President Donald Trump read some headlines while speaking from the lectern at the White House briefing room, appearing to blame a “diversity push” at FAA without evidence for the midair collision in the Washington, DC area.
“I do want to point out that various articles that appeared prior to my entering office. And here’s one, the FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. That is amazing. And then it says FAA says people with severe disabilities are most underrepresented segment of the workforce said ‘they want them in, and they want them, they can be air traffic controllers. I don’t think so. This was January 14, so that was a week before I entered office. They put a big push to put diversity into the FAA’s program,” Trump said.
“Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened because of the stress where you have many, many planes coming into one target, and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it,” the president added.
No one is believed to have survived the midair collision between an American Airlines jet plane and a US Army Black Hawk helicopter last night in the Washington, DC, area, fire chief John Donnelly said Thursday. President Donald Trump said “there are no survivors,” adding the White House has “strong opinions” of what led to the collision.