Pete Muntean
Appearances
Morning Wire
Airplane-Helicopter Collision & RFK Jr. High Stakes Hearing | 1.30.25
I'm stumbling over my words here because this is just so staggering. that there is a mid-air collision involving a commercial airliner. Commercial flights are equipped for ages with a system called TCAS, Traffic Collision Avoidance System. It tells the pilots in the cockpit how to avoid other airplanes nearby.
Morning Wire
Airplane-Helicopter Collision & RFK Jr. High Stakes Hearing | 1.30.25
It tells the pilots, there's traffic ahead of you, climb, climb now, descend, descend now. This would be an incredible lining up of the holes in the Swiss cheese, which is the saying in aviation, the gaps in the safety chain in aviation, that this happened. And now investigators have an incredible amount of work cut out for them to figure out how a commercial airliner in the United States in 2025
Morning Wire
Airplane-Helicopter Collision & RFK Jr. High Stakes Hearing | 1.30.25
When the pilots are incredibly trained, the technology is incredibly sharp, collided with what is apparently a military or government helicopter. Nobody else uses the Blackhawk. It is really something else. I'm just stunned.
Morning Wire
Airplane-Helicopter Collision & RFK Jr. High Stakes Hearing | 1.30.25
The fact that this happened in D.C. over near Reagan National Airport, some of the busiest airspace in the country and one of the single busiest runways in the national airspace system is really pretty incredible.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Bongino Brief - What Happened At Reagan Airport???
If you can take me live for a second, I can sort of demonstrate with my hands what the crews were and were not able to see. And so the helicopter, the Black Hawk helicopter, appeared to be coming from the right of the commercial flight that was descending into runway 33. It's a particularly perilous
The Dan Bongino Show
The Bongino Brief - What Happened At Reagan Airport???
situation for pilots because they can often not see very well below them as helicopter crews are often looking at the ground, flying primarily in reference to the ground, especially in a very critical phase of flying as a crew is descending, making that final critical approach to landing. They are focused primarily on the runway and primarily on their instruments.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Bongino Brief - What Happened At Reagan Airport???
They're not necessarily looking left and right, scanning for other traffic. This may be something where the crew simply just did not have the ability to see the helicopter and the situation unfolding in front of them. This is something that aviation experts have warned me about over and over since the start of 2023 when we saw these commercial flight near collisions take off.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Bongino Brief - What Happened At Reagan Airport???
in the United States. Many of them became under the watchful eye of the National Transportation Safety Board and were the result of very sweeping probes. Those situations never involved an actual collision. What we are seeing now is the result of the warnings. It very much is the worst case scenario.