"Many essentials are imported almost entirely from China — and with new tariffs, they’re likely to become more expensive."
Sunday, April 27, 2025
Your Home Without China - The New York Times
"Many essentials are imported almost entirely from China — and with new tariffs, they’re likely to become more expensive."
Opinion | ‘A Veneer of Official Medical Knowledge’: Three Opinion Writers on Kennedy’s Tenure - The New York Times
‘He’s Often Working Backward From a Conclusion’: Three Opinion Writers on Kennedy
Ross douthat, Jessica Grose and David Wallace-wells
"By Ross DouthatJessica Grose and David Wallace-Wells
Mr. Douthat is an Opinion columnist. Ms. Grose and Mr. Wallace-Wells are Opinion writers.
Alexandra Sifferlin, a health and science editor for Times Opinion, hosted a written conversation with the Opinion columnist Ross Douthat and the Opinion writers Jessica Grose and David Wallace-Wells about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first two months as secretary of health and human services.
Alexandra Sifferlin: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to tackle chronic disease and take on the food and pharmaceutical industries. But his response to a measles outbreak in the Southwest — and inflammatory remarks about autism at a press briefing — have drawn criticism from all sides.
Ross, you’ve written about your own experiences with chronic illness and the limitations of the U.S. medical system. What’s been your view of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, and what do you make of his tenure as health leader so far?
Ross Douthat: I think debates about the limitations of the U.S. medical system tend to be polarized in a very, shall we say, unhealthy way. On one side, you have people who haven’t hit the limits of medical consensus and knowledge in their own lives, and therefore struggle to understand why so many of their fellow citizens would want to wander outside those limits in search of answers or wisdom. On the other side, you have people with very good reasons for skepticism of conventional wisdom, but who have allowed that skepticism to become total, making them reject everything the establishment says while fastening onto a specific outsider narrative as an absolute alternative even if the evidence is lacking.
On a lot of fronts, Kennedy and the MAHA movement exhibit the latter problem. There’s absolutely room for new research and new debate about the causes of chronic illness, or autism or obesity — all areas where the official understanding of things doesn’t have definite answers for a lot of people. And there’s always good reason for skepticism about the medical-industrial complex writ large. But Kennedy seems committed to his own set of low-evidence theories — the vaccine-autism link being the most prominent example — and he seems to be working backward from the outsider perspective, rather than trying to genuinely create dialogue between the establishment and its critics.
David Wallace-Wells: I’m not sure it’s even just low-evidence theories. I worry about the quality of the evidence demonstrating the problem. One thing I’d really like to see an autism commission tackle is the seemingly simple question of to what degree we actually are really living through an epidemic. I think there are reasons to worry about an increase in cases, and about environmental factors contributing. But I also think the alarming charts you see showing exponential growth in prevalence are really not very credible, and yet they are what is powering our panic.
I see this as a problem much bigger than autism, by the way. Bipolar diagnoses recently grew 40-fold in America. Among college students, A.D.H.D. diagnoses have gone up 72 percent since 2010, and Paul Tough just wrote a long piece in the Times magazine exploring the possibility that the country has grown quite hysterical about the disorder. Across the board, I worry that we are living through a crisis of diagnostic inflation.
What’s interesting is that Kennedy and the MAHA folks are open to thinking about these things at some level. They’re worrying about overmedicating children, for instance. But they are also motivated by the scary charts, and persuaded by them that there is something deeply wrong.
Jessica Grose: I don’t know that I see the framing of the polarization in the same way as Ross. Most scientists are themselves very skeptical people. When you interview them, their explanations are full of caveats. MAHA and Kennedy have a much easier communications task, because as you say, Ross, he’s often working backward from a conclusion, like vaccines cause autism. It’s definitive and it’s clear, even though from all available evidence it’s not correct.
I also push back against your framing that MAHA and Kennedy are the only people who are thinking about this problem and other issues with the American medical system. I have personally written about the side effects of birth control, for example, and how I think pharmaceutical advertising should be banned, which Kennedy agrees with. The genius of this movement is that they frame themselves as uniquely skeptical or truth-telling, when they’re not. I would say the biggest problem in terms of health polarization is social media, and how Kennedy and the Children’s Health Defense, the organization that he helped found and run, science-wash their statements to make them seem like they have a veneer of official medical knowledge.
