Rebecca Lobach And The Golden Rule

As soon as I heard the news last week that the Army was withholding the name of the Black Hawk helicopter pilot involved in the Reagan National collision, my antennae went up. There had to be family money involved. Here's the problem:

On Saturday the U.S. Army released the name of the second pilot—reported to have been pilot in command—of the Blackhawk helicopter that collided with American Airlines flight 5342 over the Potomac River, killing 67 people. This was a marked departure from Army policy that states “Names, city, and state of deceased will be withheld until 24 hours after next of kin notification.” This was the standard process used to identify the other two members of the Army’s flight crew, Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Eaves, and Staff Sgt. Ryan O'Hara. . . . Yet, in an unusual deviation, the Army selectively withheld Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach’s identity for an additional two days. When her name was finally released over the weekend, the Army included a family statement of eulogy that praised Lobach and requested privacy. Army officials claim that violating its own rules was done to respect Lobach’s family’s wishes, but that decision casts an unnecessary shadow over her service and memory.

I saw a military YouTuber claim the family had insisted they feared for their safety if Rebecca's name were made public, and they apperantly needed the extra time to scrub their social media for their own protection, but I haven't found anything to corroborate this. It does sound like the lame excuse someone might try to make -- if they aren't protected, mobs of MAGA types might riot outside their front door. The link above goes on,

The information shared by the Army and Lobach’s friends indicate that she was a stellar soldier. However, stellar soldiers do not ask for special consideration—they demand equal treatment to prove that they are one among a team. Yet we now see a movement to essentially canonize Lobach as a hero while civilian remains are still being recovered from the submerged and fragmented passenger jet that her aircraft knocked from the sky. Army officials rushed to defend a single pilot among a flight crew of three and 64 dead civilians.

. . . Beyond violating military regulations, the Army strategically released Lobach’s identification on a Saturday—a classic public relations tactic used to bury news. Meanwhile, it appears her social media history was erased, despite the insistence that she was an admirable public servant. The inclusion of a family eulogy in the Army’s announcement further signaled that her passing was somehow more profound than the rest. Why?

In short, her family appears to have asked for, and received, special treatment. How could they do this? According to the York, PA Daily Record,

"She was a wonderful, admirable young lady," her uncle, York attorney Jeff Lobach, said. "She deserves a lot of respect. She will be sadly missed."

Jeff Lobach, a partner in the Barley Snyder law firm and a well-known philanthropist, didn't want to go into great detail about his niece, who was a member of the crew of the Blackhawk helicopter that crashed with a regional jet over the Potomac near Reagan National Airport last week.

Capt. Lobach's father, Jeff Lobach's brother David, is from York but currently lives in Durham, N.C. He earned his undergraduate degree from Bucknell University before completing his medical degree and a doctorate at Duke University.

"This is really their story," Lobach said.

Even if it's the Durham Lobachs' story, here's more on Uncle Jeff:

Jeff and Cindy Lobach, whose work on behalf of the Golden Venture immigrants detained in York County Prison garnered international recognition, are this year's recipients of Penn-Mar Human Service's Distinguished Humanitarian Award.

They will receive the award at the organization's 33rd Gala fundraiser at the Marriott Owings Mills Center in Owings Mill, Md., on March 1.

. . . Jeff Lobach, former managing partner and CEO of the Barley Snyder law firm, was a leader of the volunteer asylum project that provided legal services to the Chinese refugees who were detained in York County after their ship, the Golden Venture, ran aground at Rockaway Beach in Queens, N.Y., in June 1993. The Lobachs took in one of Jeff's clients and his wife and daughter, making them a part of their family.

Elsewhere,

Jeff and Cindy Lobach’s varied and eclectic volunteer service led them to create the Jeff and Cindy Lobach Community Fund at the Community Foundation. Jeff, the current Community Foundation board chair, said, “I have a front row seat for the evolution of the Community Foundation to a proactive and impactful driver of positive community change. With college in the rearview mirror for our three sons, we thought now would be a good time for us to focus our giving more strategically and the Community Foundation is the perfect vehicle.”

