"I Have Control"

Here's the usual disclaimer: all I know about aviation comes from watching Air Disasters and Juan Browne's YouTube channel, which means I know zilch. I'm not a pilot, I've never had flying lessons, and I've never had a check ride. Nevertheless, a couple of things keep bothering me about Chairman Homendy's briefing Friday.

From Air Disasters, I at least know that several landmark crash investigations have centered on crew resource management, including the responsibility of the pilot monitoring (as opposed to the pilot flying) to speak up forcefully, and in extreme cases take control, if the pilot flying is doing something really dumb. So this is a potential issue when looking at the January 29 collision.

There's a closely related issue that this was a check ride, which Chairman Homendy made clear in Friday's briefing. In this case, the pilot monitoring was Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, who was also the instructor pilot. This page outlines the respective duties of the p[ilot flying and the pilot monitoring:

the pilot flying is responsible for flying the aircraft. The pilot monitoring, or PM, consequently takes over all other tasks that do not relate to flying the aeroplane. . . . the PM constantly monitors all instruments for their proper functionality and accuracy. Most importantly, he or she oversees the plane’s flightpath and altitude [my emphasis], and if there is any deviation from the target values.

A flight instructor doing a check ride would be even more focused on the instruments. I went looking for any information I could find on how a flight instructor conducting a check ride would react to the pilot being evaluated remaining well above the 200 foot maximum altitude for over four minutes. The best I could find was this forum, where actual flight instructors gave opinions, for instance:

There are only a few reasons why an instructor would have to take the controls on an IFR [instrument flight rules] training flight, and being off your altitude isn't usually one of them. I can usually accomplish the same result by saying one word - "altitude". Depending on the stage of training, and whether we are actually on an IFR flight plan, or in actual IMC [instrument meteorological conditions], or not, I might prompt the student at 100 feet, or it might be more. But I don't think I've ever felt the need to take the controls for an altitude issue.

But the helicopter here was under visual flight rules in an extremely dense airspace, and it was consistently above the maximum altitude by 100 feet or more. The actual outcome indicates that the pilot was showing extremely poor judgment, was not correcting altitude when it was twice pointed out, and the result was a disaster. Juan Browne hasn't chimed in yet over Friday's briefing -- I suspect he wants to avoid controversey -- but I did find one skeptical aviation YouTuber:

He invited commenters to give their opinions on who was responsible, and there were several replies that I thought were informed and insightful:

The NTSB mentioned that the Instructor Pilot (IP) and the Pilot Flying (PF) had an altitude disagreement of 100' before entering the severely restricted area with a 200' ceiling. Was it therefore safe to proceed for a training flight into such a busy area? Simple answer, No. They should have turned away from DCA airspace if they had such a fundamental instrument disagreement when they were expected to operate at or below only 200'.

. . . Layman question: why, when there was an acknowledged 100 ft difference in altimeter reading between the instructor/examiner and the exam taker/pilot, did the instructor not abort the mission and fail the exam at that moment?

. . . I see it in the engineering field and most other field but extremely so in the military. Look at the pictures of the female captain pilot being evaluated and ask yourself how she climbed the ranks so fast? Then listen to the voice of the evaluator, you can assume that he is older. The female's career was dependant on passing the re-evaluation . . . the male pilot instructor was influenced by the wrong joy stick . . .

My own question before I looked at this YouTube and the comments was why the instructor pilot didn't say, "I have control", the way they say it should be done on Air Disasters, take control, and bring the helicopter down to 200 feet. But the layman question above is even better: if there was that much of an instrument disparity, it was time to abort the mission.

It also sounds to me as though Cpt Lobach was already, by any objective standard, failing the check ride well before circumstances inarguably stepped in to fail her, whatever the instructor pilot might have said. The version of the cockpit flight recording given by Chairman Homendy is probobly heavily redacted, and we don't have any replay of the actual voices as we did with the tower and the CRJ.

Tone of voice could have added a lot -- what was the actual disagreement when CWO Eaves said they were at 400 feet and Cpt Lobach said no, it was only 300? It might not have been an instrument discrepancy at all, Cpt Lobach may just have been irritated that CWO Eaves was criticizing her in any way.

My own view is pretty much that Cpt Lobach was politically connected, she was a White House aide, and she expected her career to go well. CWO Eaves, an enlisted man, was in an uncomfortable situation, and it would not have gone well for his career if he failed a favored officer on a check ride. In fact, my surmise is that Cpt Lobach was not well regarded by her peers or her subordinates, and the job of giving her the expected pass on her check ride wasn't exactly a plum assignment.

