You're listening to kaf I AM six forty the Bill Handles show on demand on the iHeartRadio app Yesterday last evening, another horrific airline crash.
This one or actually a.
Collision between a civilian aircraft American Airlines regional plane. It was a smaller plane I think sixty some odd people can hold I think seventy and a military helicopter as the plane was approaching landing at Reagan Reagan Airport.
In Washington, d C.
With us Jay Ratliffe, the iHeart aviation expert who joins us whenever we have these unfortunate stories and he knows.
What he was talking about.
Jay, thanks for taking the time, greatly appreciated. Can we start with what happened? And then I have question after question? So describe what happened.
If you would.
Well, I mean, we had a American Airlines commuter flight flying in. It was American Airlines fifty three forty two. On approach coming out of what you talk Kansas into Washington, DC's Reagan Airport to normal operations, clear skies, ten miles visibility, the winds a little bit sixteen to twenty miles an hour. It was okay and then as they were preparing for landing, at the last moment, the aircraft collided with an essence, a military black Hawk helicopter and exploded in the air
and no one survived. Sixty passengers for crew members on the American Airlines flight, and then three people that were crew members on the aircraft. And now the search francers begins because obviously having two aircraft in the same spot is not what we want, and it just I've not had to talk about this since February of two thousand and nine. It's been sixteen years since our last aviation disaster here in the United States involving a US carrier
with a crash and a loss of life. Now, we did have the Asiana plane crash or episode that we had in San Francisco. We had a couple of fatalities there, but they were more from what happened after the crash and the crash itself. But it's not the norm. So when this happens, everybody kind of gets to wake up called like, oh my gosh, what happened?
With that being said, a couple of questions and if there is a silver lining, you can possibly just take something out of it. Is it fair to say that no one aboard the airplane ever knew what happened. It happened so quickly, it was instantaneous, so there was no anticipation, there was no pain, there was nothing that fair to say.
I would think, given the explosion that we unfortunately had to witness on the video, that would be an accurate statement. In fact, I think the only people that might have had any sort of prior knowledge that something was about to happen them would have been the flight crew for American Airlines, and that would have been the helicopter coming up underneath from the side would have been the last
thing they saw before everything happened. And I believe that you're right that no one suffered, and that's certainly something that if that's the case, we're certainly glad to see, because you know, aviation is incredibly safe, and when this happens, we always have questions, and I always say, the best way for us to honor the lives of those that were lost is to make sure that we learned from the accident and then do everything humanly possible to prevent
it from ever happening again. And that's what the National Transportation Safety Board is going to do now. Right now, we have nothing but questions. But there are some observations that I can offer because we have heard the air traffic control conversation from ATC to the militarily helicopter that was flying on a VFR or visual flight rules. They were lying along the Potomac River as that's what that
corridors for, and it was at the proper altitude. They were what we hope they were, and they were responsible for making sure they kept a visual separation between them and any other aircraft. Well, what happens is air traffic Control reaches out to them and says, hey, do you have a visual of that American Airlines flight? Now? The problem or a question I have is that happened seconds before impact. So my question is, now wait a minute. And again it's a snippet. We don't know if anything
happened before or anything else. So this is a tainted observation that doesn't have all the facts. But why are we asking a question moments before impact that's going to require a response that we then have to give evasive
commands to. To me, it should have been you need to evade, you need to move, you need to do whatever to that black Hawk helicopter, which obviously, between the two aircraft is the one better positioned to respond quickly because that's what they do, all right, to get out of the way.
So with that, with that in mind, okay, I have an additional question, and we can do this for hours and hours, and that is I'm assuming that that air space because I know that Reagan International is one of the busiest.
Airports probably in the world. I know it's the busiest airport that we have in the United States.
Certain number of planes, uh, and corridors are established specifically, I mean, you don't put helicopters anywhere at the same time as airplanes coming in or the same level or the same trajectory. Any preliminary uh, any preliminary accounts were they in the wrong places? Was air traffic involved and telling them.
Where to go?
Uh?
Does it look like anyone is at fault pilots? Uh? It would have to either be pilot, air or traffic control. Any idea.