The Lobachs are passionate about youth, education, health care, and their church, and support organizations that can have “transformative or life-saving effects on our neighbors,” according to Cindy. Globally, the Lobachs are currently working to preserve an area of the Amazon rainforest by helping the villagers living on the edges of the gigantic Tahuayo Tamshiyacu reserve.

Ah, the Jeff and Cindy Lobach Community Fund. But the family requeats privacy. These are powerful Democrat donors. What about Rebecca's dad down in Durham? He's David Franklin Lobach, Medical Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health in the Duke Univeristy School of Medicine, M.S. 1994 - Duke University, M.D. 1987 - Duke University. Ph.D. 1986 - Duke University. His list of grants and citations is impressive. In fact, I would bet he's on a first-name basis with Tony Fauci. He's a member of the medical and public health establishment, after all.

This in turn says to me that there's generational wealth and influence that extends back beyond brothers Jeff and David. I suspect another half hour of searching could turn that up, too, but I don't have the time right now. But this explains why Rebecca was a White House social aide, among other things, and why her friends, contacted for comment, were so insistent that she'd earned everything she got, just like her dad and Uncle Jeff did. What do you bet all the Lobachs are Democrats?

Come to think of it, they didn't do all that great a job of scrubbing their media, either, even with all the extra time they got.

"Who Are These Guys?" Indeed

This is a job for Big Balls 😂 https://t.co/vqYD0XyCfB

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2025

On Thursday, I asked of DOGE, "Who are these guys?", and yesterday, I began to get an answer: one of them is named Big Balls. The doxing campaign was immediate. Per Wired:

A young technologist known online as “Big Balls,” who works for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has access to sensitive US government systems. But his professional and online history call into question whether he would pass the background check typically required to obtain security clearances, security experts tell WIRED.

Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old high school graduate, established at least five different companies in the last four years, with entities registered in Connecticut, Delaware, and the United Kingdom, most of which were not listed on his now-deleted LinkedIn profile. Coristine also briefly worked in 2022 at Path Network, a network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers. Someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine also solicited a cyberattack-for-hire service later that year.

Per The New Republic:

Shocking: The 19-year old DOGE goon with a questionable résumé who goes by “big balls” online was fired from his last real gig for leaking company information online.

Bloomberg is reporting that Edward Coristine was fired from cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for “leaking internal information to the competitors.” Now Coristine has access to the most sensitive internal information there is, the federal government’s, and he has no confirmed clearance that legitimizes that access.

Wait a moment. Isn't it guaranteed that if a deep-stater with all the right clearances has an interest in leaking classified info, especially if it will help the deep state, he'll leak it? But let's look at it from another direction. Mr Coristine can't be a dummy. He's got to know, given his own history and likely connections, that if he offends the wrong people, this is exactly what can happen to him. Big balls indeed.

At the same time, I sometimes worked in computer security in my tech career. It was generally understood, especially in the early days of the field as corporations began to recognize the risks of data breaches, that companies themselves and consulting firms would hire "white hat" hackers to penetrate their systems to demonstrate vulnerabilities -- and those early insights formed the basis of continuing strategies in the business.

But the sort of person who becomes a "white hat" hacker, let's face it, isn't necessarily an Eagle Scout. He probably started out as a "black hat" hacker and may even have a prison record to demonstrate his qualifications for the job. This is simply the sort of person who goes into that line of work. I would bet that Elon Musk himself has a strong internal sympathy for that sort of person as well. After all, he's a rule breaker, a norm shatterer, a risk taker. Just look at his "family" life.