By far his best option, if he didn't want to fail her as he should have, would have been to abort the mission due to the instrument discrepancy and leave the job of passing her to someone else. He may have seen reasons why he couldn't do this, and his only alternative was to let her keep flying and hope for the best. I suspect the YouTuber in the link above is correct in his assessment that the NTSB will never discuss anything like this in its final report.

Captain Wonderful Failed Her Check Ride

I've been deeply skeptical of the NTSB's investigation of the January 29 collision of a helicopter and a jet landing at Reagan National Airport on January 29, especially after Todd Inman's remarks at the February 1 press conference implying disagreements among the investigators over releasing data on the helicopter's altitude. This has been a sensitive question since the investigation began, and it clearly continues to be, since the NTSB held an update press conference yesterday afternoon, the traditional Friday bad-news dump.

Here's a transcript of Chairman Homendy's remarks at the press conference. There isn't a whole lot that's new, and what is, is buried within the old. ABC News gives the approved version of the briefing:

There's no indication the U.S. Army Black Hawk crew could tell there was an impending collision before its devastating crash with an American Airlines plane in Washington, D.C., National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Jennifer Homendy said Friday as the agency continues to investigate the cause of the accident.

The helicopter crew may have had bad information on the altitude from their altimeter, as the pilots had differing altitudes in the seconds [actually four minutes] before the crash, the NTSB said.

Wait a moment. The transcript of the control tower voice recording that was made available on February 1 has the instructor pilot responding twice to the tower after its inquiries, "aircraft in sight, request visual separation". It's certainly possible that the instructor pilot didn't see the jet, or mistook another set of lights for the accident jet, but if he didn't see anything at all, he was telling a falsehood, and if he saw the wronkg jet, his judgment is in question. Chairman Homendy doesn't address either issue.

The highly respected aviation YouTuber Juan Browne, as I've noted, seems to think the repeated "aircraft in sight, request visual separation" were just pro forma responses to the tower to get them off his back so he could continue on his flight path -- in other words, a falsehood.

Chairman Homendy makes the point that the maximum altitude for the helicopter when passing over the Memorial Bridge should have been 200 feet. However, at 8:45:30, the instructor pilot told Cpt Lobach that they were at 300 feet altitude at that location. But at 8:44:27, the instructor pilot had already noted to Cpt Lobach that the helicopter was at 300 feet and needed to descend to 200. For some reason, this descent never took place, even though the instructor pilot clearly expressed the need for it.

In fact, Chairman Homendy says at 8:43:48, the pilot flying told the instructor pilot that they were at 300 feet, while the instructor pilot said they were at 400. The chairman points out that there was no discussion of the discrepancy, says they do not know why there was a discrepancy, and they're exploring this. However, this gives a two-minute span between the Key Bridge and the Memorial Bridge where at least the instructor pilot understood they were at 300 feet, should have been at 200, but there was no discussion about this. If anything, if Cpt Lobach thought they were at 400 feet, she should have seen even more urgency to descend.

At the February 1 press conference, it was established that the jet's altimeter said it was at 325 feet when the collision took place. Yesterday, Chiarman Homendy updated the radar altitude for the jet at 313 feet, and the helicopter at 278 feet. (Some sources indicate that radar altitude is less accurate over water.)

This would be a very strong indication that Cpt Lobach had understood the helicoper was too high for at least four minutes before the collision at 8:47:59, irrespective of the exact altitude of either aircraft or any discrepancy in the helo's altimeters. The fact that the collision occurred indicates that the helo's altimiters were close enough, and the pilots were fully aware this was too high, whatever the exact numbers may have been. This would also be irrespective of whether the helo crew had parts of the ATC transmissions blocked when they were keying the mic. The ABC report nevertheless continues,

"We are looking at the possibility of there may be bad data," Homendy said.

The transmission from the tower that instructed the helicopter to go behind the plane may not have been heard by the crew because the pilot may have keyed her radio at the same second and stepped on the transmission from ATC, the NTSB added.

. . . The Black Hawk was conducting an annual training flight and night vision goggle check ride for one of the pilots [namely, Cpt Lobach] at the time of the crash, Homendy said. This is a practical exam that a pilot must pass to be qualified to perform specific duties, she said.

Here's my question. This was a check ride that Cpt Lobach had to pass. During the ride, more than four minutes before the collision, the instructor pilot doing the check noted that the pilot flying was too high, and indeed, although she had four minutes to get down to 200 feet altitude, she never did this. At the same time, the instructor pilot inexplicably told the ATC twice that he had the jet in sight and was maintaining visual separation, which he clearly was not.

Was Cpt Lobach already failing her check ride even before she ran into the jet? If she wasn't, was the instructor pilot complicit in conducting a silly charade that was going to pass her no matter what?