Wallace-Wells: On some level I am inclined to see Kennedy as a good-faith actor on this — deluded and conspiratorial, yes, but operating consistently over a long period of time. What worries and depresses me more is the support he’s won from people like Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the National Institutes of Health, and Marty Makary, the new head of the Food and Drug Administration — good, serious scientists who in my view went through the Covid rabbit hole and came out the other side with a new set of standards for themselves and for science. How can Bhattacharya say with a straight face that scientists are scared to look into the link between vaccine and autism? It’s absurd.
Douthat: I definitely don’t think Kennedy is the only person thinking about these problems, and I think it’s unfortunate that the specific claim about a link between vaccines and autism — which as far as I can tell has no real evidence behind it — has become a kind of condensed symbol of the entire establishment-outsider debate. I do think, though, Jess, that while working scientists are often very skeptical and good at self-criticism and offering caveats, doctors and public health officials, in somewhat different ways, feel pressure to project often unwarranted certainty about their own expertise, in a way that their outsider rivals then imitate and mirror.
To your points about diagnostic inflation, David, I think two things can be true at once: There is a set of difficult conditions, some congenital and some probably related to infection, where existing medical investigations have hit something of a wall in understanding the origins and proposing effective therapies, and there’s also a tendency to overdiagnose. Social media contagion makes it hard to tell how fast any of these conditions are actually increasing — and that creates a feedback loop where skeptics become more dismissive of the real problems because they assume that if you say you have certain chronic conditions you must just be a hysteric.
Wallace-Wells: I agree that both things are true. I also think we’ve developed an unfortunate tendency — not just in the world of MAHA but even in institutions like ours — to lay quite a lot of blame on the failure of establishment actors to comprehensively address questions like these, and much less blame on those simply setting fire to the institutions. This marks me as quite a normie liberal, I know, but I just can’t look back on the pandemic and think, the problem here is that Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control, slightly oversold the ability of vaccines to entirely stop spread, rather than the numbers of pretty high-profile people circulating video compilations of sudden vaccine death.
Grose: I’d love evidence that Kennedy is a good faith actor. I think he’s someone who has become wealthy and powerful based on his advocacy and he holds anyone who disagrees with him in contempt.
Wallace-Wells: Fair enough. Maybe it’s better to say his is a long-form variety of opportunism.
Douthat: I would say — again, from my own lived experience — that someone can have an entirely good faith attraction to helping a specific suffering community that medical orthodoxy seems to be failing, which can then curdle into its own kind of orthodoxy that doesn’t leave room for contrary evidence. If Kennedy were a self-interested political opportunist, he wouldn’t have ended up quite so far out on the fringe; to me it looks more like a path of sincere idealism leading into a bubble of the like-minded and self-righteous.
Sifferlin: As you all have noted, Kennedy built his brand on criticizing the public health establishment. But now that he’s in charge of it, he has to deliver real results. Including responding to the growing measles outbreak. Do you think being in power could counterintuitively fracture the MAHA movement, which was until now arguably characterized by its opposition and outsider status?
Wallace-Wells: One thing that worries me here is the possibility that we’ve passed through a disturbing bottleneck, to quote Ross, in which many of the old social rules don’t apply. People used to talk about the “Disneyland effect”: when there was a large measles outbreak at the amusement park in 2014, it produced an international wave of concern, a measurable increase in popular support for vaccines and vaccination, and, in policy, a change to the California rules about vaccine exemption.
But now? The Texas outbreak is still relatively new, and I haven’t seen large-scale surveys measuring the effect on vaccination. But the families of the dead are not expressing regret, and Kennedy’s old organization is highlighting their unwavering commitment. According to one recent poll, nearly half of surveyed Trump voters believe it is at least “probably” true that the Covid-19 vaccine — which saved several million American lives, and more than 20 million worldwide — was “the deadliest vaccine ever created.” Will there be meaningful blowback against destructive public health policies? I’m a lot less sure than I would’ve been a few years ago.
Grose: David, I share your concern and I think it’s hard to know what will happen. I talked to a doctor in West Virginia — who practices in a very conservative area — who told me that he’s seen more vaccine skepticism in the past year than ever before in his career. It was his opinion that we’re going to have to experience many outbreaks like the ones we’re having now to get the hard-core skeptics back on board. It might have to be something even deadlier than measles, which is horrible to contemplate.