So this is precisly the sort of person he would hire, and precisely the sort of person he did hire. And Musk being Musk, the calculated risk paid off. Beyond that, after a public debate on X, and with J D Vance's endorsement, Musk rehired Big Balls:

By saving that staffer’s job, Trump, Vance, and the team will end up putting an entire class of point-and-sputter journalists out of theirs

No one will pay for digging up mean tweets if there’s no payoff at the end

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) February 7, 2025

As the saying goes, not a bug but a feature. This somewhat fanciful "maybe it was this way" account nevertheless matches my own surmise:

In Treasury's basement, fluorescent lights hummed above four young coders. Their screens cast blue light across government-issue desks, illuminating energy drink cans and agency badges. As their algorithms crawled through decades of payment data, one number kept growing: $17 billion in redundant programs. And counting.

"We're in," Akash Bobba messaged the team. "All of it."

Edward Coristine's code had already mapped three subsystems. Luke Farritor's algorithms were tracing payment flows across agencies. Ethan Shaotran's analysis revealed patterns that career officials didn't even know existed. By dawn, they would understand more about Treasury's operations than people who had worked there for decades.

This wasn't a hack. This wasn't a breach. This was authorized disruption.

. . . "Pull this thread," a senior official warned, watching patterns emerge across DOGE's screens, "and the whole sweater unravels."

He wasn't wrong. But he misunderstood something crucial: That was exactly the point.

This wasn't just another transition. This wasn't just another reform effort. This was the start of something unprecedented: a revolution powered by preparation, presidential will, and technological precision.

. . . The secret wasn't just speed—it was precision. Instead of waiting for Senate confirmations, the transition team prioritized non-Senate-confirmed positions. While Democrats prepared for traditional confirmation battles over cabinet posts, an army of aligned personnel was already moving into place. Strategic positions were identified. Legal authorities were mapped. Support networks were established.

. . . This urgency drove innovation. When DOGE's young coders breached Treasury's payment systems, pre-positioned legal teams neutralized resistance within hours. When career officials tried revoking system access, they discovered DOGE's authority came from levels they couldn't challenge. When leaks surfaced, rapid-response units fed counter-narratives to alternative media almost instantly.

Musk must have already gamed out what would happen to Big Balls and had the response ready beforehand. And he and Trump clearly had the whole DOGE strategy worked out well before Inauguration Day.

HOW DEMS BUILT THE WORLD'S BIGGEST RAKE, THEN STOMPED ON IT: THE DOGE ORIGIN STORY

1. Obama creates WH office to hire Silicon Valley types exempt from rules (USDS)
2. 2017-2020, staff use it to undermine Trump WH from within
3. Biden puts it under a political appointee
4. DOGE pic.twitter.com/L5YiWV3ITv

— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) February 7, 2025

I can't wait for the next news cycle.

DOGE Progress

pic.twitter.com/obbnlw6CxZ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2025

I'm not sure if the New York Post writer fully understands the story here:

A federal judge temporarily limited members of the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system the day before a DOGE employee who was linked to offensive social media posts quit.

US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the order Wednesday after three union groups — the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union — filed a lawsuit against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, accusing him of illegally sharing their members’ information with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team.

Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, limited access to the payment records system to two DOGE employees — one of whom resigned Thursday — and Treasury officials.

The judge ordered that the two DOGE workers — Tom Krause and Marko Elez — must be provided “read only” access to payment records as part of their efforts to eliminate waste and fraud and modernizing federal information technology.

Read-only access is the only type of access such a program, which would fall into the broad category of "audit software", ever needs. In fact, if the purpose of an audit is to identify irregularities, it's important that the auditors be unable to change data -- otherwise, the auditors themselves could alter records to create the appearance of irregularity. Read-only access is a standard type of data access that all commercial data security systems provide; system administrators can set this up in a matter of minutes. So the judge hasn't restricted anything, in fact, she's enabled what needs to be done. She's given DOGE exactly the access it should have.

There's a separate question of one of the DOGE guys who got doxed:

Elez abruptly resigned from DOGE on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal connected him to racist posts made on X.

The 25-year-old engineer reportedly tweeted his support for “eugenic immigration policy” in the weeks before President Trump’s inauguration and expressed a hatred for people from India.