This, of course, doesn't appear to be anything like a full transcript of the helo's CVR from the whole flight. My surmise, during the two-week period before the NTSB would release even a redacted portion of the CVR, was that its contents would prove deeply embarrassing to the Army and the memory of Cpt Lobach. For now, I think I was right, and I would bet there's still more to come.

Are We Getting The Truth From Catholic Charities?

Up to now, I've been following what seems to be the received total of something over $100 million as the annual amount the Catholic Church gets in US government grants. For instance, Vice President Vance used this number in a speech reported by America magazine:

And I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?

I mentioned the same amount in this post, but so far I haven't been able to find the source, and the vice president doesn't list it, either. The problem I'm beginning to have is that the actual amounts in grants from all US government sources to the Catholic Church are starting to look much, much larger. I linked to a story from Just the News in yesterday's post that said in part:

. . . For example, the endowment associated with Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Fort Worth in Texas experienced a more than 34 fold increase in funding from government grants from FY 2021 to FY 2023. In FY 2021, at the beginning of the Biden administration, the group had only received $11.7 million in grant money. By FY 2023, that amount had ballooned to $401.7 million. A majority of that funding was earmarked for a “Refugee and Entrant Assistance” program, according to the financial records.

. . . For example, Catholic Charities of Louisville, Kentucky also experienced a similar growth in funding over the same period. In FY 2021, the group took in roughly $10 million in federal grants, but by FY 2023, that number had exploded to about $122 million.

. . . Catholic Charities San Antonio, which received more than $27 million in total from FEMA, was accused by a Democratic congressman of misusing funds it received for the program by purchasing airplane tickets for migrants in its care.

Clearly if the Diocese of Fort Worth alone got $401.7 million in FY 2023 and Catholic Charities of Louisville, KY got $122 million, the number going to the US Church as a whole is far larger than $100 million, and whatever sources are citing this number are disingenuous. So I went looking farther and found this article in City Journal from February 4:

The Catholic Church has long positioned itself as an advocate for poor immigrants and provided them with services in the United States. But for decades, including during the great migration waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the church’s work was charitable in nature, funded by contributions from parishioners. Over the past 50 years or so, however, Catholic Church-affiliated organizations, especially Catholic Charities, have become government contractors with a stake in a growing welfare state. Even before the last four years of explosive immigration, Catholic Charities nationwide derived more than six of every ten dollars of revenues from government contracts. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities have been among the biggest beneficiaries.

. . . The Biden administration used radical changes in immigration policies, especially through its so-called parole program, to justify a vast expansion of federal spending on migrant services. . . . Large chunks of this money made its way to nonprofits as discretionary grants from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which rose from $33 million in 2021 to $400 million in 2022 and then $616 million in 2023, according to Open the Books.

. . . This federal money, often heavily supplemented by local government contracts, has led to a startling growth in groups like Catholic Charities across the country in just four years. The ProPublica database of the financial filings of nonprofits lists 234 Catholic Charities entities around the U.S. The top 25 had revenues of slightly more than $2 billion in 2023, the last year filings are available for all groups. That’s an almost 50 percent increase, a gain of about $660 million, in four years. Some of these groups have been utterly transformed. Catholic Charities Fort Worth has become one of the nation’s largest local Catholic groups, with revenues of $289 million in 2023, compared with just $32 million in 2020. And like so many religious social services groups today, the charity exists almost entirely on government funds. Catholic Charities Fort Worth’s 2023 federal 990 form, which nonprofits must file, lists $270 million in total government grants.

But even these stories show discrepancies. Just the News gives the total for Catholic Charities of Fort Worth for 2023 at $401.7 million, while City Journal puts it at $203 million, although both wildly exceed the number Vice President Vance and I had been using of "over $100 million" for the US Church as a whole. Last September, posting on the problems in Springfield, OH, I linked to an article that attributed the problem to church-spnsored organizations, certainly including Catholic Charities:

An example is the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Catholic voluntary organization which issued a press release in response to citizen backlash against their role in the migrant crisis in which they acknowledged that “SVdP volunteers and interpreter[sic]/navigators assist these neighbors [migrants] with tools for independent living. SVdP conduct(s) legal pro-bono immigration clinics. Whenever possible, SVdP navigators help Haitians seek waivers of… application fees.”

But the "navigators" are doing more than helping immigrants fill out forms:

An example is the Nehemiah Foundation, a non-profit organization that coordinates faith-based activities among churches and parishioners as an official partner of the City of Springfield. The Nehemiah Foundation also maintains collaborative relationships with the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, the Haitian Community Help & Support Center, and the Springfield City School District.