Douthat: I spent a lot of time in my own youth in the 1980s and 1990s around people on the crunchy left who were anti-vaccine, and my sense then was that it often followed from some kind of personal experience — a kid having a bad reaction to a vaccination course, knowing someone who had a vaccine injury, etc. — rather than just from imbibing a broader antivaxx worldview. I don’t know if the internet or polarization has changed that pattern, but one thing to keep in mind about the vaccine debate is that it has always been a difficult collective-action issue. You are exposing your child to some (yes, statistically modest, but nonetheless real) risk of vaccine side effects or injury for the sake of achieving herd immunity. So in a more fractured society it wouldn’t be surprising that the prosocial pitch would weaken.
Grose: I have found the same thing in my reporting, Ross. Moms who become vaccine-skeptical often had a bad experience around the medical system during their pregnancy or postpartum and they felt unheard, and it led to a total distrust of the system. The internet just super powers it because there’s a well-trod path from general medical skepticism to specifically antivaccine takes. But it’s not just collective action or desire to be a good person; it’s law. Over time, more states allow for exemptions. Historically, the states with the highest vaccination rates have few loopholes for exemptions.
Wallace-Wells: I see the math here a little bit differently, because I don’t think the real purpose of vaccination is to achieve herd immunity, however much “pro-science” liberals like to talk about that. I see the main purpose as lowering your child’s risk of serious illness. We may talk about vaccination trade-offs in these terms — personal risk versus social benefit — because given widespread vaccination, the additional risk to your child may be relatively small. But the much more significant impact of a shot is on the person getting the shot, not on the rest of his or her nursery school, right?
I remember being pretty frustrated about this during the first year of Covid vaccination, when liberals were outraged about the relatively low rates of vaccination among conservatives. I kept thinking to myself, yes, there is some cost to society of lower vaccination rates leading to increasing disease prevalence, pressure on hospitals and need to reimpose social restrictions. But at a disease level, the person refusing the shot is also the person shouldering a much larger share of risk — so much larger than the additional risk he or she is imposing on the community.
Sifferlin: To return to autism — Kennedy caused a stir during his recent press briefing where he said autism “destroys families.” While there seem to be plenty of families that would welcome more support, as Jess has covered, Kennedy has also offended many people. What do you all think about Kennedy’s making autism the centerpiece of his early agenda? Why take on autism first over, say, obesity or cancer?
Douthat: I think it just reflects his particular interests and obsessions, and again, his obvious belief that there might be an explanation here — the vaccine theory, which again I think clearly lacks evidence — that the establishment is ignoring or covering up.
The one thing I’d say about the controversy over his remarks is that, yes, many people with autism diagnoses lead flourishing lives and see their families successfully adapt, but Kennedy isn’t wrong that the condition and others like it can be truly devastating, a tremendous cross to bear, in ways that do make causal explanations urgent. It’s just that, again, the causal explanation he wants reinvestigated seems to be clearly wrong.
Grose: But there are all sorts of disabilities that children have that are very difficult for families, and those families feel unseen and unsupported. I agree that our care systems don’t spend enough time, money or advocacy on those families, but it’s hard to take Kennedy’s concern seriously when he is absolutely gutting his own department.
Wallace-Wells: The thing that most struck me about his comments was what Jess emphasized at the top of her recent piece about it: the undertone of eugenics, and the suggestion that we should be much more hardhearted in applying measures of fitness to the population as a whole. This is something I’ve been writing about as a deeper shift in our social politics since the pandemic, with more people seeming to believe not just that the world is a dog-eat-dog place, but that it should be, and that building a genuine meritocracy means growing much less sensitive about, and attentive to, those we judge weak or even just ill-suited.
Sifferlin: It’s not hard to envision where this might be headed — it seems likely that Kennedy’s autism study will draw a connection to vaccines. Is there anything that can or should be done to prevent or respond to that inevitability?
Grose: I hold out minor hope that Republicans in the administration who have actual medical degrees will put the health of our country over party and say something. They are the only ones who can influence this, because anything mainstream doctors, science communicators or the journalists say will just be framed as a deep state/fake news conspiracy trying to suppress the truth.
Sifferlin: The Trump administration has cut the work force of H.H.S. by around a quarter. Are Kennedy’s MAHA goals even feasible with such cuts?
Douthat: If the MAHA goal is to try to somehow substitute wellness programs for treatment programs, then you could argue yes. But that idea of substitution, again, reflects the weakness of outsider theories: Instead of trying to supplement the medical establishment where it’s missing things or doing too little, they tend to want to replace or reject too many things the establishment gets right.
