Washington, United States:
US President Donald Trump has compared last week’s catastrophic crash between an Army helicopter and a passenger jet near Washington, claiming 67 lives, to a golf driving range. Mr Trump reportedly said that the accident was “amazing” as it would improve the air traffic control system.
Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast at the US Capitol, Donald Trump said the crash revealed lapses in the country’s air traffic control technology. “It’s amazing that it happened. We should have had the proper control. We should have had better equipment,” he said, adding the US had obsolete equipment.
“They were understaffed for whatever reason. I guess the helicopter was high. And we’ll find out exactly what happened,” he said, as reported by Associated Press.
Comparing the incident to a golf range, he added, “Did you ever see, you go to a driving range in golf and you’re hitting balls, hundreds of balls, thousands of hours? I never see a ball hit another ball. Balls going up all over the place. You never see ’em hit. It was amazing that that could happen.”
Donald Trump claimed that instead of replacing the outdated system with a new one, the nation had spent a lot of money attempting to modernise it. He said that because the US system was “obsolete,” he had to rely on a system from another nation for his private jet.
On January 29, a Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines flight from Wichita, Kansas, collided near Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington.
Donald Trump initially blamed the Washington disaster on the diversity hiring programmes but later shifted the blame to the nation’s air traffic control system’s outdated technology.
Following the tragedy, there were worries that Mr Trump’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce may make the problem worse if some air traffic controllers took the offers of deferred resignation made to all federal employees last week. But their union informed air traffic controllers on Thursday that their job and other positions within the Federal Aviation Administration were exempt.