. . . Nehemiah’s volunteers have a level of ideological and religious conviction which means they are happy to educate Haitians for free. Admirable although this is, this is a level of concern for non-citizens which they do not extend to Americans. While teaching Haitians English, they also promote BLM-inspired Juneteenth activities and introduce them to DEI “anti-racist” ideological propaganda.

But the issue goes beyond propaganda. In Springfield, the NGOs appear to be involved in things like buying cars for the immigrants, but exactly who buys them with whose money is difficult to trace.

Within a labyrinth of organizations, obfuscation is the norm. Ohio Department of Development. Ohio Housing Finance Agency. Springfield Metropolitan Housing Authority. Minority Business Services. Neighborhood Impact Division… The names go on and on. Entities feed into other entities to create a twisted maze.

Meanwhile, local citizens are left to bear the costs, including a massive spike in car accidents. Last year an unlicensed Haitian careened into a school bus, killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark and injuring 23 other children. Local bartender Jill explained she’s afraid to let her 17-year-old son drive: “It’s an American rite of passage, and I can barely afford it. I’m worried he’ll be killed by a Haitian every time he hits the road. Our premiums have skyrocketed.” All over Springfield, this is a common refrain. “All because you don’t want to learn how to drive, we have to die,” another local told me.

Neither the public at large nor Catholic laity (nor, I suspect, the rank-and-file Catholic priesthood) has been willing to take at face value protestations of innocence from either Rome or the USCCB on questions like sex abuse without serious investigation and major policy changes. But Pope Francis himself has been reluctant to address even the sex abuse problems of the past quarter century:

[H]e is, of course, the ultimate church "insider," the man at the top of a very clear and rigid hierarchy, the one person who has the most power — indeed, nearly limitless power — to prevent abuse, expose wrongdoers, release records, rebuild trust and help victims heal.

But he refuses to do so. Instead he repeatedly just pontificates (excuse the pun) about the crisis, often in eloquent, even heart-wrenching ways, without following through with concrete, effective reforms.

If we can't get credible numbers and clear statements of policy from Catholic Charities and other Church organizations that are getting government grants, the Church faces a new problem, because Musk and Trump will be a new and independent source of numbers that will do a great deal of damage to the bishops' credibility.

"All These Things Are A Really Semi-Religious Or Religious Belief System"

I've already noted here the potential crisis the US Catholic bishops face in taking a public stance against the Trump administration's desire at minimum to cut back on funding to NGOs, including nominally Catholic programs, that have woke objectives. On January 28, immediately after Trump's imitial announcemnt of that policy, Catholic Charities, a major recipient of this funding,

urged the Trump administration to “rethink” its pause on federal funding for executive departments, noting the “millions of Americans who rely on this life-giving support.”

. . . “For more than a century, the Catholic Charities network has worked with the government to care for poor and vulnerable people in every community in the U.S., and we continue to be eager to work with government to care for our neighbors in need,” [Catholic Charities CEO Kerry Alys] Robinson said. “We strongly urge the administration to rethink this decision.”

On the other hand, there's some question about whether the federal grant money is used exclusively "to care for the poor and vulnerable":

President Joe Biden’s border policies were a boon for private religious charities associated with the Catholic Church, which collectively received billions in grant money while helping house and resettle migrants, while a federal watchdog warned about mismanaged funds and a potential for fraud.

The funding for these humanitarian programs that came through the Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency has come under renewed scrutiny by President Trump and his administration, who seek to reverse years of financial incentives for the crisis of border crossings under their predecessor.

Catholic Charities USA, comprised of 168 local member agencies across the United States, is one of the largest private recipients of government funding under several immigration-related programs that critics have said allowed the Biden administration to relocate and shelter migrants in the United States.

. . . For example, the endowment associated with Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Fort Worth in Texas experienced a more than 34 fold increase in funding from government grants from FY 2021 to FY 2023. In FY 2021, at the beginning of the Biden administration, the group had only received $11.7 million in grant money. By FY 2023, that amount had ballooned to $401.7 million. A majority of that funding was earmarked for a “Refugee and Entrant Assistance” program, according to the financial records.

. . . For example, Catholic Charities of Louisville, Kentucky also experienced a similar growth in funding over the same period. In FY 2021, the group took in roughly $10 million in federal grants, but by FY 2023, that number had exploded to about $122 million.

. . . Catholic Charities San Antonio, which received more than $27 million in total from FEMA, was accused by a Democratic congressman of misusing funds it received for the program by purchasing airplane tickets for migrants in its care.

Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, the then-ranking member of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee and member who helped create the program, and Rep. Monica de la Cruz, a Republican, told the Border Report that the program was never intended to support long distance travel but rather things like food and shelter.