Well, I mean at this point in time that there's no way to know any of the definitive stuff at this point in time because of the fact that you know, the investmentation is going to take us where we need to go, So we don't know what the investigation will help us out as far as what's taken place. The conversations that happened between air traffic control and the pilots is obviously something for me that is a big, big issue because what I want to know is what happened before, during,
and after. And unfortunately they communicate the air traffic control with the pilots on one frequency and of military and then the commercial pilots on another frequency. So sadly, the American Airlines crew could not benefit from overhearing that conversation. And again, we don't know what the American Airlines crew was told of anything. Hey there's a black hog in the area, keep an eye out, blah blah blah. Typically that's not the case, So I don't know. We're going
to have to wait and see everything. In the National Transportation Safety Board that's going to be overseeing this entire investigation,
they're an all star team. They will do everything they can to make sure that they get as much of the information as they possibly can, and we'll get to the bottom of what happened, and then they will make recommendations to the Federal Aviation Ministration about ways that we can improve safety, and then it's up to the FAA whether or not they implement those because many times they
do not, and we'll make things even safer. But I mean, we're going to find probably absent a mechanical problem or a medical episode that happened on the crew members, that this was an unbelievably preventable accident.
Yeah.
Now again that's asinine for me to say, but I have.
Investigations, you know. I think I think that that's a pretty good guest. Can you hang on to one more segment?
I can? I can't.
Okay, great, that would because I again more and more and more questions and analysis from you.
We'll be right back with that. Jay Ratliffe, iHeart Aviation Expert.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Thursday morning, January the thirtieth, and welcome back, by the way, and if I'm on echo, because I just lost you guys on my computer, so don't know what I can do with that right now. In the meantime, let's go back to Jay Ratcliffe, the iHeart Aviation Expert, and we're talking about the crash that occurred last night, the mid air collision between a military hospital, a military helicopter and a civilian aircraft American Airlines Regional jet. And the jet
was on approach four hundred and five hundred feet up. Boom, the collision happened. Everybody on board died. Of course, what sixty four people on the civilian aircraft and then three people on the military helicopter. Jay, let me ask you. The first thing that comes to mind when I saw this was, how about anti collision systems?
Don't both aircraft have them?
And do we have any information that they kicked in or said something.
To the pilots.
Well, the tea cash or the traffic collision Avoidance system is well known and well used. In fact, all of us that bore the airplane hear the flight crew testing it. Pull up, pull up, you know, because it's designed that if your aircraft gets in close proximity to another, it alerts one crew to do one thing and the other crew to do the other thing. You know what, one will ascend to the other. World decend to make sure that they don't end up occupying the same airspace at
the same time. Now, typically on every commercial aircraft you've got teacass available. To my knowledge, it's not something that is on the Black Hark Because of that, it requires a specific transponder for that to happen, So that's one thing. The other thing is typically once you go under one thousand feet, the TCAs system tends to shut off, so it's really of no use when you're in that final
thousand feet, which is unfortunately where this happened. And you can tell that the flight crew had literally no indication of what was going on because as you watch that horrific video, you see them just continuing to descend as they would typically come in for landing and the impact.
There was no last minute adjustment to course, altitude anything like that, which you're right when you talk about how it just caught everybody off guard, and it did, and at that point in time, there was obviously nothing that could be done. So they really didn't have the tools to use that you would have elsewhere. And you don't have a flight crew in American airlines that's busy looking out the windows. Any critical time of flight, the most
critical is five hundred feet in under. If you're taking off, m landing, you have a lot of things that you're doing, and in the last bit, because they're seconds away from landing. You've got your airspeed, you've got all of the pre arrival things you do pre landing, and you were monitoring systems making sure that everything's going. You have constant communication
between the two crew members on executing that landing. So you're busy doing a whole bunch of things, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, here comes an aircraft from underneath and to one side that you know you're on top of before you know it.
And yeah, yeah, that was the other question in terms of trajectory. There's video there, so who ran into whom and from where.
Well, there's an argument to be made that both aircraft were where they were supposed to be or could have been. In other words, had the American Airlines flight not been there, the Blackhawk was in the corridor that it should have been. Now, another question that I have is typically that ceiling is two hundred feet for that designated visual corridor that goes up and down the river there. So reports are this collision happened at four hundred feet, So again the initial findings,
who knows, We'll have to wait and see. But that's a question. I mean, if it was a four hundred feet was a black Hawk at a different altitude. But also keep in mind you had three crew members on that black Hawk that were officers that were simply doing were current train When we hear that it's a training flight, it wasn't somebody up there learning how to do things. They were on what's called an annual we're current training
where they were simply going through their annual current night training. Uh, and they were very, very proficient at what they did. So you've got them where there should be. And obviously the American Airlines flight grew is exactly where they were told to be. And uh, it just happened the two airplanes ended up at the same spot at the same time.
So so you're I'll go ahead and finish up now.
