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Jan. 30, 2025 - The Charlie Kirk Show
11:07
Disaster Over the Potomac — What We Know
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Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
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That's why we are here.
Our son...
We're here in Washington, D.C., soon to be coming back to Arizona.
Our son woke up after he heard a very, very loud boom.
We weren't really sure what was going on, and Erica soothed him back to sleep.
Our hotel, where we were staying, was right near the Potomac.
And all of a sudden we started to see 10, 20, 30, 40 very, very bright emergency lights.
Gather and congregate on the Virginia side of the Potomac.
My phone started to light up and people were saying, was there some sort of plane crash?
What's going on in the ground?
Twitter went ablaze.
You pray and you hope for the best in situations like this.
And just so happens, we were up very late last night.
We saw over the Potomac the entire emergency response of what...
Happened at Reagan National Airport.
Being that close to it makes it even starker and more dramatic.
Last night, here's what we know.
We're not going to speculate.
We're not going to guess.
We're just going to tell you the facts.
Last evening, a flight from Wichita, Kansas, in a CRJ-700 collided.
With a Army helicopter.
It was a clear night.
There was not a cloud in the sky.
It was perfect flying conditions.
The CRJ-700, as pictured right there, seemed to intersect with the Army helicopter at the exact precise and right moment.
From there, the plane seemed to spiral downward into the Potomac as it was on its final approach.
We believe the helicopter had a similar fate.
We haven't heard much about the helicopter, who was flying and what was going on in that situation.
And from that moment, the first responders worked all night.
And Sean Duffy, who is the Secretary of Transportation, was sworn in hours beforehand.
And boy, trial by fire.
He's been doing a great job.
Very proud of Sean Duffy.
About five hours.
On the job, he gets thrown into what is looking like one of the deadliest plane crashes in a generation.
You can see there an infographic.
Our hotel room was just right up there, so we were witnessing some of the response.
The Army helicopter was doing a training exercise with three soldiers on board.
The CRJ-700, the American Airlines flight, was on a...
Now, this is personal for a lot of us on the team and a lot of us in the audience.
I've landed in Reagan probably 200 times over the last 12 years.
I've been a passenger in this approach.
Reagan Airport has a very, very tightly controlled airspace.
And we're not going to spend time speculating because it's not helpful for anybody.
This is one of the shortest runways in the country and in the nation.
Reagan is very, very close to downtown Washington.
It's kind of just fit right there on the Potomac.
The plane goes down and rescue efforts were attempted all evening.
And tragically, around 4 a.m.
Eastern, it transitioned from a rescue effort to a recovery effort.
Now, we do not know how many passengers were on board.
But rough estimates are showing that 60 to 65 people likely died in this plane crash.
The first big U.S. plane crash since 2009. This is not political.
This is just a tragedy.
We have been warning for quite some time that there have been a lot of near misses at airports across the country.
A lot of near misses.
More so than what people are comfortable with.
There were 60 passengers and four crew members.
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I want to read one element of this, which kind of clarifies exactly what happened in These last moments.
It's how the disaster unfolded over the Potomac.
Very, very important.
And at least this is what we know as of right now.
That air traffic control was actually trying to alert the Black Hawk helicopter pilot.
So it seems as if the Black Hawk helicopter pilot was coming from the north, going south down the Potomac.
The American Airlines flight was coming from the southeast.
Going west on their intended route to land at Reagan National.
So this is a sequence in about eight steps.
The American Airlines flight 5342 makes its final approach for a night landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport with 64 people on board.
The U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter carrying three soldiers flies through the airspace on a training exercise.
The Blackhawk helicopter received a radio call from air traffic control.
So ATC did their job, allegedly.
We'll find out more.
This is all according to the current public reports.
Saying, quote, Do you have a CRJ in sight?
Pass behind the CRJ. Now this is where it gets confusing, and I'm sure we'll end up getting an answer.
I sure hope so.
Very perplexing.
It is a clear night.
You have a helicopter on a training exercise.
Knowing that they're going to fly by one of the busiest airports on the planet, where they fly approaches over the Potomac, you then hear an audible warning from air traffic control.
Do you have a CRJ in sight?
passed behind the CRJ.
At that moment, the Blackhawk helicopter very well could have diverted, changed altitudes.
You see, a helicopter is actually in many ways more nimble than an airplane.
It's able to ascend vertically within seconds.
We don't really know what happened after that, why the pilot did not recognize that warning, why it did not internalize that warning.
Moments after, the jet collided with the helicopter at an altitude of 400 feet while traveling at a speed of 140 miles per hour.
Now, People who know what they're talking about are speculating this must have been like a direct collision because potentially a CRJ still could have maybe made the landing at 400 feet.
Footage shows a violent fireball erupting above busy roads as the passenger jet banked hard to the right.
The wreckage of both the aircraft plunged into the Potomac River a few hundred meters from the Ronald Reagan Airport.
And that is what we know right now.
Commercial airliners all come equipped with collision warning technology.
President Donald Trump wrote this in the wee hours of the morning, quote, The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time.
It is a, quote, in all caps, clear night.
The lights on the plane were blazing.
Why didn't the helicopter?
Go up or down or turn.
Why didn't the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane?
This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented.
All caps, not good.
Sean Duffy has confirmed, based on what he has seen so far, this looks to be a preventable tragedy.
I'm going to save any commentary regarding this.
For another time.
Instead, we just look at this in somewhat a reflective and personal way that we've been on flights like this before and we pray for all the victims and their families.
It's just a tragic and awful situation.
And I hope we'll get clarity on everything that happened so that something like this can never happen again.
And it has been confirmed there are no survivors.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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