In any case my heart goes out to the controller and their colleagues.

There are a lot more complexities involving ATC for Military and ATC for Civilian Airlines than people are commenting.....
Different controllers, different systems, different radio channels, different radar idents, etc etc etc.
Here is a You Tube with some of the problems there could have been with those "things" on this crash:

/s

Also, he's not autistic. He's simply a psycho. IMHO.

Musk shows zero signs of having a conscience, morals, ethics, empathy for others, or concern for anything other than his own welfare. Just like Trump.

No wonder they "get" each other. Like attracts like.

...

Trump caused this.

Buttigieg Blasts Trump’s “Despicable Lies” About Crash
January 30, 2025 Trump Corruption, Trump Lies

“Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.” – Pete Buttigieg.

Hat tip to joemygod.com

According to Sec. Buttigieg, the ATC was fully staffed when Biden left office just a couple weeks ago and the reason it was understaffed that night was because Trump fired the other person who would have been on duty.

Does anyone know the name of the fired ATC controller who wasn't there?

Anybody finds this ironic? The senile pos made flying more risky with deregulations and the way he treated air traffic controllers. Dump is far worse so I expect more catastrophes to happen.

Now, we're dealing with the massively more toxic Turnip maladministration. More lives sure to be lost.

After being pro-union as an actor, he switched over to the Republican view of "unions are evil" and he laid off all of the air traffic controllers.

So he was representing management and labor at the same time, and he knew too well which side his bread would be buttered on in the future. Older actors like Bob Hope and the Marx Brothers got the shaft, which is why Groucho ended up broke in old age. RR got SAG to sign an agreement giving actors very small residuals when movies made before a certain date were broadcast, which is why local stations aired so many old movies over and over; actors who started their careers later get bigger residuals because their movies were made after TV was already a going concern and movie contracts were likely to reflect that.

(Bob Hope was rich in his old age, but that was because he invested in CA real estate years before prices grew so high. His movies didn't provide him much money when they aired.)

"In October 1947 Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as a ‘friendly’ witness. HUAC members asked Reagan, then the sitting president of the Screen Actors Guild, if communists had ever interfered in the Guild’s activities:"

And oh boy did he have a lot of names to give.

https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/ronald-reagan-testifies-huac-1947/

What a shitbag. 😡

The harm be has caused just keeps happening.

Seems appropriate.

I thought the renaming was ironic and I was even political back then.

On this will tell us everything.

If there had been another controller *just* handling the helicopter, what might have been done differently?

When helo pilot confirms visual, should ATC ask "are you sure?" and say "y'know, there are 2 planes, right?" and maybe even "confirm altitude".

Is that what they're suggesting?

I know it requires a lot of training, but there's no reason to cap the age at 31.

And increase the application age. Maybe you get 10-15 good years out of some people instead of just eliminating them.

But this assumes that all the jobs are posted and not getting filled.

Seriously, it's a job where if you're having just a normal bad day, didn't sleep well the night before and make a careless mistake, you could kill hundreds of people. Would you like that kind of responsibility? Not me. And THAT'S why it's so tough to staff.

There are a lot of small airports. In theory you can move some of those people to the bigger ones. But I'm no expert in ATC staffing.

Who would want this job, especially the grief Trump is giving workers?

The skills necessary to become a good air traffic controller begin to deteriorate naturally after 35. FAA determined hiring cutoff date of age 30 many years ago. If you haven’t got the knack for rapid mental calculations by that time, it’s tough to teach it to you.

Source: me. I did the job for 25 years.

exceeding its goal by 11. This also marks the largest number hires in nearly a decade."

Said the Reagan tower only had two thirds of the staff they needed and that a single ATC was working both helicopters and airplanes which is supposed to be the work of two different people.

a crisis that Trump clearly mismanaged during his first term.

and four years ago, and three, two, and one years ago, and six months ago, and last week. A good friend of mine just got over a severe case. (Although I know the poster was referring to the height of the pandemic…)

we still don't know the cause of the collision - it may have been an ATC failure, it may have been instrument/mechanical failure, it could have been pilot error etc.

And he was supposed to avoid the landing plane

Anyhow, as much as a lot of folks would like to (including myself BTW), looks like it will be hard to pin this on Trump.

So it's altitude was known and the flight corridor for helicopters is available online and that section is a 200 Max altitude, and the accident happened between 300 and 400 ft.

Sadly both the Pilots looking out the windshield trying to find the nearby traffic might have kept them from monitoring their flight altitude as close as they should have.

Sounds like a plausible explanation alright.

I feel awful for the air traffic controller too! Haven't heard anyone on CNN or MSNBC mention that person's psychological welfare.

Please turn off all portable electronic devices and stow them until we have arrived at the gate.

In preparation for landing, be certain your seat back is straight up and your seat belt is fastened.

Also, please be aware that due to budget cuts by the current administration, all airports are severely understaffed, and of the few remaining in [city], many have already worked over 60 hours in the last five days, so they're a bit on the tired side.

On second thought, forget what I said about electronic devices, your seat back position, and fastening your seat belt".

The air traffic control room scenes are terrifying.

It's his specialty.

Trump's executive order that instructed the federal government to make no more disbursements until he approves them included stopping salaries for air traffic controllers.

I don't believe any salaries of Federal employees were stopped

-Roy Cohn, attorney

Much of what is wrong with the government today can be traced back to 1981 and ronald raygun.

For example, in 1981, when air traffic controllers went on strike, he fired 11,000 of them, out of maybe 13,000 in an anti-labor union move that has continued until these days in the republican party: corporations and bosses good, unions and workers bad.

He leaves them speechless with the facts every time..

I dont think the tower did anything wrong. Confirmed helicopter had visual and would and would deconflict with plane.

Probably standard there.

More then likely they saw they plane behind the PSA Airlines jet in the pattern.

Sadly I suspect if they had spend more time monitoring alt and less looking for traffic they would have passed under the plane, the max alt for helos in the section is 200ft and the plane was at 300ft+ I believe at the time of crash.

Helicopter training joy rides into the mix. Nighttime no less.

This mishap will hopefully force a new look at the way military aircraft use civilian airspace.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_28

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_Airlines_Flight_300

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_537

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Airwest_Flight_706

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_Pacoima_mid-air_collision

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Air_Lines_Flight_736

And when this happens in Japan, people resign
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Nippon_Airways_Flight_58

And GOP budgets have chronically underfunded this.

How did the NY Times get one in 24 hrs?

https://www.youtube.com/live/d860IiUhaWo?t=364s

according to reporting today.

I hope that doesn't apply equally to every control tower. Might be okay in rural Montana but not at DCA, etc.