Grose: The No. 1 thing we could do to help more people is expand health care coverage — I think there’s a zero percent chance that happens under this administration. Maternal and child health programs have already been cut.
Sifferlin: No one’s job ever seems truly safe in a Trump administration, but how much does Trump still need Kennedy and his MAHA movement? Do you think he’s around for the long haul?
Douthat: If he just keeps saying controversial things, he can stick around for a long while, because there’s plenty of that to go around. If you get a real public health emergency, then he would become vulnerable in a hurry.
Grose: I don’t think anyone is ever permanently safe. I think if Kennedy angers the wrong business interest groups, that would also be bad for him — Trump seems to care only about the market response to policy. But as long as Kennedy is willing to smile and eat fast food next to the president, he can hold on.
Alexandra Sifferlin is a health and science editor for Times Opinion. Ross Douthat is an Opinion columnist, and Jessica Grose and David Wallace-Wells are Opinion writers.
Source photographs by Ash Ponders for The New York Times, and Mary Conlon/Associated Press
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast "Interesting Times with Ross Douthat." He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now."
The Missteps That Led to a Fatal Plane Crash at Reagan National Airport - The New York Times
Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash
"New details revealed by The Times show that the failures on Jan. 29 before an Army helicopter crashed into a jet near Reagan National Airport were far more complex than previously known.
By Kate Kelly and Mark Walker
The reporters reviewed government documents and audio recordings of the air traffic controllers leading up to the collision. They interviewed scores of experts, including pilots, government officials and current and former controllers. They reported from Washington.
As they flew south along the Potomac River on the gusty night of Jan. 29, the crew aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter attempted to execute a common aviation practice. It would play a role in ending their lives.
Shortly after the Black Hawk passed over Washington’s most famous array of cherry trees, an air traffic controller at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport alerted the crew to a regional passenger jet in its vicinity. The crew acknowledged seeing traffic nearby.
One of the pilots then asked for permission to employ a practice called “visual separation.” That allows a pilot to take control of navigating around other aircraft, rather than relying on the controller for guidance.
“Visual separation approved,” the controller replied.
The request to fly under those rules is granted routinely in airspace overseen by controllers. Most of the time, visual separation is executed without note. But when mishandled, it can also create a deadly risk — one that aviation experts have warned about for years.
On Jan. 29, the Black Hawk crew did not execute visual separation effectively. The pilots either did not detect the specific passenger jet the controller had flagged, or could not pivot to a safer position. Instead, one second before 8:48 p.m., the helicopter slammed into American Airlines Flight 5342, which was carrying 64 people to Washington from Wichita, Kan., killing everyone aboard both aircraft in a fiery explosion that lit the night sky over the river.
One error did not cause the worst domestic crash in the United States in nearly a quarter-century. Modern aviation is designed to have redundancies and safeguards that prevent a misstep, or even several missteps, from being catastrophic. On Jan. 29, that system collapsed.
“Multiple layers of safety precautions failed that night,” said Katie Thomson, the Federal Aviation Administration’s deputy administrator under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The New York Times examined public records and interviewed more than 50 aviation experts and officials, including some with extensive knowledge of the events, to piece together the most complete understanding yet of factors that contributed to the crash.
Up to now attention has focused on the Black Hawk’s altitude, which was too high and placed the helicopter directly in the jet’s landing path at National Airport. But The Times found new details that show that the failures were far more complex than previously known.
The helicopter crew appeared to have made more than one mistake. Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.
Radio communications, the tried-and-true means of interaction between controllers and pilots, also broke down. Some of the controller’s instructions were “stepped on” — meaning that they cut out when the helicopter crew pressed a microphone to speak — and important information likely went unheard.
Technology on the Black Hawk that would have allowed controllers to better track the helicopter was turned off. Doing so was Army protocol, meant to allow the pilots to practice secretly whisking away a senior government official in an emergency. But at least some experts believe that turning off the system deprived everyone involved of another safeguard.
The controller also could have done more.
Though he had delegated the prime responsibility for evading other air traffic to the Black Hawk crew under visual separation, he continued to monitor the helicopter, as his job required. Yet he did not issue clear, urgent instructions to the Black Hawk to avert the crash, aviation experts say.
These lapses happened against the backdrop of systemic deficiencies in U.S. aviation. The F.A.A. has struggled for years with low staffing among controllers, and the National Airport tower has been no exception. At the time of the crash, for reasons that remain murky, a single controller was working both helicopter traffic and commercial runway traffic — jobs that would typically be done by two controllers.
