The Week: Tragedy over the Potomac

• There are some members of Congress we’d like to buy out, too.

• A fatal commercial plane crash happened in the United States for the first time in nearly 16 years. At Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, an American Airlines CRJ700 in the process of landing collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. All 64 people on the plane died, as did all three soldiers on the helicopter. In an average year in this country, 800 million passengers are flown on more than 16 million flights. Since the last fatal incident—back in 2009—more than 10 billion people have completed flights. What happened near Washington, D.C., was a terrible tragedy. But it was also an aberration. Naturally, this did not stop political partisans. Immediately after the news broke, a handful of journalists attempted to link the crash to the federal hiring freeze that President Trump had announced eight days earlier. This was ridiculous. The following day, President Trump suggested that, instead, the problem had been the DEI programs instituted by Presidents Obama and Biden. This was wholly unsubstantiated. It would, of course, be a good idea to ensure that air traffic controllers are hired on solely meritocratic grounds, but so far there is no evidence linking existing policy to this disaster. Sometimes, even within the safest systems, awful things happen. When they do, our eyes are better focused skyward than at one another’s throats.

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• There are some members of Congress we’d like to buy out, too.

• A fatal commercial plane crash happened in the United States for the first time in nearly 16 years. At Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, an American Airlines CRJ700 in the process of landing collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. All 64 people on the plane died, as did all three soldiers on the helicopter. In an average year in this country, 800 million passengers are flown on more than 16 million flights. Since the last fatal incident—back in 2009—more than 10 billion people have completed flights. What happened near Washington, D.C., was a terrible tragedy. But it was also an aberration. Naturally, this did not stop political partisans. Immediately after the news broke, a handful of journalists attempted to link the crash to the federal hiring freeze that President Trump had announced eight days earlier. This was ridiculous. The following day, President Trump suggested that, instead, the problem had been the DEI programs instituted by Presidents Obama and Biden. This was wholly unsubstantiated. It would, of course, be a good idea to ensure that air traffic controllers are hired on solely meritocratic grounds, but so far there is no evidence linking existing policy to this disaster. Sometimes, even within the safest systems, awful things happen. When they do, our eyes are better focused skyward than at one another’s throats.