This happens; I assume Musk will replace him with another 25-year-old. The more interesting case is the other DOGE guy who was named in the story, Tom Krause, who will stay on the project:

Tom Krause—the current CEO of Citrix and several other tech companies’ parent company Cloud Software Group—is reportedly helping Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with reviewing the nation’s federal payment system.

. . . Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has signed off on a plan to give access to the payment system to a team led by Krause, according to multiple reports.

. . . Krause’s role will be subject to safeguards that would not allow the ability to make changes to the system and that no one outside the Treasury Department would have access. “The secretary’s approval was contingent on it being essentially a read-only operation,” said sources familiar with the matter, according to a Politico report.

So as far as I can see, read-only access is all Krause and Bessent ever wanted, and the judge is simply giving them what they asked for. The ruling simply isn't a setback. A report this morning suggests DOGE has been working with the same speed and effectiveness I noted yesterday:

In a bombshell revelation that could shake the foundations of American healthcare, Elon Musk, leading the charge under President Trump’s newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has uncovered what he describes as a staggering “$100B of taxpayer money” wasted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

“CMS has two senior Agency veterans – one focused on policy and one focused on operations – who are leading the collaboration with DOGE, including ensuring appropriate access to CMS systems and technology,” the agency said in a statement to Reuters.

The DOGE team was granted read-only access to the system.

. . . However, the narrative has quickly escalated from efficiency to accusations of rampant waste and potential fraud.

“This is where the big money fraud is happening,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday in response to a post suggesting that aides using DOGE are searching the Medicare agency payment systems for fraud.

There have been several stories in alt media trying to figure out how this is being done, but the problem is that reporters, alt or legacy, just aren't tech savvy. For instance, Townhall quotes the Washington Post behind a paywall:

The AI probe includes data with personally identifiable information for people who manage grants, as well as sensitive internal financial data. . . .

The DOGE team is using AI software accessed through Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure to pore through every dollar of money the department disburses, from contracts to grants to work trip expenses, one of the people said. Lower level department staffers were directed by agency leadership to let Musk’s teams access the sensitive financial data, the person said.

The stories always refer to "AI" with no further explanation; one typical alt writer concludes,

He’s uncovering abuse, waste, and fraud at other agencies as well—but how is he doing it so quickly? After all, the administration is barely two weeks old.

Turns out his team is using that new technological marvel—“incomprehensible advancement” to many of us—artificial intelligence.

It seems to me that what DOGE is doing is simply the massive data search-and-comparison side of "AI", which isn't really AI. The programs involved simply use contemporary computational speed to do searches and comparisons of massive amounts of data -- something like the entire IRS data base run against the Treasury's entire accounts payable for the last 10 years run against, oh, say Google. The searches bring results in somewhere from seconds to maybe a few minutes at the outside, and the result is that official X has a side business with congressman Y to get grants from agency Z.

This sort of thing goes on all day every day in the real world. How do I know this? Two weeks ago I posted here on Blogger about stoles, tippets, and chimerics at the National Cathedral. The next day I got ads from vestment companies in my Facebook feed -- what's important is that my Blogger posts go to Google data bases, but Facebook is a whole different company with different data. No matter, Facebook was able to link with Google and send me ads that might match my interests just like that.

If the cost for Facebook to do this is negligible, think what Musk and his 25-year-olds can accomplish.

Who Are These Guys?

According to The Hill,

DOGE aides have been fanning out across the federal government, exerting control of agencies as part of a mandate to cut at least $1 trillion in federal spending, most recently at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. They have demanded, and received access to, highly sensitive information, raising alarms among Democrats and government employees.

I saw someplace that their dress code is blazer-over-T-shirt, and that's about all I know about them, except from the stories, it doesn't sound like they work from home:

ABC News reported on how DOGE showed up at USAID offices in Washington, D.C., late last week and demanded access, speaking to one employee who claimed to have seen it all play out.