The F.A.A. said in a statement that it could not discuss “any aspect” of a continuing investigation led by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman, the Army’s director of aviation, said, “I think what we’ll find in the end is there were multiple things that, had any one of them changed, it could have well changed the outcome of that evening.” He, too, deferred detailed questions about the investigation to the N.T.S.B., adding that the Army was conducting its own reviews of the accident.
Investigators from the N.T.S.B. will issue their final report on the causes of the crash by early 2026.
In the meantime, data recently analyzed by the board revealed that National Airport was the site of at least one near collision between an airplane and a helicopter each month from 2011 to 2024. Two-thirds of the incidents occurred at night, and more than half may have involved helicopters flying above their maximum designated altitude.
Given those findings, the F.A.A. recently banned most helicopter flights along a portion of the route the Black Hawk used.
Hillcrest
Heights
Last recorded
locations
Reagan National Airport
Plane was
headed to
Runway 33
Aurora
Highlands
And, critically, the F.A.A. has also vastly limited the use of visual separation.
The maneuver is primarily used by pilots flying helicopters and smaller aircraft, and is used less frequently for commercial jets. When using visual separation, pilots take responsibility for noticing and steering clear of neighboring air traffic if certain conditions, like good visibility, are met. It has long been viewed in the industry as essential to keeping traffic moving.
But the occasional difficulty for pilots to see and avoid nearby air traffic has also been implicated in at least 40 fatal collisions since 2010, according to the N.T.S.B. It has led to stern safety warnings to pilots from both the F.A.A. and the N.T.S.B.
Human error, blind spots not evident from a cockpit and environmental conditions “leave even the most diligent pilot vulnerable to the threat of a midair collision with an unseen aircraft” under this maneuver, the N.T.S.B. wrote in a safety bulletin published in 2016.
The practice of allowing pilots to navigate around traffic on their own “has long been seen as a flawed concept but a necessary one,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigator for both the F.A.A. and the N.T.S.B. “But it has been linked to a number of deadly midair incidents throughout the years.”
Two Departures, Six Minutes Apart
At 6:39 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, a CRJ700 regional jet departed Wichita under cool, dry conditions with 60 passengers, two pilots and two flight attendants on board. It was operated by American Airlines’s subsidiary carrier, PSA Airlines, and the direct route to National Airport had started the previous January.
Capt. Jonathan J. Campos, a 34-year-old raised in Brooklyn who had wanted to fly since an early age, was the pilot. Sam Lilley, a 28-year-old former marketer whose father had been an Army Black Hawk pilot, was the first officer.
National Airport is one of only five airports in the United States that the F.A.A. designates as complex because of high density.
It is one of 57 airports in the United States that has a special-qualification designation from the F.A.A., according to an agency document reviewed by The Times. Nearly all of the remaining airports, such as those in Durango, Colo., or Missoula, Mont., are included because of hazardous mountainous terrain that pilots must navigate during takeoffs and landings, or because they are smaller airports without radar or a control tower.
“You have to have an aggressive defensive posture coming into DCA,” said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association who is also an American Airlines pilot, using the call sign for National Airport. “You have to take your A-game and add a plus to it.”
Six minutes after Flight 5342 departed, the Black Hawk took off from Davison Army Airfield, at Fort Belvoir, Va., about 20 miles southwest of Washington.
The crew was ordered to fly about 40 miles north of the base to a suburb near Gaithersburg, Md., where it would turn around and head back to Virginia.
The crew’s mission was to conduct an annual evaluation of Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, who joined the Army in 2019, to ensure that her helicopter piloting skills were up to par.
That night, her assignment was to navigate the conditions of a scenario in which members of Congress or other senior government officials might need to be carried out of the nation’s capital during an attack.
Captain Lobach was the highest-ranking soldier on the helicopter, but Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, who was acting as her instructor, had flown more than twice as many hours over time.
A third crew member, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, whose job was to help with equipment and other technical issues, sat in the back.
Captain Lobach, who was sitting in the front left seat, was initially handling the radio communications. To her right working the controls was Warrant Officer Eaves, a former Navy petty officer who joined the Army, according to his brother Forrest Eaves, because it would train him and permit him to fly helicopters.
