President Donald Trump on Thursday blamed last week’s deadly collision of a passenger jet and army helicopter on what he called an “obsolete” computer system used by US air traffic controllers, and he vowed to replace it.
Mr Trump said during an event that “a lot of mistakes happened” on January 29 when an American Airlines flight out of Wichita, Kansas, collided with an army helicopter as the plane was about to land at Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, killing all 67 people on board the two aircraft.
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Trump blamed diversity hiring programmes for the crash. But on Thursday, he blamed the computer system used by the country’s air traffic controllers.
“It’s amazing that it happened,” Mr Trump said during a speech at the national prayer breakfast at the US Capitol.
A crane offloads a piece of wreckage onto a flatbed truck near the crash site in the Potomac river (Ben Curtis/AP)
“And I think that’s going to be used for good. I think what is going to happen is we’re all going to sit down and do a great computerised system for our control towers. Brand new – not pieced together, obsolete.”
Mr Trump said the US spent billions of dollars trying to “renovate an old, broken system” instead of investing in a new one.
He said in his own private jet, he uses a system from another country when he lands because his pilot says the existing system is obsolete.
Federal officials have been raising concerns about an overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system for years, especially after a series of close calls between planes at US airports.
Among the reasons they have cited for staffing shortages are uncompetitive pay, long shifts, intensive training and mandatory retirements.
Mr Trump said that if the nation had a newer system, alarms would have sounded when the Black Hawk helicopter, which was on a training exercise, reached the same altitude as the plane.
But an FAA report after the crash said that the controller did get an alert that the plane and helicopter were converging when they were still more than a mile apart.
The controller responded by asking the helicopter if it had the plane in sight and directed the helicopter to pass behind the plane. The helicopter responded that it did have the plane in sight.
An early focus of the investigation has been confirming the altitude of the plane and helicopter. The jet’s flight recorder showed its altitude as 325ft, plus or minus 25ft.
To get more precise information, investigators need to be able to examine the wreckage of the still-submerged Black Hawk to verify the data. The helicopter is not expected to be recovered until later this week.
This crash was the deadliest in the US since November 12 2001 when a jet slammed into a New York City neighbourhood just after take-off, killing all 260 people on board and five on the ground.