The catastrophic collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on January 29, which claimed the lives of all 67 people aboard both aircraft, is not just a tragedy—it’s a searing indictment of the Biden administration’s pattern of incompetence, neglect, and bureaucratic finger-pointing.
Now, buried beneath headlines and deflections, we’ve learned what may be the most staggering fact of all: the hotline between Reagan National Airport and the Pentagon—a direct line meant to coordinate airspace and prevent disasters just like this one—had been inoperable since March 2022. And no one in Washington, not the FAA, not the DOD, not the White House, noticed for three years.
It’s the movie “Airplane,” but IRL https://t.co/KLnPwhKxI0 pic.twitter.com/roGoflnpHv
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) May 15, 2025
The revelation came during Senate testimony from FAA Deputy Head of Air Traffic Control Franklin McIntosh, who acknowledged the line was discovered to be dead only after another near-miss on May 1, when two commercial jets had to abandon their landings due to an uncoordinated Army helicopter flight. It wasn’t a software glitch. It wasn’t a system outage. It was institutional rot, left to fester without audit, inspection, or accountability.
“We’re insisting on that line to be fixed before we resume any operations out of the Pentagon,” McIntosh told the Senate panel.
But that doesn’t bring back the 67 Americans lost.
The names are familiar, and the accountability nonexistent.
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Secretary of Transportation (2022): Pete Buttigieg, a man whose previous experience amounted to running pothole operations in South Bend, Indiana. He was heralded as a rising Democratic star, but his tenure at the Department of Transportation has been a masterclass in failure, from supply chain crises and railway disasters to now this—the deadliest transportation incident of his term.
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Secretary of Defense (2022–2025): Lloyd Austin, another Biden Cabinet official embroiled in controversy over absenteeism, lack of transparency, and now, oversight of a broken coordination link in some of the most congested airspace in America.
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President Joe Biden, the man once pitched as “Mr. Empathy,” has presided over an era marked not by compassion, but detachment. From the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan to the failure to contact Gold Star families after the Abbey Gate bombing, and now to this aviation disaster—his administration’s fingerprints are all over the aftermath of American deaths.
Instead of accountability, Americans got the usual shuffle. Now, under Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the DOT has launched a blame campaign against the Department of Defense, claiming it failed to follow FAA restrictions. The military, for its part, insists it complied fully and is “working with the FAA” to repair the hotline.
But that’s just noise.
Here’s the truth: that hotline was down for three years, and no one at the highest levels of the Biden administration knew or acted. That’s not just bureaucratic negligence—it’s a systemic leadership collapse.
Whoops. https://t.co/WyPI07JGBS pic.twitter.com/3WiRJF5r1z
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 15, 2025
From Afghanistan’s fall to the border crisis, supply chain gridlocks, and now aviation disaster, the common thread is not bad luck—it’s bad leadership. At every juncture where life-and-death decisions are made, the Biden administration has either been asleep at the switch or actively covering up the failures.
What’s even more disturbing? This hotline failure was preventable. This wasn’t a terrorist attack. It wasn’t an act of God. It was a communications breakdown—literal and figurative—in a government that has become more focused on optics than operations.