Investigators believe Captain Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves were wearing night-vision goggles, which were required attire for this type of evaluation. Goggles allow exponentially enhanced visibility of nearby people and objects, which is helpful at night in complex surroundings. But urban lights can also become cripplingly bright, according to military pilots.
Despite differences in rank and the delineation of duties, all three Black Hawk crew members bore responsibility for searching the sky for other aircraft and helping to stay clear of them.
A Blip Every Five to 12 Seconds
Sitting in the control hub of the National Airport tower that night, an air traffic controller watched the lighted dots on the radar scope in front of him.
His colleagues’ air-traffic instructions punctuated the ambient noise as he directed aircraft by radio. A little after 8:30 p.m., an Army helicopter, known in the tower as a “P.A.T.” for priority air transport, made contact with him.
The controller had worked for the F.A.A. for about a decade in two smaller air-traffic control centers, but had been stationed at National Airport for about two years, according to government employee filings. The controller, whom The Times is not identifying because his name has not been publicly revealed as part of the investigation, did not respond to requests for comment.
Like his colleagues in the tower, he typically worked one control duty at a time, such as directing just helicopters, or only handling airplanes on taxiways. He worked about seven hours that day, according to a government document reviewed by The Times. The F.A.A. says all controllers get required breaks.
But after a co-worker left the control hub at 3:40 p.m., some controllers began to assume combined duties. The controller who ended up directing the Black Hawk took over combined duties at roughly 7 p.m., according to the government document. An N.T.S.B. spokesman declined to confirm how long the controller operated in both roles.
Such a combination was not unusual, and was approved that evening by a tower supervisor, according to a person briefed on the staffing. But the roles were not typically combined until traffic slowed many hours later, around 9:30 p.m.
Though the reasons why the supervisor combined the duties so early are still not clear, the F.A.A. would later say in an internal report that staffing was “not normal” that evening.
By the time both the Army Black Hawk and Flight 5342 were in radio contact with the controller — starting about 8:43 p.m. — five controllers were working different duties in the control hub of the tower.
In addition to doing two jobs at once, the controller faced another complicating factor that night: He could not watch the helicopter’s movements in real time.
Doing so would have required the use of an aviation broadcasting system called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Out, or ADS-B Out, which reports an aircraft’s position, altitude and speed roughly every second.
But the Black Hawk did not operate with the technology because of the confidentiality of the mission for which the crew was practicing. That is because ADS-B Out positions can be obtained by anyone with an internet connection, making the system a potential risk to national security.
As a result, the controller relied on pings from the helicopter’s transponder to show its changing location, which can take between five and 12 seconds to refresh, according to F.A.A. documents.
Aviation experts said that during that gap, the aircraft could change course or elevation, making for a concerning level of uncertainty.
In a busy airspace, that lapse, said Michael McCormick, a former vice president of the F.A.A. Air Traffic Organization, is “a very long time.”
General Braman said the fact that ADS-B Out was turned off “played no role in this accident” because the transponder meant that the Black Hawk could be seen on the radar and “was never invisible.”
Some federal lawmakers have strongly disagreed.
During a contentious Senate hearing on March 27, Chris Rocheleau, the F.A.A.’s acting administrator, announced that the technology would be required on all flights near National Airport — though with some as-yet-undefined exceptions.
Little Margin for Error
Near the end of his shift, the controller handling both helicopters and commercial jets tried to pull off a complicated, and potentially risky, maneuver called a squeeze play.
This is an attempt to keep operations moving efficiently, according to veteran National Airport controllers, by tightly sequencing runway traffic with minimal time between takeoffs or landings.
In this case, the plan was to let one airplane depart from Runway 1 at about 8:47 and let another land on the same runway about a minute later.
Shortly thereafter, the controller needed to bring Flight 5342 in for a landing.
But to fit in the Wichita flight without interrupting the flow of other traffic, the controller made a request that was permissible but atypical, according to the N.T.S.B. He asked to divert its landing to one of the airport’s ancillary runways, a spot normally used by smaller aircraft because of its shorter length.
“Can you take Runway three-three?” the controller asked the pilots.
His request would require Mr. Campos and Mr. Lilley to adjust their route during the final stage of their flight, introducing a wrinkle at the end of a two-hour journey. But commercial pilots train for such maneuvers, and having just passed over Mount Vernon in Virginia, about 10 miles from National Airport, they still had time to make the shift.
After a beat, one of the pilots replied. “Yeah, we can do, uh, three-three,” he said.