“When I first started this program, I said it would only be used for food and shelter, maybe transportation inside a city, but not to be sending them up there. The family or somebody should pay for that, not the taxpayer dollars,” Cuellar told the outlet last April.

However, the newly appointed Arcnbishop of Detroit, Edward Weisenburger, a longtime Trump opponent,

warned against the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle USAID, and highlighted the responsibility the United States has to care for those suffering around the world.

“In our culture, when we don’t have to see that person, see that process, we can kind of close our minds to it, but I don’t think a Christian can do that,” Weisenburger said in an introductory news conference[.]

Nevertheless, this hasn't done away with the inevitable inference that Catholic Charities benefited enormously from the Biden administration's increased funding, and indeed, that such funding wasn't necessarily offered for programs in conformity with Church teaching. If, for example, as in the San Antonio case, the money was going to transport migrants to the US who intended to cross the border illegally, this would be in opposition to CCC 2241, which says countries may "make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions".

This is leading to expressions of concern from prominent Catholic Trump supporters such as Vice President Vance, but former Speaker Newt Gingrich raises an intriguing additional point in the video embedded at the top of this post. Answering a question from Sean Hannity on why Democrats are objecting to cuts in USAID and other grants, he says at 1:23:

There are two different things going on here with the Democrats. The first is, they are watching with terror as all the different sources of government money that has propped them up for the last 60 or 70 years, all of it, is now being challenged by President Trump amd Elon Musk. And this cuts to the very base of their coalition, If they can't bribe people corruptly, if they can't take care of their friends, their entire coalition is going to collapse.

Second, you have a very large part of the Democratic Party for whom the beliefs you are describing, transgenderism, for example, are religious beliefs. This is a secular religion. They can't unlock, because they believe these things. They believe in an open border. They believe there really is no such thing as America. They believe that it's really good to have millions of people flood into this country, it's really good to have people who don't have to work. . . . All these things are a really semi-religious or religious belief system. . .

How much has this semi-religious belief system infiltrated the Catholic Church? It's worth noting that prominent US Cardinals like Blase Cupich and Robert McElroy are not just in favor of uncontrolled migration, they're notably squishy on LGBT+ issues. I've already noted here that the potential abuses by Catholic Charities of grants for immigration support cold result in a crisis equivalent to the clerical sexual abuse crisis of the early 2000s. and the US bishops, not to mention Pope Francis, seem unaware of the risks involved, at least so far.

It would be foolhardy for them to underestimate either Trump of J D Vance. Gingrich's remarks on the whole semi-religious belief system are insightful and a major point of current vulnerability for the bishops and the Holy See.

"Samantha, Look In The Mirror! The Reason The USAID Is Going To Cease To Exist Is Because It Should!"

Sen Lindsey Graham announces he's been red-pilled over USAID. and at 1:51 above, he says,

Samantha [Power] has been texting me morning, noon, and night, Samantha, look in the mirror! The reason USAID is going to cease to exist as it did before is because it should!

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse says "We can officially say this moment achieves ‘peak Graham.’" Graham has in fact been a chief advcocate of USAID up to this point, when Elon Musk has suddenly exposed the grift and Graham realizes he'd better get on the right side of the issue.

Sounds very fishy https://t.co/68ToeBRN6d

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025

I've looked at Samantha Power's career now and then, and irrespective of the latest allegations of her net worth, she's always struck me as among the privileged for being special. According to Wikipedia,

Samantha Jane Power (born September 21, 1970) is an Irish-American journalist, diplomat, and government official who served as the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development from 2021 to 2025. She was the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Power is a member of the Democratic Party.

Power began her career as a war correspondent covering the Yugoslav Wars before entering academic administration. In 1998 [age 28], she became the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she later served as the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy until 2009. She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008.

A later paragraph expands on her early career:

After graduating from Yale, Power worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a researcher for Carnegie's then-President Morton Abramowitz. From 1993 to 1996, she worked as a war correspondent, covering the Yugoslav Wars for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic. When she returned to the United States, she attended Harvard Law School, receiving her J.D. in 1999.

There's still a great deal left unsaid here. Born in Ireland, she lived there until she was nine, when her mother separated from her father and took her to Pittsburgh. She resurfaced in high school in Atlanta, after which she went to Yale. I can only assume something happened at Yale that put her on the fast track; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a bastion of old-money power and wealth that doesn't hire just any bright young thing. Ferdinand Lundberg has much to say about such foundations in The Rich and the Super-Rich:

To what extent are the wealthy giving their money away for good works if they are giving it away at all? This is somewhat similar to the question faced in the last chapter: To what extent are the wealthy being taxed out of existence? And, if they are not giving wealth away, what is it that they are really doing with their numerous foundations?

