Though the National Transportation Safety Board has just begun investigating the mid-air collision over DC last Wednesday that killed 67 people, we already know the cause: wishful thinking.
Elected officials demand the impossible when it suits them. In this case, the problem wasn’t too little faith in supposedly sclerotic, inept government agencies, but too much.
The Washington elite put blind faith in the idea that things would all work out, somehow, even though they were putting themselves in mortal danger.
Unlike the United States’ last major plane crash, which killed 50 in upstate New York 16 years ago, this one can’t be blamed on the airline.
American Airlines Flight 5342 took off from Wichita, Kan., at 5:22 p.m. and, by 8:48 p.m., had seven minutes left to its estimated arrival time when it began to descend on a clear path to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.
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