Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) tore down President Donald Trump's speculation that the Washington, D.C. collision between an American Airlines regional jet and a Black Hawk helicopter was the result of "diversity" programs in an interview with CNN's Jim Sciutto on Thursday.
Kelly, who served as a Naval pilot and flew Space Shuttle missions for NASA before getting into politics, noted how complicated these kinds of disasters can be, and that there is rarely a single cause behind them.
"Senator, thanks so much for taking the time," said Sciutto. "I would, to begin, like to draw on your extensive experience of a pilot right up from the Space Shuttle, test pilot, fighter jet — when you look at the data, as it's known, with the proviso that it is early, and I'm not asking you to come to any final conclusions, but what stands out to you about what happened here? And what do you think investigators should be focused on?"
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"Let me start by saying, what the president said is some wild speculation that's not anchored in any reality," said Kelly.
"Aviation accidents are often very complicated and it's usually not one thing," he continued. "It's usually a series of things, a chain of events that — where things start to go wrong, and it just cascades from one thing to another. So it's likely that when the NTSB does their job — and they're really, really good at this, you know, figuring out what's the cause of an accident, and then what do we need to do about it? We'll probably find out that it was a number of things."
"In an accident like this, there's a lot that could go wrong," Kelly added. "It could be, you know, some things could happen with the flight control team, also on board the helicopter or the airplane. There could be equipment failure. There could be somebody not following, you know, standard procedure or flight rules. But I would say, as somebody who's been involved in investigations, the Columbia Space Shuttle accident investigation is a really complex one — they all tend to be rather complicated, and it's generally not one thing, and it certainly isn't, you know, this broad policy that actually might not even be true about hiring."
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