Tragedy In The Air Over Washington As Trump Guts The FAA

An American Airlines passenger jet carrying 64 people and a US Army Black Hawk helicopter with three soldiers on board have crashed near Reagan National Airport, just outside Washington.

The passengers on the flight from Kansas included members of the figure skating community. The helicopter was on a training flight.

This Substack is not devoted to news coverage per se, so please check your online sources for updates. This notice is going out because of Trump’s immediate interference and blame-naming:

The collision was a “bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented…The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

“NOT GOOD!!!” he added.

The aerospace sector has developed a system that promotes safety to the extent that flying has gotten to be literally safer than sitting on the ground.

In the aerospace sector, the industry’s secret weapon is the development and universal use of a routine dedicated to eliminating accidents. It is an extraordinary system that avoids assigning blame and instead routs out the cause of failure and then corrects it.

The After-Action Review (AAR) process used in aviation brings all the parties together for a blame-free exploration of what went wrong and how it should be fixed. In the decades since the military created the AAR, it has spread to other sectors such as business, where companies like Microsoft have embraced the practice as a way of learning from both failure and success.

The AAR has achieved this popularity because it can be incredibly effective. When it gets ingrained in the DNA of an organization or sector, it strengthens teams and improves performance.

An active AAR program produces a smaller “OODA loop”, which is a metric for measuring the ability of a culture or group to change. OODA means Observe, Orient, Decide and Act; it is a four-step process that focuses on filtering available information, putting it in context and quickly making the most appropriate decision while also understanding that changes can be made as more data becomes available. It was conceived by US Air Force colonel John Boyd. It has been described as “a combat multiplier. If it had to be defined by one word, then “agility” would be a good word. If an army is agile (relative to the opponent), it increases the power of a military force.”

Another powerful spin-off from AAR is that the learnings in one team are spread immediately throughout the entire sector.

It has two crucial features:

1. Participation: Instead of being a top-down reprimand, it is an open conversation among team members. The goal is to surface every perspective — to harvest all existing insights and to ensure that the entire team feels included, eliminating disaffection and promoting unity.

2. Narrative: Instead of listing directives, it delves into the history of the event. This narrative approach allows for more specific analysis. Rather than abstracting failures and successes into universal principles, it connects precise circumstances and behaviors to precise results. And because the human brain learns more from narrative examples than from general doctrines, this approach is also more effective at producing organizational change.

AARs are not optional in the aviation sector. Every member of every organization runs their own analysis of an event, and comes to conclusions about what went wrong. If this individual analysis is not pooled, then no unity or benefit to the team will transpire.

The result of adopting AAR is a change in team behavior that encompasses attitudinal shifts, positive emotions, and specific action items. All three are generated in the brain by narrative — that is, by the specific stories that people tell themselves about what happened and why. The real purpose of an AAR is therefore to generate a collective story that everyone owns as their story, turning the wheels of their future performance. Everyone converges on the same narrative.

The investigation of the tragedy yesterday will no doubt proceed along these disciplined lines.

Except that Trump has already gotten in the way.

And of all the people remotely connected with this event, he is least qualified to talk about it. He has not only started a blame-chain focused on people rather than systems, but he himself has taken steps to confuse the FAA at the very top.

Trump’s unelected presidential partner Elon Musk demanded that FAA leader Michael Whitaker step down, which he did when Trump took office. Musk said the FAA “should not exist,” and accused Whitaker of standing in the way of his vision of putting human life on Mars. “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” His venom might have something to do with the fact that Whitaker had proposed fines of more than $600,000 for SpaceX, citing safety concerns.

The Senate has not confirmed anyone to take Whitaker’s place.

Trump also laid off 100 FAA officials.

In another one of the first moves of his second term, President Donald Trump fired TSA Transport Security administrator David Pekoske, who he had first nominated in 2017.

Trump and the FAA have never gotten along. After the Capitol riots in 2021, five FAA senior appointees announced their resignations. That included the resignation of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Some people have values.

Trump obviously does not. He is seeking to step in front of a tragedy and own it.

Get out of the way, Donald. Let the people do their jobs. They are really good at it. They do not assign blame; they find errors.

This is a concept you would be unfamiliar with, but it works for the rest of us.