Why was the Army blocking the name of the pilot who flew a Blackhawk helicopter into a passenger plane?
The lack of information fuels the very “conspiracy theories” that the Left love to debunk.
Then we learn that the conspiracy was real.
Initially, it was said that the pilot was a transgender woman. Now that theory is being challenged. But when I first heard that, I thought, “Didn’t President Trump get rid of all of them?” But who knows how long it takes for a directive to catch up with the troops.
One thing is for sure: we have residual Biden-era Army communications personnel still in charge. Because an Army with Hegseth as Secretary of Defense should have no problem giving us the straight (oops) scoop immediately.
Not even one full month ago, we were made privy to military performance evaluations that paint Hegseth’s “outstanding” leadership skills as belonging to someone known as “an incredibly talented, battle-proven leader” with years of military service, “including deployments to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
What makes this story all the more intriguing is that the while the Army refused to name the pilot of the aircraft, they disclosed the names of the two other soldiers in the chopper who died, and said the woman’s family requested her identity be withheld from the public.
The Army on Friday formally identified Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, 28, and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, 39, as the two other service members who were on the Black Hawk helicopter when it went down in the fiery crash into the Potomac River.
“At the request of the family, the name of the third soldier will not be released at this time,” the Army Public Affairs wrote on their website.
Of course, this is the information age. So it didn’t take a full day to identify crew member number three. Captain Rebecca Lobach.
RIP Eaves, O’Hara, and Lobach.
All we know at this point is that the pilot was a woman. And this woman appears to have made a gross error in flying her helicopter into a passenger plane killing 67 people.
When the Army refused to give us a name, they wanted to make sure to tell us how much experience she had.
The unidentified soldier was an experienced pilot with more than 500 hours of flying experience, the Telegraph reported, citing Jonathan Koziol, chief of staff of the army’s aviation directorate.
Yet, that might not be as much as it sounds. According to NPR:
Initial indications suggest this may have been a checkride, or periodic evaluation by an experienced instructor pilot of a less experienced pilot,” said Brad Bowman, a military analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former Black Hawk pilot who after the 9/11 attacks flew out of Fort Belvoir on the same routes.
A checkride, as opposed to a normal training flight, creates some unique dynamics in the cockpit. In a checkride, the less experienced pilot can be nervous and eager to not make mistakes, while the instructor pilot is watching to see how the other pilot responds to different developments,” Bowman explained. “Sometimes an instructor pilot will test the less experienced aviator to see how they respond, but such a technique would have been unusual and inadvisable in that location given the reduced margin for error.
The aircraft is supposed to maintain a height of 200 feet, but officials who were not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation told NPR that the Black Hawk may have been more than 100 feet higher.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has acknowledged that there may have been an elevation issue with the Black Hawk.
Officials said the tower at Reagan National Airport alerted the Black Hawk to the presence of American Eagle Flight 5342 on two occasions: once two minutes before the crash, the second one just 12 seconds before impact.
Investigators have recovered the black boxes from both aircraft and are still recovering the bodies.
The FAA has restricted all helicopter traffic along the route to Medevacs and VIP flights.
No offense, but I’m not that interested in her flight hours. I’m interested in how and why her helicopter collided with a passenger jet. Especially after learning she was in the top 20% of cadets in the Army ROTC and received many prestigious awards. That makes her inability to avoid the collision all that mush more unbelievable.
President Trump views it as suspicious.
Personally, I have wondered the same thing. How did the helicopter not steer out of this? In the White House briefing room Thursday, the President 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.”