. . . A third effect is the corporate-control effect. Corporate control, which would otherwise be undermined by the tax laws, is preserved to perpetuity by many foundations, permitting the hereditary transmission, tax free, of vast corporate power.

A fourth effect is that the foundations extend the power of their founders very prominently into the cultural areas of education (and propaganda), science, the arts and social relations. While much that is done in these areas under foundation auspices meets judicious critical approval, it is a fact that these dispensations inevitably take the form of patronage, bestowed on approved projects, withheld from disapproved projects. Recipients of the money must be ideologically acceptable to the donors.

Somehow, the right people seem to have decided early in Power's career that she had a knack for picking the right recipients of foundation money, and they put her in increasing positions of trust that she would do this. Wikipedia notes that In 2016, she was listed as the 41st-most powerful woman in the world by Forbes. Time has listed her as one of “100 Most Influential People,” and she's one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” All we can think is she does all the right things and has all the right opinions.

There can be no question that her approval of any project can mean multimillions in grant money to the recipient, and throughout her career, she seems to have been able to place herself in positions where she can do this. There can be little question that someone in that sort of position would have enormous opportunity to reap all sorts of rewards from the grateful beneficiaries of her largesse. The USAID would be just the most recent, and probably by far the most lucrative, of her opportunities.

I would also assume that someone in so prestigious a position would have the resources to legitimize or conceal disbursements that might otherwise be interpreted, however uncharitably, as kickbacks. We'll have to see what the DOGE boys come up with.

Privileged For Being Special

A while ago, there was a saying about people like Paris Hilton. whom nobody could understand what they had done to make themselves famous, that they were "famous for being well known". What I've been noticing in recent years is a phenomenon of people who are, or were, privileged for being special. Nobody can quite figure out what made, or makes, them privileged. Take the example of Rebecca Lobach, the pilot of the helicopter that by current general consensus was at fault for flying into a regional jet on January 29. The jet was following the controller's instructions, at the precise altitude and course it should have been. The helicopter appears to have been above its authorized altitude and even slightly off course.

The initial news the morning after the crash had to do with the loss of 14 prominent figure skaters on the jet:

U.S. Figure Skating, the organization that serves as the sport's national governing body, confirmed the plane's passengers included several of its members, who had attended a prestigious training camp for novice and intermediate skaters in Wichita, Kansas, where the flight took off.

"These athletes, coaches, and family members were returning home from the National Development Camp held in conjunction with the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas," U.S. Figure Skating said in a statement. "We are devastated by this unspeakable tragedy and hold the victims' families closely in our hearts. We will continue to monitor the situation and will release more information as it becomes available."

But almost immediately, the focus changed. The Army was withholding the name of the helicopter pilot at the request of the family, even though it had released the names of the other two crew members. This immediately shifted attention to the pilot. For days after the eventual release, media carried tributes to her ahchievement and character:

U.S. Army Capt. Rebecca Lobach earned it.

She was an athlete and a top student. She was, more than anything, a patriot, in the best sense of the word, serving her country and, at the age of 28, becoming a leader and a mentor.

Notice the constant repetition in the quotes I've found over the past several days stressing that she "earned it", or, "Not only did she deserve what she achieved, but she was overqualified most of the time". Why the need to stress this? She was the pilot of a helicopter that was out of position, ignored the warnings of the tower, and crashed into a jet that was carrying 64 people who neither earned nor deserved the fate they got. Indeed, it sounds as if the jet's pilots were fully qualified, while at least 14 of the passengers were prominent athletes.

Somehow the media bought into the idea that Rebecca Lobach, beyond anyone else involved in the accident, was the casualty who was prominent for being special.

Another puzzling case is Luigi Mangione, who has been arrested and indicted for killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on December 4, 2024 in New York City. According to the New York Post,

Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has accepted nearly $300,000 in donations from his so-called fans to pay for his criminal defense, his lawyer says.

The December 4 Legal Committee, a group that raised the money and is named after the date in which Thompson was shot and killed in Manhattan, confirmed the transfer on Monday to Mangione’s legal fund.

. . . Mangione, who is charged with first-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism for killing the father-of-two, has gained a cult-like following over the high-profile case.

Jamie Peck and Sam Beard, of the “Party Girls” podcast who also serve as spokespeople for the fund, said they were thrilled to learn that Mangione was making use of the resources they helped build for him after making contact with his attorney on Monday.

One of numerous stories trying to make sense of the phenomenon says,

Mangione can be described with a host of adjectives, among them young, fit, wealthy and male. The valedictorian of an elite private high school with two Ivy League degrees, he comes from a prominent upper-class family in Maryland and maintained an active presence online.

