecca Lobach, was suppressed for days. Which is, to some extent, standard practice, so that family members don’t find out the awful news via the media. But something else happened in those days: all of Lobach’s social media accounts were scrubbed. Again, the reason given was ‘grieving’. Which may or may not be true, but it certainly created a vacuum that many were quick to fill with possibly wild speculation.
Right-wing commentator Laura Loomer, for instance, claimed that Lobach was a Biden aide, and an ‘LGBTQI+ community’ activist who attended Pride events. “So yes, DEI was very much involved in this crash,” she wrote, implying Lobach’s sexual orientation played a role in her promotion to the pilot role.
Whether or not any of that is true – it’s at least true that Lobach was pictured at Biden White House events, which seems ordinary enough given that she was a White House military social aide – new revelations suggest that some very odd things happened in the moments leading up to the crash.
The pilot of the Black Hawk military helicopter that collided with a passenger airplane over Washington, DC, in January ignored instructions to change course moments before the crash took place, according to a report by the New York Times.
Lobach, who was undergoing an annual flight evaluation at the time, had already been warned by air traffic control that the jet was in their vicinity. Both Lobach and her instructor and co-pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, acknowledged the warning, but opted to proceed under ‘visual separation’. That is, they would keep flying using their own observations rather than taking instruction from ATC.
The report said the Black Hawk was only 15 seconds from crossing paths with the passenger jet when Eaves informed Lobach that he believed air traffic control wanted them to turn left toward the east river bank.
“Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet. She did not turn left,” the New York Times reported [….]
The helicopter appeared to be flying too high at the time of the collision. Additionally, radio communication between controllers and pilots broke down.
“Multiple layers of safety precautions failed that night,” said Katie Thomson, the Federal Aviation Administration’s deputy administrator under President Biden.
Indeed. Many people, right up to President Trump, have questioned how the helicopter pilot could have failed to see the jet, which had its running lights blazing, on a clear night. Especially when they were wearing high-tech visual aids.
Investigators believe the crew was wearing night vision goggles throughout the flight and that there was nothing to suggest that the crew had removed them.
Just before that discovery, it was revealed that vital tracking technology inside the helicopter was turned off for ‘no compelling reason’ when it collided.
When the chopper went down, the Black Hawk’s Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast was disabled – a system which shares an aircraft’s position, altitude and speed, Sen Ted Cruz previously told the New York Times.
The technology also includes a display that shows pilots the location of other aircraft both in the sky or on a runway, and allows air traffic controllers to not just rely on radar tracking – which could have a delay of a few seconds.
Perhaps that was part of the ‘visual separation’ procedure. Perhaps it was all just a matter of a concatenation of a string of small failures that ultimately added up to a catastrophic one. Or, the fringe are hinting darkly, Lobach chose to deliberately crash into the passenger jet, which seems a long bow to draw on the basis of very little evidence. But, hey, this is America 2025, so who knows?
For the moment, though, the reasonable and decent thing to do is, as always, to choose the stuff up before the conspiracy.
