warner25
Born on October 09, 2021•2296 Karma
And the aviators assigned to that unit are typically more senior people who've already done a tour or two with more conventional units. Source: I'm a career Army officer and former Black Hawk pilot.
It's unclear whether they were being used at the time of the crash, but it'd be part of training.
The reporting to hand ATM makes statements such as:
Earlier in the day, Mr. Hegseth said the crew had night vision goggles. However, it was unclear whether the crew was wearing the goggles at the time of the crash, Army officials said.
And I wouldn’t expect them to be training in them in a busy commercial airspace. But that’s just what I’d expect - not based on anything else.
Errr, Hegseth is a functioning alcoholic recently parachuted into a job several orders of magnitude past anything in his prior experience.
He's likely to blurt out anything unredacted that he's heard in briefings without any due consideration of consequence.
That aside, these are training missions, they have night vision available, this would have been flagged as one of many possible influencing factors in the absence of a full accident investigation that crawls through everything.
It's unknown (to the public at least, and at this point no one who knows would or should say) whether they were in use for now.
Also as defrost said, nobody can know right now if they were actually in-use at the time of the incident. We have to wait for cockpit voice recordings.
Anyway, it's not really significant, though. I think Secretary Hegseth mentioned it because a portion of the public will equate "flying with night vision" to "flying in daylight" (even though it's not even close), so the DoD was taking all appropriate measures to be safe. Or he was just told that the crew was doing a "goggle reset" flight (because crew members need to log at least one hour of flight time with goggles every 60 days to stay current), and he jumped to a conclusion.
"Training" here also doesn't imply some 21 year-old flight school student learning to fly. The aviators assigned to that unit are typically more senior people who've already done a tour or two with more conventional units.
I've lost count of how many times I've heard your sentiment already today, and I'm distraught by the general public's apparent lack of understanding about how things work.
If the system can’t be safely designed with a safe margin of error then it is too dangerous.
There are alternative ways and locations to train.
If there’s a nat sec issue have the planes hold.
Whether the system (i.e. separating rotary-wing and fixed-wing traffic there) can be more safely designed is a question for the FAA. The military aircraft are simply abiding by FAA rules for that airspace. Many more civilian helicopters are doing the same thing.
One characteristic of the US that differs from most other countries is the degree to which the states retain a lot of power to govern themselves, and states will continue doing what they do mostly independently of things at the Federal level.
The way that most Americans talk about the president also overstates the actual power of the office. I half-joked earlier today that most Americans seem to imagine this country as an autocracy in which they get to vote for a new ruler every four years. But it's not. Congress still has more power than the average person-on-the-street seems to realize. Part of what makes Trump taking office tomorrow a bigger deal is that he's also getting both houses of congress for the next two years, which isn't always the case, but we're seeing flashes of congressional Republicans being unwilling give up their powers to him.
Anyway, I also agree with the other answers about nuclear command and control and the dysfunction in congress, especially in terms of congress exercising its power to declare war.
All he needs to do is bribe spineless gop senators. No problem.
> And in 2 years and 4 years I will go to the voting booth. But I'm powerless until then
What's really depressing is that I'm already happy with my representation in congress, and they'll probably win again comfortably in 2026 and 2028, but they're powerless too.
My whole life I've believed that "it's important to be informed." I now challenge that. I mean: yes, obviously before the next election I will read up on the candidates and propositions. But apart from that, me being informed has zero effect on the world.
That might be a good model for generally striking an appropriate balance: be informed about new major legislation (or executive orders, court decisions, etc.) when they happen, but skip all the day-to-day drama about who said what on the House or Senate floor, or in an interview, or on X in between such things. I've seen it suggested many times that the Wikipedia current events portal is all that one should look at, and it would probably accomplish this.
Practically necessarily trumps concerns of fictitious and imaginary constructs
[1] I mean when people cared about Iraq, 2003 to circa 2008. We still have troops there, but I don't think most of America is even aware of that.
Note that it was a shift for Trump, still not a majority voting for him. Exit polls that I've seen still indicated an 11-point lead for Harris[1], but that's much more narrow than the 24-point lead that Biden had in 2020[2]. Anyway, I've been fascinated by this because it kind of broke my mental model imagining that the Republican party would eventually be marginalized as its voters died of old age. I definitely thought Trump was going to lose this age group in 2024 by the widest margin ever.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/exit-polls
> Kill all the algos and let me find stuff via regex
I love this. As someone who increasingly feels old and dissatisfied with what computing is turning into, I'm going to start using this along with things like "you'll have to pry local accounts, passwords, and plain text email from my cold, dead hands."