. . . "This, of course, is framed as, 'He's one of us,'" said Ioana Literat, a communications professor at [Columbia University's Teachers College].

"'One of us' as in a social media user, 'one of us' as a young person and, very importantly, 'one of us' as someone that is dealing with this system that doesn't work for regular people."

The same story points out, though, that Mangione was not a customer of UnitedHealthCare. However he may have been dealing with "the system", it was at least one level removed, and the peculiar thing is that "the system" was in fact working for him. According to Wikipedia,

Mangione's father now runs the Mangione Family Enterprises. The extended family also owns Hayfields Country Club, Turf Valley Resort, Lorien Health Services, the WCBM radio station, as well as the Mangione Family Foundation

Mangione attended Gilman School, an all-boys private secondary school in Baltimore, where he graduated as valedictorian in 2016. Mangione received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) in computer engineering and a Master of Science in Engineering (MSE) in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. His undergraduate studies included a minor in mathematics, and his graduate curriculum was concentrated in artificial intelligence. He was a UI programming intern with the video game company Firaxis Games from May 2016 to August 2017 while he was an undergraduate student.

Mangione began to work remotely in November 2020 as a data engineer for TrueCar, a car retailing website company headquartered in Santa Monica, California. His employment there ended at some point during 2023, according to the company. His last known residence was in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Wait a moment. After a career in tech, I can guarantee you that you do not need an MSE from Penn to work for a car retailing website. Most of my colleagues in system engineering didn't have four-year degrees, and many had just GEDs they'd obtained through the military. In general, he appears to have underperformed in life after leaving an educational system that his family was almost certainly able to game in his favor.

In the summer of 2024, Mangione stopped posting on social media. On November 18, 2024, his mother reported him missing to the San Francisco Police Department, saying the family had not heard from him since July of that year, shortly after a trip to East and Southeast Asia. Mangione's mother contacted the San Francisco Police Department because she believed that Mangione lived in San Francisco and still worked for TrueCar, which had an office there.

Although unemployed since leaving his remote job in 2023, he appears to have been able to travel to Southeast Asia, as well as to New York, with no visible means of support. What he apparently did have, though, was an overridng sense of grievance against "the system", when as far as anyone can tell, "the system" had been working in his favor all his life, or at least until he basically checked out.

I say this only as someone with a layman's general understanding of mental health issues, and we know very little of Mangione's specific case, but it's hard to avoid speculating that schizophrenia begins to manifest in the late teens and early 20s, and something like this may have taken place. But this hardly makes him admirable, just a very sad situation.

But somehow in the popular imagination, he's entitled to be privileged for being special because he's "one of us", which apparently means wealthy, attractive, fit, and privileged, but basically hollow, and in fact with a deep-seated fear they haven't earned their position in life and don't deserve what they have. And this also comes with a free-floating sense of grievance against "the system" that actually works in their favor. Seems like there's a lot of people who are that way, and they can all relate to each other.

How come so many of them are in the Ivy League/

Golly Gee, We Still Don't Know Much More About What Caused The Accident!

Yesterday I posted about indications that very powerful influences were able to insert themselves into the Army's press releases about the Reagan National collision January 29, especially that the family was able to override Army policy and delay release of the pilot's name an additional two days, as well as to include a family-written eulogy of the pilot in the Army's own press release, despite the strong likelihood that that pilot played a major role in the collision. It's hard to avoid thinking similar influences have been delaying the release of other key information about the crash.

As of Janary 31, over a week ago,

The National Transportation Safety Board has recovered the flight “black box” from the downed Black Hawk helicopter, that appears to be undamaged, board member Todd Inman said.

Yesterday, the NTSB has recovered a flight data recorder “in good condition” from the accident, he said, though it will not be releasing information from that device immediately. The cockpit voice recorder that was recovered, in contrast, had “water intrusion,” a problem that investigators are now dealing with, but they have “a very high level of confidence” that they will get information from that device, Inman said.

Regarding the helicopter voice recorder itself, another version of what the NTSB said was,

The Sikorsky has a combined black box, which was retrieved and is at NTSB headquarters; they will begin its evaluation to determine when/how to take action; they saw no exterior damage, indicating it was compromised; they have a high level of confidence in full extraction.

So, how long does it take to extract the voice recorder data if there's been water incursion? Should we maybe have had some info by now? The answers are vague:

It most likely take a day, or a couple days depending on the environment it was found in. For example I’ve heard that if the crash is at sea they will bring the box in, using the same surrounding water it was submerged in. But these days the actual downloading of the audio is no more than downloading of digital audio files. What takes a long time is releasing it to the public. It first will need to be analyzed by “experts” and the cause of the crash determined and possibly attempted to be rectified. Making sure the last of kin are all ok with releasing the recordings. Respect for the dead. Logistical things surrounding the black box recording. That’s what takes a long time.