The pilots began the process of rerouting the flight to the new runway, which intersected Runway 1 at an acute angle in the middle.
Runway 33 had an additional quirk: a particularly narrow vertical space between the landing slope for a jet and the maximum altitude at which helicopters using a certain route, called Route 4, could fly.
At an altitude of 200 feet within the designated route, helicopters fly at 75 feet below airplanes approaching Runway 33. This vertical separation decreases if helicopters are farther from the eastern bank of the river.
Flight 5342’s last
recorded position
Safe approach area
Helicopter
route
At its highest, near the Potomac’s east bank, the vertical distance between a helicopter and an aircraft en route to landing on Runway 33 would be 75 feet, N.T.S.B. investigators said. But if a helicopter were flying farther from the river’s east bank toward the airport, that distance would be even less.
That is one reason why, after the crash, the N.T.S.B. recommended banning helicopter flights on Route 4 when Runway 33 at National Airport is in use.
Jennifer Homendy, the N.T.S.B. chairwoman, said in a March 11 press briefing that those distances “are insufficient and pose an intolerable risk to aviation safety by increasing the chances of a midair collision at DCA.”
With so little margin for error — 75 feet or even less — it would be crucial that the Black Hawk fly below the maximum altitude for the route.
Aboard the Black Hawk that night a curious exchange occurred between the two pilots.
Captain Lobach, who by that point had assumed the controls, announced an altitude of 300 feet, according to cockpit voice recordings. Warrant Officer Eaves then read out an altitude of 400 feet.
The exact time that passed between the statements has not been detailed in N.T.S.B. reports, but records suggest that it was no longer than 39 seconds. And experienced helicopter pilots say that given the ease of mobility in a Black Hawk, the altitude could have changed in fractions of seconds.
But the discrepancy, which neither pilot commented on at the time, was potentially significant.
The F.A.A. mandated an altitude of no higher than 300 feet for that part of the route, meaning that an altitude of 400 feet would have been unacceptable and could have positioned the Black Hawk uncomfortably close to departing or landing airplanes.
By about 8:44 p.m., it seemed to be in a more appropriate spot.
As the helicopter approached the Key Bridge, from which it would fly south along the river, Warrant Officer Eaves stated that it was at 300 feet and descending to 200 feet — necessary because the maximum height for its route closer to the airport had dropped to 200 feet.
But even as it reached that juncture, Warrant Officer Eaves evidently felt obligated to repeat his instruction: The Black Hawk was at 300 feet, he said, and needed to descend.
Captain Lobach said she would. But two and a half minutes later, the Black Hawk still was above 200 feet — a dangerously high level.
‘Threading the Needle’
Seconds after the Black Hawk crossed over the Tidal Basin, a shallow lake near the Washington Monument ringed by cherry trees, the controller informed the Army crew that a regional jet — Flight 5342 — was “circling” to Runway 33.
Aviation experts said that development may have blindsided Captain Lobach.
Though she had flown four or five similar practice rides there over the years, she might have never confronted a landing on Runway 33, because it is used only 4 to 5 percent of the time.
In any case, investigators now believe that the word “circling” was not heard by the Black Hawk crew because one of them was pressing the microphone key to speak when the word came through their radios. If the key is depressed, the pilot can speak but not hear incoming communications.
Around 8:46 p.m., Warrant Officer Eaves responded to whatever he did hear of the circle-landing notification, using the call sign for his own flight: “PAT two-five has traffic in sight. Request visual separation.”
The controller gave his approval.
Visual separation is at the crux of an aviation concept known as see and avoid, which works exactly as it sounds. A pilot is meant to see neighboring air traffic, often without assistance from the controller, and avoid it by either hovering in place until the traffic passes or by flying around it in prescribed ways.
See-and-avoid flying is commonplace in aviation. At many tiny airports, with no controllers, there is no alternative. In busy airspaces, such as parts of National Airport’s, the helicopter’s altitude limits are too low for controllers to easily assist it in maneuvering around obstacles such as ships or tall buildings, while also keeping it clear of air traffic.
The F.A.A. said in its statement that “pilots are responsible for keeping themselves safely separated from other aircraft.”
Nonetheless, even when a helicopter is operating under see-and-avoid rules, if the controller notices it is converging into another aircraft’s path, he or she should — under F.A.A. rules — call out the existence of the nearby traffic and ask the helicopter to affirm that it has the aircraft in sight.