I was going to say, and how many times have you and I talked about this year and going into even last year, the number of runway incursions, near miss of things that we've had at airports around the country. And each time you and I are holding our breath thinking, dear Lord, how close are we to really having a super accident with some of these And you know, it had it been two commercial jets, you know, it would
have been far worse than it was. And you know, my heart goes out to the families that are involved in this because my family had a loss that was very public as well, and when it's constantly on the news, you can't get away from it. It is just it just makes it even more difficult to go through. But American Airlines as a care team, these are individuals on
a go team like I was with Northwest. When there's an accident, you're dispatch to that facility and you're assigned to work with a specific family who had a lost loved one. During the entire process, you're getting them set up with the hotel rangers, you're taking care of any of their family that needs to send them, You're working with whatever funeral home that they're going to do. I mean, it is a very emotional, unbelievably so time for the
American Airlines care team people. So you've got so many people that are impacted that this is going to change your life forever. And once we start hearing the stories of the people that were on those planes in the helicopter, it's going to make it even more tragic as we hear about the futures that were lost in an accident that we'll probably find out and never should have happened.
Yeah, and stories are already coming out, for example, the skating team, Oh yeah, skaters, the champions, all of it.
Jay, thank you.
Unfortunately, we're probably going to be talking about this a little bit more over the next few.
Days and weeks.
Thanks for joining us, Jay Ratliff, ihearted expert. All right, coming up, Jim Keeney, who is going to talk to us. So I asked some questions about the CDC, Donald Trump and the World Health Organization.
That just begins the conversation.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
And the light of this a mid air collision last night, all of us are spinning. And we still have tons of politics that are going on that would be front page news, but for what happened one of them, for example, of RFK, his first hearing was yesterday and it's going to continue on today. But Jim Keeney is our guest, actually not even yes, he's a regular on the show.
Jim, who is the.
Chief medical officer of Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center in Long Beach. Uh and Jim and not only an er doctor but also a doctor that has specialized and dealt with mass casualties.
I mean, that's one of the things you know something about.
So jim uh here you are in the er room and you hear that something like this just happens. Now the reality is they're gonna there are going to be no survivors. But is that is that assumption made or do you anticipate casualties coming in?
Yeah, we we usually anticipate casualties coming in, and we would get that from EMS or emergency medical services in the field. So typically, you know, somebody would call nine to one one, they would arrive to the location. They would set up what they call an incident command and would have an incident commander who would organize everything because you're going to have multiple agencies and units responding to this event, so somebody has to kind of coordinate and
take control. Then they start dividing up the work and we'll say, you know, such and such unit will be on the east bank, the other one will be on the west bank. The other one will be you know, with a helicopter over the water, another one will be
with a boat unit in the water. So they start coordinating all that and we'll quickly, they'll set up an area where they're going to bring patients, and that'll be the extraction area where all now ambulances will show up and gather in that area, so that as they find victims,
they'll bring them to those areas. So there's really as you can see, once we're starting to set up all that structure, there's typically enough time to get at least a few minutes, if not even you know, hours warning before we start get patients.
Okay, so let me ask this.
I mean, clearly, initially it starts with we are on a rescue mission.
That's what the authorities here.
I'm assuming that then sets off what you just said. And then in this case, it wasn't too much longer. Now it's recovering bodies, and as soon as you hear that, you shut everything down.
Do I have that right?
Not exactly. I mean, you know, of course, when you call nine one one, we don't have to declare it a rescue mission. I mean, that's what it is.
What I'm talking about the authorities now.
From the very beginning. Yeah, I mean, then the authorities are gonna make comments, but on the ground they are somewhat disconnected. A lot of the times between what the authorities say and what's going on on the ground. But yes, they will say we are in the mode, we are in a rescue operation mode right now, which is by definition, what's happening when you call nine one one and then yeah, then once they realize okay, wait a second, the water temperature.
You know, we're talking about minutes of survival, not hours of survival, and here we are hour later. There's just no way somebody would survive in that cold of water.
Now.
Here's the thing though about hypothermia is that, you know, we never say the rule is nobody's dead until they're warm and dead, because if you cool off fast enough and it protects your brain. A lot of times, you know, people can be down for quite a long period of time and we can resuscitate them.
It's yeah, just absolutely heartbreaking this. And the reality is, even when it's a quote rescue, if you've got a mid air collision, as soon as I've heard mid air collision, it's over. I mean, no one ever survives that or it happens. So now I don't even think anybody has survived anything like that. At four hundred feet mid air
collision where you see that huge fireball. All right, moving away from there, let's take a break, because I want to talk about a big, big picture, and that is the FED saying that the CDC, the President does not communicate in anymore with the World Health Organization.