On February 3, a week ago, the NTSB gave what appers to have been the last detailed public press conference on the crash. It gave an extensive timeline of the regional jet's cockpit voice recorder, as well as a report that the altitude of the jet, based on the jet's flight data recorder and ADS-B data, was 325 feet, which gave a strong impression that the helicopter was well above its 200 foot authorized altitude. However, the NTSB spokesman claimed

the NTSB cannot yet give any information on the altitude of the helicopter (call sign Priority Air Transport 25 or PAT25). But he called the helicopter recorders “the third prong” of information that needs to be confirmed to understand the conflicting altitude information being seen in preliminary data. Whenever those data points are finalized, NTSB will feel “very comfortable” in saying exactly what altitude this collision occurred at.

Meanwhile, the last semi-public statements from the NTSB, as far as I can determine, were on Thursday, February 6, when it briefed the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on the accident. It apparently provided no update on the helicopter voice recorder in that briefing, but the main subject was the question of whether the helicopter’s ADS-B advanced surveillance technology was installed or activated, which would have solved the pesky problem of its altitude, as we saw just above. As of this past Saturday, it's all still just a big puzzle:

Investigators have revealed that the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that collided with American Airlines Flight 5342 over the Potomac River was flying with its automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system turned off. The turned-off ADS-B is possibly another contributing factor to a crash that was the deadliest in U.S. aviation since 2001.

. . . What it all means, with respect to the Potomac collision, is that had the Black Hawk’s ADS-B been turned on, American Airlines Flight 5342 would have been more likely to have been aware of the Black Hawk’s location, reducing the likelihood of a collision.

Of course, the investigation is still ongoing, and it is unlikely to conclude that the turned-off ADS-B was solely responsible for the collision. But the disclosure raises questions and further suggests that the tragedy could have been avoided.

There are other questions about errors that were made just before the collision.

Michael Pearson, who was a FAA air traffic control specialist for over 26 years, is a lawyer in the lawsuit against the FAA regarding alleged racial discrimination in the agency’s hiring practices. Pearson told Just the News on Tuesday that ATC didn’t follow proper procedure, which led to the crash. He said there was a conflict alert on the radar, giving the ATC “27 seconds to do something.”

“When a [conflict alert] goes off, you take immediate action,” he said.

While the media largely appears to holding the crew of the Army helicopter to blame for the crash, Pearson believes that the ATC is primarily at fault. Pearson says that the controller "didn't tell the jet that the helicopter was in sight,” despite being “required to, and didn’t give safety advisories” when the conflict alert went off. Also, the “helicopter route was horrible,” and “the controller didn't apply the rules properly.”

So the NTSB needs data from the helicopter's flight data recorder to say for sure what its altitude was at the time of the collision. Although it's released a detailed timeline of the jet's flight data and voice recorder, it just can''t seem to get the same data from the helicopter, even though it's had the black boxes for well over a week. And if it had the helo's ADS-B data, well, that would have helped, too, but for some reason, the helo's ADS-B just wasn't turned on, so I guess maybe we'll never quite know. Nor will we even know why the helo's ADS-B was turned off, when the jet had it on. One of history's great mysteries, huh? And what a tragedy for the pilot!

"Not only did she deserve what she achieved, but she was overqualified most of the time for what she was able to accomplish," said Capt. Bilal Kordab, who recruited Lobach to the North Carolina National Guard. "Nothing was just handed to her."

. . . [Close friend Lt Smantha] Brown said she was confident, despite the political rhetoric swirling around her friend's death, that Lobach would be remembered for one thing – that she heartily deserved her success.

"Rebecca earned her place in that aircraft," she said. "She was outstanding, and she deserved to be there."

Here's another incongruity: the Lobach family somehow prevailed on the Army to violate its policy and withhold her name for an additional two days so they could scrub her social media, and indeed, they requested privacy. But somehow, the family publicist has been releasing photo after photo of a gleeful Rebecca, as well as interviews with all her friends, to legacy media, which it eagerly prints, and indeed, the family publicist has used Rebecca's death to remind everyone in York, PA of what a great humanitarian her Uncle Jeff is. He's even gonna have a gala at the country club next month!

Except Rebecca's last flight was a check ride, which she unquestionably failed. As I asked yesterday, why does everyone she knew keep insisting she earned everything she got? It's almost as if there are nagging doubts.

Something's hinky.