Trump blames soldier for deadly air crash: 'You can stop a helicopter very quickly'
President Donald Trump appeared to blame the soldier who was flying a U.S. Army helicopter for a deadly collision with an American Airlines passenger jet.
The president offered some speculation about the cause of the crash – which he variously blamed on his predecessors and Democrats in general, as well as air traffic controllers and programs aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion programs – and he speculated about the circumstances leading to the crash that appeared to cast blame on the Black Hawk pilot.
"You had a situation where you had a helicopter that had the ability to stop," Trump said. "I have helicopters, you can stop a helicopter very quickly. It had the ability to go up or down, it had the ability to turn, and the turn it made was not the correct turn, obviously, and it did somewhat the opposite of what it was told. So don't know that that would have been the difference, because the timing was so tight. It was so, it was so little, there was so little time to think. But what you did have is you had vision, the helicopter had vision of the plane because you had vision of it all the way – perfect vision of it all the way from Kennedy Center, where the tape was taken, and for some reason, there weren't adjustments made."
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"Again, you could have slowed down the helicopter substantially, you could have stopped the helicopter," Trump added. "You could have gone up, you could have gone down. You could have gone straight up, straight down, you could have turned – you could have done a million different maneuvers. For some reason, it just kept going and then made a slight turn at the very end, and there was by that time it was too late. They shouldn't have been at the same height, because if it wasn't the same height, you could have gone under it or over it, and nobody realized or they didn't say that it's at the same height. It would still wouldn't have been great, but you would have missed it by quite a bit. It could have been 1,000 feet higher, it could have been 200 feet lower, but it was exactly at the same height, and somebody should have been able to point that out."
The president then justified his baseless speculation, saying that his opinions were simply common sense and valid before investigators gather and review the evidence.
"So all of this is going to be studied, but it just seems to me from a couple of words that I like to use, the words 'common sense,'" Trump said. "Some really bad things happened and some things happened that shouldn't have happened, so you had a helicopter going in an identical direction. You had a helicopter that was at the exact same height as somebody going in essentially the opposite direction. You had a plane that was following a track, which is a track that every other plane followed, and I don't imagine, I know I've heard today that they might have been following the preceding plane, which was pretty close, but not that close, the preceding plane. But you wouldn't have even been able to see that because of the direction that the helicopter was coming in at, so you had a confluence of of bad decisions that were made."
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