"DOGE was in the building. We started -- we took down our Pride flags, we took down- I took out any books I felt would be incriminating," Kristina Drye, a speechwriter for USAID, said. "No one was talking. We heard they started taking transcripts automatically of all of our Google Meets."

She added further, "They unplugged the news in the little kitchen galleys. It didn't feel good. And then Saturday, all of the websites went down. And then I lost complete access to my computer."

On Monday, the White House listed a variety of questionable and DEI-related projects USAID has contributed to.

Aha, this is how you do these sorts of things, you get in quickly, go for low-hanging fruit, and show immediate results:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed reports that millions in federal funding went to Politico and declared taxpayer dollars would no longer “essentially” subsidize subscriptions to the outlet.

. . . “So upon coming out here to the briefing room, I was made aware of the funding from USAID to media outlets, including Politico, who I know has a seat in this room,” Leavitt said.

“I can confirm that the more than $8 million in taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers’ dime will no longer be happening,” she added. “The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now.”

These guys are smart, and they're fast. They worked all weekend, and by Monday, they had the dirty laundry in the news. But let's keep in mind that the total USAID budget is a relatively piddling amount:

USAID's budget for 2024 was approximately $44 billion, representing about 0.6% of the U.S. government's $6.75 trillion budget.

And even though the individual payments to news organizations, NGOs, and such are maybe $8 million here, $30 million there, these are really just teases. The Hill link above understands the real objective and the real stakes:

Representatives of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have turned their focus to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency confirmed Wednesday.

. . . The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Wednesday that DOGE aides had been granted access to key payment and contract systems.

. . . The CMS spent more than $1.5 trillion in 2024, around 22 percent of federal spending. Lawmakers often say the massive amount of spending on health care programs is rife with fraud and abuse, though bipartisan efforts to curb Medicare spending over the years have been met with political backlash.

So in a matter of days, they set expectations by bringing about near-immediate results, and they've proven their methods out as well. They seem to have a knack for looking at payments, exactly whom they're going to, quickly locating the deposit slips and the receipts, and getting this all into the news cycles. And now they're focused on the real money.

Democrats are terrified of DOGE and Musk because they have never witnessed this degree of competence. It looks alien to them.

I mean that literally. People with experience see in DOGE a process that is necessarily messy but 100% on target in terms of speed, talent, and energy…

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 6, 2025

Well, Scott Adams knows a thing or two about competence. Now and then in my career I ran across truly competent people. It was always a privilege to work with them. But what does it say about Musk that he's been able to find and employ whole teams of them?

Scott Adams concludes, "I pity the inexperienced."

Suddenly There Are Federal Layoffs

Just this morning:

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reportedly extended a buyout offer to its entire workforce.

This follows President Trump’s proposal to encourage millions of federal workers to resign by February 6 in exchange for pay and benefits lasting until September 30.

Trump is offering the buyouts to make sure all federal workers are “on board with the new administration’s plan to have federal employees in office,” CNBC reported.

Only 6% of all federal workers actually work full-time in the office!

This follows:

After going offline over the weekend as part of Trump’s goal to streamline federal operations and slash government spending, the official website of USAID is back online—but not for the reasons anyone expected.

The agency’s website now serves as a digital pink slip for its global workforce.

All USAID direct hire personnel are to be placed on administrative leave globally, with mandates for many to return to the U.S. This directive excludes only those deemed essential for “mission-critical functions.”

But the cuts won't stop with just the direct hires at USAID:

Last month, the State Department ordered an immediate pause on U.S. foreign aid for 90 days and issued “stop-work orders” on nearly all existing foreign assistance awards. This swift decision has effectively left many government contractors and global aid providers — including groups that supply HIV/AIDS care, provide child health services, set up education programs, fight food insecurity and counter disinformation in developing nations — struggling to operate or pay their workers.

Eight U.S.-based individuals who work in the foreign aid sector, all granted anonymity due to concerns about retaliation from the administration, told POLITICO that the foreign aid freeze had undermined their ability to carry out global aid efforts. Some predict that thousands of foreign aid professionals across the industry may soon be out of work.