That relationship is now severed. Oh what does that mean?
And then we're looking at the largest outbreak of TB in US history.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from kf I AM six forty.
Jim Keeney a regular segment.
W what's been going on for a couple of decades now, doctor Jim Keeney, who is an er specialist in er doc and now the chief medical officer of Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center in Long Beach.
All right, Jim, two big stories.
When I heard that Trump had cut off the CDC's communication with the World Health Organization, I was fairly stunned, and I was thinking, this is.
No small deal.
I'm assuming I'm right on that one. And what kind of repercussions are we talking about?
Sure? Yeah, I mean it's not a small deal. CDC and who work collaboratively and have done so for a long time. They share information, they collaborate with each other and especially in the world of surveillance like disease surveillance and response, so we get early warnings when things are going on in other countries, say Marlborough virus or empos or even Avian flu monitoring. They're looking at that, coordinating with the CDC, and then we're made aware of those
and are able to respond. I mean, when you think about it, we're not with jet travel. It's a global economy and a global everything. So you know, you've got four hundred thousand people a year coming from the continent of Africa to the United States, and that has the potential to bring some of those diseases that we see that initiate in Africa and then end up in the United States. We could lose that early warning system.
I'm trying to figure out even would be the politics.
And you may not know this answer because it's not a medical question, but does the United States fund most.
Of the work that the World Health Organization does? Maybe that's the political reason this happened.
Yeah, No, I believe it is about money, and and yes, the United States is a big supporter of the World Health Organization and spends a lot of money. And I know that Donald Trump has mentioned before that that you know, we disproportionately contribute to a lot of different things in the world, and this was one of them. So this may be just kind of a strategic move to get better participation globally. I don't I don't really know.
Well, work with NATO. I'll tell you that the first time around.
Okay, Now, tuberculosis Kansas City, Who the hell gets tb anymore? I mean I thought that was you know, this is in Doc Holiday, sitting in tombstone, coughing up, you know, blood into a napkin.
What is going on here?
Yeah, I mean it's really interesting because for the most part, you know, tuberculosis is controlled in the United States. There are cases of tuberculosis, like eight to ten thousand cases a year in the United States of tuberculosis, but it's treatable. We have antibiotics for most of it. There is multi drug resistant tuberculosis, and even cases that are resistant to all known antibiotics to treat tuberculosis, but those are rare. Most of them come from outside the country because the
rest of the world is still struggling with tuberculosis. That's actually a worldwide problem, a much bigger problem outside the United States. So to see this, especially because you know, during COVID again we saw drops and a lot of communicable diseases, and tuberculosis was one of those. During the years following COVID, we saw big drops in TV cases and now all of a sudden, we're starting to see this. We see this one area where it's resurging. I didn't
really see there's two kinds. There's latent TV and active. And they said a lot of these cases are latent, which means not active, not infectious. You can't spread it. But when we test people, we know that they have tuberculosis in their body.
I mean, just crazy. Just a quick story.
I don't know if I share that with you, but my mom worked at All of You Medical Center as a lab technician. All of You Medical Center in Silmar, before it became a County General Hospital, was.
A TB hospital. It was a tuberculosis hospital and in fifties my mother was there.
There were times when there were four, count them, four patients that she was dealing with. She had to bring books with her to read because she would go out of her mind all day because drawing blood from four people does not take eight hours, so it has it gone from that kind of rarity to it's much more prominent.
No, that's why this is a surprise. It really has been relatively under control. So it is a shocker to get a grouping of cases like this. I mean, it's so it remains to be seen why did this happen. TV is not easy to catch.
You have to be in the.
Space with someone for a prolonged period of time to be able to get TV from somebody. That's why we see it in confined spaces like jails and places like that, or communal living type of places. We don't usually see it in the general public, especially in big outbreaks. If you're sitting next to someone on the subway or even on a plane ride, you're very unlikely to get TV even if they have it.
Okay, Jim, thank you.
We do this again next Thursday at seven thirty, like we do every week.
Have a good one. We'll talk again, all right, coming out Joel.
Larsguard which we do on Thursday, which we broadcast and Joel always has great information as we go in through some of the financial world. Oh and Valentine joins us at eight point fifty. There is a massive benefit concert and it's going to be carried here on iHeart and well, Valentine is all over that, and you'll explain what's going on to help the victims of the fire. And that's our last segment this morning. All right, we'll be back with Joel Larsgard how to Money right here KFI am six pot.
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Catch my show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.