The D.C. Aviation Disaster and Trump's Funding Freeze Fiasco - EVEN MORE NEWS AD-FREE

Please continue to make the videos that feel important to you all. There will be no shortage of important news and heartbreaking developments. We must speak up for each other! I trust you all to make great choices of topics- you have done so for years. I haven’t missed a word; thank you!

Chelsea Mullen

Fed employee here. Many feel the fork email is a trap. Right now, there is only a govt budget until March, so is there funding to pay anyone who takes the offer until Sept? We then received emails saying “we promise this is real and you will be paid even if there’s a lapse in appropriation.” Then, some received emails saying they were in jobs that couldn’t accept the fork offer. THEN some received emails saying that if they take the fork offer, their whole position is cut, leaving more work to fewer people. Then of course, those who don’t take it get to live in fear that more memos come out eliminating their job some other way. All these emails came directly from OPM, from some external servers the new team randomly connected. So all the emails are marked “external” and are unencrypted. Many reported the emails as phishing since it looks like classic phishing or social engineering.

M R

Listening to this in the future where we found out one person on the helicopter was a woman and her parents tried to hide her name for fear of repercussions from MAGAs after Trump's DEI blaming.

Gretchen Hintz

Pete I'm over by Easton and in some talks with folks at NCCC. We should try to connect and/or coordinate as I imagine more colleges are going to be dealing with this.

Armando Moritz-Chapelliquen

From the Lehigh Valley in PA - apparently ICE showed up near my alma mater and detained/cuffed/“took downtown” one of the students. Details are sparse (the student editor wanted to protect the victim) but I expect this is going to continue to happen indiscriminately in my area. https://muhlenbergweekly.com/news/muhlenberg-student-picked-up-by-ice/ https://muhlenbergweekly.com/news/a-letter-from-the-editor-reporting-of-recent-ice-article/ (student editor did a good job linking to red cards from the ILRC if anyone wants them) Stay safe and strong, everyone

Pete Barry

That isn't a good strategy because the more our society collapses, the harder it'll be to clean up the mess. Widespread confusion and desperation will make Americans more dependent on the Trump administration, regardless of whether they voted for him or not. We should try to defend government services if we can, and if they get dismantled we should build community services to meet that need (like the Black Panthers free breakfast program or the Jane Collective abortion services).

Andrew Carkner

Also the fault of DEI: 9/11, COVID, cancer, the Kennedy assassination, WWI & II, the Crusades, and the extinction of the dinosaurs

Vance

Listening from PA to tell you that this podcast was recorded too early to cover the *other* plane crash that just happened in NE Philly. Stay safe everyone

Armando Moritz-Chapelliquen

Steven Smith

You guys criticize democrats because you have or appear to me to have integrity and conviction for your values. Unlike alot of people in this world.

Incredibleplum

I am not as worried as my wife is about the state of this country, nevertheless we are currently shopping countries to move to in the next 5 to 10 years, seriously. We have no intention of being “good Germans“ when this fucking dumbed down bloated corpse of what remains of anything decent of America (of which there was little to begin with when you consider our roots) goes full Nazi. We have seen this story before, and I am not going to be the dumb fuck who didn’t learn from history.

Steve Snyder

Air Traffic Controller here, for airspace comparable to where the recent tragedy just happened. This is entirely my own opinion, not representing anything official in the slightest, just putting out my own perspective on the whole situation. The attempts at politics from both sides on this issue are extremely upsetting. Yes, Trump's cuts to aviation safety related things are not good but they have nothing to do with this horrible accident. DEI had absolutely nothing to do with it either. When politics get involved with this sort of thing it only makes safety more compromised, let the NTSB do their jobs and find out where the failures were, then make the required changes. This APPEARS to be an incredibly sad mistake made by the pilot of the helicopter compounded by the situation involved. From the information I've been able to seen(which is pretty much what's available to the public as the FAA recordings were leaked very quickly) the most likely causes seem to be the helicopter being higher than they should be for the route they were on(the route specifies below 200 feet, the transponder on the helicopter appeared to read 300 feet at the time of the crash) and confusion about which aircraft they were meant to be avoiding. If you listen to the available audio you hear the controller twice ask the pilot if he has the CRJ in sight and then approves the requested visual separation from the pilot. Visual Separation is a technical term in aviation where the pilot assumes responsibility for separating themselves from the aircraft in question. This was a night flight over a busy metropolitan area with lots of lights everywhere, so my best guess would be the pilot either saw a different plane on approach and was preparing to maintain visual separation from that aircraft OR the lights below in the city might have also led to confusion. I've also read that the training mission may have involved night vision goggles being worn in the cockpit and those claims seem to indicate that those goggles can have an effect on depth perception. So that may also have been a factor. Ultimately the point is this, the FAA and Controllers have been raising alarms about staffing and safety since before I started my career nearly 20 years ago. Neither party has handled it with their time in office to any significant degree. Changes to committees in the last couple weeks did not create this safety issue with routes that have been used and flown for even longer than I have been a controller, DEI absolutely has nothing to do with this even more than any of the above issue. This was a failure in the procedures and execution for this specific situation, the NTSB will do its job and hopefully make sure it never happens again. I can say a lot to fill in questions about the whole privatization situation(which i strongly oppose) is if people are interested, but thats a whole different thing.

Vilacom