“I can’t even begin to describe how cataclysmic it is, everyone is furloughing or laying off staff,” said one person. “It’s almost 5,000 people, and it’s just starting.”

And it's not just foreign aid:

The Trump administration has sent shockwaves through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by notifying over 1,000 employees that they are on the chopping block, marking a decisive step in dismantling bloated government agencies notorious for regulatory overreach.

EPA employees who have been with the agency for less than a year received an email last week notifying them that they could be dismissed immediately, according to NBC News citing sources familiar with the matter.

These employees, who are still on their “probationary” status, were bluntly informed that their tenure could end without delay at the administration’s discretion.

“As a probationary/ trial period employee, the agency has the right to immediately terminate you,” the email reads. “The process for probationary removal is that you receive a notice of termination, and your employment is ended immediately.”

At the FBI:

On Saturday, the FBI Agents Association issued a statement expressing concern about what it said are further efforts to force FBI agents to quit.

“There are several amongst our ranks who are extremely fearful of being removed — and some of those have started to pack up their desks,” it said in a bulletin to members.

The message gave agents advice about what to do if they believe they are at risk of being fired. “Do NOT resign or offer to resign,” the message said. “While we would never advocate for physical non-compliance, you need to be clear your removal is not voluntary.”

“Stay calm and refrain from making any statements that could be deemed to violate the Hatch Act," it added, referring to law that bars federal civil servants from engaging in political activities. "If you are told you will be terminated, make sure you get the termination notice in writing and forward it to us ASAP.”

After I left graduate school, I spent my whole career in tech. Part of that was in disaster recovery and contingency planning, where the running joke was "a good contingency planner has a current backup copy of his resume off site at all times". In fact, this was pretty much the mindset throughout tech. Every few years, no matter where I worked, my employer was acquired, which meant layoffs, or went bankrupt, which meant layoffs, or waas spun off, which meant layoffs, or downsized, which meant layoffs. Even if I wasn't caught in that particular wave of cuts, the handwriting was always on the wall, and as a good contingency planner, I always more or less had to have my resume out, which meant I also had to have good situational awareness about the job market.

It's hard to avoid thinking federal workers have been in never-never land for quite some time.

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee found Wednesday [January 15] that vast numbers of federal employees telework from home, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars spent on office space, and the Biden administration has enabled such accommodations to continue during President-elect Donald Trump’s next administration.

“The Biden-Harris administration has ceded too much authority to the federal union bosses, allowing their preference to work from home to take precedence over fulfilling agencies’ missions and serving the American people,” the committee declared in a report decrying the continued widespread use of telework since the COVID-19 pandemic ended.

"Working from home" was a dodge that I began to see only late in my own career, and it was mostly a perk for the bosses. If the boss didn't feel like coming to work that day, fine, he or she would "work from home", which meant you called in for the staff meeting via conference call, and the boss would be in the family van ferrying the kids to soccer practice while on the call. Given all the potential distractions, even less would get done than in the usual staff meetings. I don't have too much sympathy for those who get laid off:

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This famous observation was made by Herb Stein, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. It became famous largely because it was just that, obvious. Yet, what is no less obvious is that public policy is commonly based on a wholly contrary assumption, that the future will be like the past, more or less. This is deeply unfortunate since many of the most important systems on which the future of mankind depends are evolving in an unsustainable way.

Silence Descends On The Washington Air Crash

' After the NTSB press conference Saturday afternoon, in which it was announced that the regional jet's altitude was 325 feet at the time of the collision when the helicopter should have been no higher than 200 feet -- and a faction of the NTSB investigators didn't want this released -- while the Army revealed the identity of the pilot almost concurrently, we've learned nothing more. Somewhat belatedly, Juan Browne posted an update late yesterday that does little other than summarize what we knew Saturdday afternoon.

