“Thoughts On The Sad Fate Of Flight 5956”
Friends who work in the air, a local victim and the imbecilic response from a so-called leader have all been on my mind
As an admitted news junkie I learned of this week’s tragic midair collision fairly early. I was, per usual, click clacking away on my keyboard with “The Source with Kaitlan (side note, is there any name spelled more different ways?) Collins” on television in the background when I was alerted to “Breaking News.”
It was shocking, of course. A plane crash at Washington’s Reagan Airport. I flashed on a childhood memory of another DC air tragedy, in January of 1982 an Air Florida jet crashed into the 14th Street Bridge thirty seconds after takeoff. A jet in the icy Potomac River is something a kid remembers.
The next update was even more jarring, that this jet had been in a midair collision with a Blackhawk helicopter. Another instant memory flash. I lived in Washington, DC for a year and helicopters always seemed almost as common as taxi’s, any resident of the Capitol will tell you they are just an ubiquitous presence. I learned while writing this there are 100 helicopter flights in proximity to Reagan Airport (which was built to accommodate 15 million passengers a year and now services over 25) everyday.
As I watched this tragedy unfold I thought of friends who make a living in the normally friendly skies.
The first person that came to my mind was a friend I have known since elementary school that I have been in increased touch with since he made a very generous donation to our Konsideration housing initiative who is a commercial airline pilot. He was a sharp and funny kid and he’s a sharp and funny adult, and my first thought was how awful it must be to have this sort of thing happen in such a specific high performance industry. It’s a pretty select group of people who do what he does.
One of my high school pals is employed as the pilot for one wealthy person’s private plane. He and I have had our share of adventures and the last time I saw him was when I was living in Cambridge and he hit me because he’d just flown up to Hanscom Field in Bedford (the same airport the Celtics, Bruins and Red Sox charters usually use). The initial reports this week referred to the plane being small which insinuated that it was a private plane so he was on my mind.
Finally, the guy who lived next door to me in my freshman dorm at Niagara has been a flight attendant for over thirty years. I know very few people who genuinely love their job as much as this dude does, which is a testament to his patience because I have flown enough to have witnessed how rude some passengers can be to these people. I thought of him instantly when they said the flight was carrying a crew of four.
In the aftermath I took some small point of selfish solace in the idea that it was unlikely I’d be personally affected by the poor souls lost on a flight from Wichita to DC. Then, of course, I learned there were six members of the Skating Club of Boston including Jinna and Jin Han, a 13 year-old girl and her mother from Mansfield, MA. The corner of Attleboro where I grew up was close enough to Mansfield (perhaps best known as the home of the Great Woods Amphitheater) that as kids my friends and I would ride our bikes to the Country Store there and buy penny candy.
It was located next to the commuter rail train tracks and there was a tunnel beneath the tracks that we would race up and down in screaming like lunatics to hear the echos. It broke my heart to imagine Jenna’s friends doing that but forever missing one howling and laughing voice.
The whole thing is so overwhelmingly sad but you can always count on the resident clown of Pennsylvania Avenue to take your mind off the ugliness of the real world by saying something uglier. Politicizing a plane crash is an appallingly despicable new low which most certainly doesn't speak to "common sense" on any level. Blaming this on three administrations ago? The administration this current imbecile questioned with his “birther” bullshit? That speaks a lot more loudly to the sort of racism that gave birth to the MAGA movement than DEI initiatives do to a plane crash.
The response when asked if he was going to visit the crash site- “What for? To look at the water?” - was also pathetically unpresidential. No point in thanking first responders who can’t write you six figure checks, right? It’s nothing if not illuminating to witness a so-called leader demonstrating abject selfishness in the face of overwhelming sadness.