At that point, the helicopter crew should acknowledge that it sees the traffic and can request visual separation — asking permission to stay clear of the nearby aircraft — which the controller can grant or refuse. Or, if the crew says that it does not see the traffic, the controller will likely direct the helicopter to a safer position.
One benefit of the see-and-avoid system is that it can lighten the controller’s workload during busy periods. But see and avoid has proved problematic, even fatal, in recent decades.
In 2019, two airplanes collided above Ketchikan, Alaska, killing six people and injuring 10 others. Three years later, two helicopters collided above San Diego, but there were no casualties. The N.T.S.B. cited failed see-and-avoid efforts in both cases.
One risk is that the pilots will miscalculate which way the other aircraft is moving; another is identifying the wrong aircraft.
John Goglia, a former N.T.S.B. board member, put it plainly: See and avoid assumes that every pilot has sharp vision and can pick out the right aircraft in the direction they have been told to look. But instructions are not always clear, he said. And tools like night-vision goggles can sometimes cloud vision more than clarify it.
Put two planes in roughly the same patch of sky, and even the most attentive pilot might track the wrong one, Mr. Goglia said.
During a recent press briefing on the crash, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, criticized the practice of allowing helicopters to use visual separation in confined airspaces like the one near National Airport.
“Having helicopters fly under landing aircraft, and allowing helicopter pilots to say, ‘I’ll maintain visual separation’ — that is not going to happen anymore,” he said. “That is too risky. You’re threading the needle. And it’s going to stop.”
In the 90 seconds after the air traffic controller granted visual separation to the Black Hawk, the attempted squeeze play started to unfold. At 8:46:48 p.m. the tower cleared a jet for immediate departure off Runway 1.
Then, the Black Hawk, still southbound, passed Hains Point, a park area along the east side of the Potomac, moving it closer to the airport on the opposite bank.
At the same time, Flight 5342 began a leftward turn toward Runway 33. It was flying at about 500 feet and the equivalent of around 153 miles per hour.
At 8:47:39 p.m., the controller contacted the helicopter.
“PAT two-five, do you have the CRJ in sight?” he asked, using the abbreviation for the model of Flight 5342’s aircraft.
As he spoke, a conflict alert — which controllers described as a distinctive beeping sound — was audible in the tower behind him, according to the N.T.S.B. report. A warning light, controllers said, would also have been flashing on the radar scope.
Conflict alerts are not rare. Controllers say they can go off numerous times over a long shift, to the point that they risk losing their urgency.
The controller received no response. The helicopter and Flight 5342 were by then about one mile apart.
The controller then issued an instruction to the helicopter crew: Pass behind the airplane.
Cockpit voice recordings indicate that the essence of the controller’s command — to “pass behind” — might not have been heard by the Black Hawk crew, perhaps because of a second bleep-out.
Some former military pilots said that by issuing a proactive command to pass behind the jet, the controller was going above and beyond his obligations, especially under see-and-avoid conditions, and that an experienced Black Hawk crew should have known what to do without help.
Still, some regulators and controllers said that the controller in this case could have done more.
He could have told the Black Hawk crew where Flight 5342 was positioned and which way it was bound. (The F.A.A. manual instructions direct controllers to use the hours of a clock in describing locations.) He could have provided the jet’s distance from the helicopter in nautical miles or feet.
But one thing is critical. When two aircraft are on a collision course, the controller’s top priority must be to warn both sets of pilots.
“Advise the pilots if the targets appear likely to merge,” F.A.A. regulations state.
That did not happen.
Direct, immediate intervention was needed that night. Instead of seeing and avoiding Flight 5342, Captain Lobach continued flying straight at it.
Investigators might never know why. There is no indication that she was suffering from health issues at the time or that a medical event affected her during those final moments aboard the Black Hawk, according to friends and people familiar with the crash investigation, which included autopsies and performance log reviews.
Two seconds after the controller’s cut out instruction about passing behind the jet, Warrant Officer Eaves replied, affirming for the second time that the Black Hawk saw the traffic.
“PAT two-five has the aircraft in sight. Request visual separation,” he said.
“Vis sep approved,” the controller replied.
It was their last communication.
The Black Hawk was 15 seconds away from crossing paths with the jet. Warrant Officer Eaves then turned his attention to Captain Lobach.
He told her he believed that 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.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Kate Kelly covers money, policy and influence for The Times.
Mark Walker is an investigative reporter focused on transportation. He is based in Washington."
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