At 2:20, he estasblishes that this was a check flight for Cpt Lobach, and the check pilot was Chief Warrant Officer 2 Eaves. The point neither he nor anyone else has made on this is that Cpt Lobach inarguably failed her check flight. He establishes that a total flight time for an Army helicopter pilot at this stage of her career of 450 hours is "about normal", although this would be very low for a fixed-wing pilot. He says, "the Army has been doing more with less for years."

He establishes that the male voice talking to the tower on the radio messages is CWO Eaves, which is normal. But at 9:50, he shifts to the last exchange between CWO Eaves and the tower:

So just within some 16 or so seconds of the collision, once again, PAT25 confirms that he still has the CRJ in sight. requesting visual separation. They're just saying this automatically, "request visual separation have him in sight", as if it's a normalization of deviance, it's like this is the way they've been doing it all the time, and he's convinced that he's got tthe correct aircraft in sight, when in fact he does not.

Browne then moves to another issue that hasn't been clarified since the craxh:

Another thing that needs to be verified is exactly which model of Blackhawk were these guys flying at the time of the accident. It's more likely than not that they were flying one of these old UH60 Lima models, the L models, steam powered gauges, no autopilot, without all the flat screen technology of the later Victor models, or I believe even Mike models.

I noticed a comment on an X thread from a helicopter pilot who said that the autopilot has an ALT HOLD feature that can automatically keep the helicopter at a particular altitude like, say, 200 feet. If the helicopter had this feature, it would have been a major problem for the pilot not to use it. If the helicpter didn't have the feature in that very complicated and busy airspace, it would be a major problem for the Army command. So far, this information isn't being released.

At 13:00, he moves to another key, as yet undisclosed, issue:

Part of this analysis is going to be to determine what was the altimeter setting at the time of the accident, and how was that information passed on to the helicopter pilots. Do they pick it up on the ADIS recording, or do they get it from the controller prior to entering the airspace? . . . I have not heard anyhbody mention what the altimeter setting is, and the altimeter setting is critical, because you set it right here in your altimeter, and it makes sure everybody is on the same sheet of music. . . . [E]very tenth of an inch of mercury that you're off in your altimeter setting, you are introducing an altimeter error of 100 feet, and that's why setting your local altimeter setting is so important on these approaches[.]

So Browne identifies saeveral lines of inqui9ry that the NTSB is likely to follow:

• The apparent automatic assumption by the helicopter check pilot that he had the jet in sight, and the automatic acceptance of this by the tower controller, who was clearly overworked
• Whether the Blackhawk in question had an autopilot and key features like ALT HOLD
• Whether the helicopter's altimeter had been properly set.

The biggest issue of the Washington crash is that this is the first fatal air accident in 15 yers, and it comes in the wake of increasing concern about the FAA's regulation of the air traffic control system, which as I noted in Sunday's post Browne himself has expressed. The reaction of legacy media has been to discount these concerns, especially as Trump has expressed them:

President Donald Trump wasted little time this week trying to assign blame for the nation’s deadliest air disaster in more than two decades. Among his chief targets: An FAA diversity hiring initiative he suggested had undermined the agency’s effectiveness. /p>

“But certainly for an air traffic controller, we want the brightest, the smartest, the sharpest. We want somebody that’s psychologically superior,” Trump said at a news conference Thursday. /p>

No evidence has emerged that rules seeking to diversify the FAA played any role in the collision Wednesday between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter that killed 67 people.

But the evidence actually seems to support Trump. It is non-controversial that the fAA has a shortage of controllers. It is gernerally alleged that the shortage results in large part from the FAA hiring to racial quota, and if they can't find enough qualified minority applicants, this places an artificial limit on the number of white applicants they can hire. Thus, as Browne points out here, one controller was doing the work of two, and he was clearly rushed in approving the helicopter's request for visual separation.

There's also a strong suggestion that at least in this case, the Army has developed a culture that normalizes deviance. It looks as though every new revelation from the NTSB investigtion is likely to prove embarrassing to both the Army and the fAA. and it looks like there's already pressure on the NTSB to slow-walk its findings. I suspect that neither Trump nor Secretary Hegseth will tolerate this.

