Airport workers have been arrested after they allegedly had shared a video of the crash between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines aircraft that happened near the Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., last week.
According to The Hill, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) announced the workers, who were from Maryland, had been arrested and charged with a Computer Trespass, which is a misdemeanor, for “making an unauthorized copy” of Airport records.
The MWAA stated that 21-year-old Mohamed Lamine Mbengue had been taken to a detention center in Arlington County, Virginia, but had been released “under his own recognizance,” 45-year-old Jonathan Savoy, the other employee involved in the video leak, was also let go “on a summons by the magistrate.”
D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services Chief John Donnelly said over the weekend that 55 victims had been positively identified. In total, there were sixty passengers and four crew members on the American Airline flight, and three soldiers on the Black Hawk helicopter. Donnelly announced there were no survivors.
Watch the video below:
Lt. Darin Gaub, who spent 30 years as a Black Hawk pilot and Commander, told Real America’s Voice that there were at least two reasons for the helicopter’s crash.
“My experience told me that there’s two main things that I’m looking at. One is there appears to be a procedural violation, potentially, of the air space rules around the airport in D.C. in general, Gaub said. “What I mean by that is, the helicopter flights through this specific location are required to go on very well-defined transit routes, at restricted altitudes and left or right lateral movements, so you have to fly within here. If they were above what’s called a 200-foot ceiling, which means you can’t go higher than this, legally, but physically you can, they were higher than that.”
Gaub noted it did not appear there had been any deviation from the helicopter’s flight path.
“That puts them in the path of fix-wing aircraft, landing and descending out of Reagan. Sounds like that is very likely to have happened, and when you look at the video, you see an aircraft, a helicopter that did not change its trajectory, air speed, anything, and ran into an aircraft it could clearly did not see for whatever reason. The second one being a communications error.”