Show Horse Or Work Horse?

Last month, Capt. Lobach escorted fashion designer @RalphLauren at the White House when he received his Presidential Medal of Freedom. https://t.co/GyTGMliwaI pic.twitter.com/fDMX5W3m40

— Jim LaPorta (@JimLaPorta) February 1, 2025

Over the weekend, the Army finallly released the name of the third pilot -- apparently the one at the controls -- of the helicopter that crashed into the regional jet Wednesday evening, killing 67.

At the request of and in coordination with the family, the Army is releasing the name of the third Soldier who died while performing a training mission near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Jan. 29.

Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, of Durham, North Carolina, served as an aviation officer (15A) in the regular Army from July 2019 to January 2025. She has no deployments. She was assigned to the 12th Aviation Battalion, Ft Belvoir, Va.

It turns out that the three-day delay, which was atrributed to the request of the family, must have been to give them time to scrub not only her own social media, but that of the rest of the family as well. Even so, what remains -- the image at left is apparently an official Army photo -- isn't helpful. It shows her all tricked out as a helo pilot on the flight deck having just a giggly good time. The alt media was quick to see the incongruity of the giggle glam and the tragedy.

The official Army bio at the link above says that she served for her whole career in the the 12th Aviation Battalion, Ft Belvoir, whose mission is to ferry VIPs around in gold-striped helicopters, a plum assignment in itself, but other references point out that during some part of this time, she also served as a social aide in the White House. According to Wikipedia,

A White House social aide is a United States Armed Forces officer assigned to attend to the personal needs of visiting dignitaries at the White House and to facilitate interactions with the President of the United States and the First Lady of the United States. White House social aides were first appointed in 1902; as of 2014, there were 45 such officers.

. . . White House social aides report to a coordinator in the office of the White House Social Secretary. Their duties include managing "guests who attend social functions at the White House, [facilitating] interactions with the president and first lady and [escorting] dignitaries". In the past, this has included entertaining single guests, such as providing dance companions; initiating small talk with lonely guests during teas; directing the flow of traffic at receiving lines; and greeting visitors.

It isn't clear how this related to her duties as a helicopter pilot, or whether her status as a White House social aide superseded her regular tasks at Ft Belvoir. On the other hand, it does appear that the Army thought she was at least an attractive window display for the White House and VIPs who needed helicopter rides in Washington.

But this comes as the collision investigation focuses more closely on "some sort of elevation issue”, in Secretary Hegseth's words. According to the NTSB Saturday, the regional jet's flight recorder showed an altitude of 325 feet plus-minus 25 feet. This would be consistent with the jet's landing pattern at the airport, while the maximum altitude for the helicopter there should have been 200 feet. A cooment to the post on X embedded above said,

Altitude control is a basic fundamental flying skill for any pilot. Its like staying between the lines on the road. Whoever was flying failed to control altitude (and course) properly. ATC sounds like it will be a contributing factor.

— Lumpschlevot (@Lumpschlevot) February 2, 2025

Whatever the reason Cpt Lobach's family may have had to withhold release of her name, and whatever reason the Army may bave had to cooperste with this. it does nobody any favors. It simply feeds the impression that Cpt Lobach had been receiving special treatment throughout her career and in the wake of the tragedy, when the evidence that's beginning to emerge suggests that the special treatment was part of the accident's cause.

On Saturday, the NTSB said that although the flight data recorder-cockpit voice recorder on the helicopter had been recovered, it would take time to repair water damage. But in the same press conference, the NTSB spokesman said there had been dissagreement among the investigators over even releasing the jet's altitude data, suggesting that what eventually comes out will be even more damaging to Cpt Lobach's reputation.

Not to mention the incredibly bad look for the Army. At minimum, Secretary Hegseth is probably going to have to get rid of the gold-striped VIP helos and their show horse pilots.