The Charlie Kirk Show - January 30, 2025


Disaster Over the Potomac — What We Know


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

138.71065

Word count

1,542

Sentence count

152


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The crash of an American Airlines flight into the Potomac is the latest in a series of near misses that have happened across the U.S. in recent years. Today's episode is dedicated to the families on board the plane and those on the ground.

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:00.000 Enjoy this episode.
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00:00:07.000 Email us, as always, Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
00:00:10.000 And become a member to support this program.
00:00:12.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:13.000 Here we go.
00:00:14.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:15.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:17.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:21.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:24.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:25.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:26.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:43.000 That's why we are here.
00:00:44.000 Our son...
00:01:15.000 We're here in Washington, D.C., soon to be coming back to Arizona.
00:01:18.000 Our son woke up after he heard a very, very loud boom.
00:01:23.000 We weren't really sure what was going on, and Erica soothed him back to sleep.
00:01:28.000 Our hotel, where we were staying, was right near the Potomac.
00:01:33.000 And all of a sudden we started to see 10, 20, 30, 40 very, very bright emergency lights.
00:01:43.000 Gather and congregate on the Virginia side of the Potomac.
00:01:49.000 My phone started to light up and people were saying, was there some sort of plane crash?
00:01:55.000 What's going on in the ground?
00:01:57.000 Twitter went ablaze.
00:01:59.000 You pray and you hope for the best in situations like this.
00:02:03.000 And just so happens, we were up very late last night.
00:02:06.000 We saw over the Potomac the entire emergency response of what...
00:02:12.000 Happened at Reagan National Airport.
00:02:17.000 Being that close to it makes it even starker and more dramatic.
00:02:23.000 Last night, here's what we know.
00:02:25.000 We're not going to speculate.
00:02:25.000 We're not going to guess.
00:02:28.000 We're just going to tell you the facts.
00:02:31.000 Last evening, a flight from Wichita, Kansas, in a CRJ-700 collided.
00:02:40.000 With a Army helicopter.
00:02:42.000 It was a clear night.
00:02:45.000 There was not a cloud in the sky.
00:02:46.000 It was perfect flying conditions.
00:02:50.000 The CRJ-700, as pictured right there, seemed to intersect with the Army helicopter at the exact precise and right moment.
00:03:01.000 From there, the plane seemed to spiral downward into the Potomac as it was on its final approach.
00:03:09.000 We believe the helicopter had a similar fate.
00:03:12.000 We haven't heard much about the helicopter, who was flying and what was going on in that situation.
00:03:18.000 And from that moment, the first responders worked all night.
00:03:21.000 And Sean Duffy, who is the Secretary of Transportation, was sworn in hours beforehand.
00:03:29.000 And boy, trial by fire.
00:03:32.000 He's been doing a great job.
00:03:33.000 Very proud of Sean Duffy.
00:03:36.000 About five hours.
00:03:38.000 On the job, he gets thrown into what is looking like one of the deadliest plane crashes in a generation.
00:03:49.000 You can see there an infographic.
00:03:51.000 Our hotel room was just right up there, so we were witnessing some of the response.
00:03:57.000 The Army helicopter was doing a training exercise with three soldiers on board.
00:04:03.000 The CRJ-700, the American Airlines flight, was on a...
00:04:10.000 Now, this is personal for a lot of us on the team and a lot of us in the audience.
00:04:16.000 I've landed in Reagan probably 200 times over the last 12 years.
00:04:21.000 I've been a passenger in this approach.
00:04:24.000 Reagan Airport has a very, very tightly controlled airspace.
00:04:30.000 And we're not going to spend time speculating because it's not helpful for anybody.
00:04:38.000 This is one of the shortest runways in the country and in the nation.
00:04:43.000 Reagan is very, very close to downtown Washington.
00:04:47.000 It's kind of just fit right there on the Potomac.
00:04:52.000 The plane goes down and rescue efforts were attempted all evening.
00:04:58.000 And tragically, around 4 a.m.
00:05:00.000 Eastern, it transitioned from a rescue effort to a recovery effort.
00:05:04.000 Now, we do not know how many passengers were on board.
00:05:08.000 But rough estimates are showing that 60 to 65 people likely died in this plane crash.
00:05:17.000 The first big U.S. plane crash since 2009. This is not political.
00:05:24.000 This is just a tragedy.
00:05:27.000 We have been warning for quite some time that there have been a lot of near misses at airports across the country.
00:05:32.000 A lot of near misses.
00:05:35.000 More so than what people are comfortable with.
00:05:37.000 There were 60 passengers and four crew members.
00:05:42.000 Charlie Kirk here.
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00:06:41.000 I want to read one element of this, which kind of clarifies exactly what happened in These last moments.
00:06:49.000 It's how the disaster unfolded over the Potomac.
00:06:52.000 Very, very important.
00:06:54.000 And at least this is what we know as of right now.
00:06:58.000 That air traffic control was actually trying to alert the Black Hawk helicopter pilot.
00:07:05.000 So it seems as if the Black Hawk helicopter pilot was coming from the north, going south down the Potomac.
00:07:13.000 The American Airlines flight was coming from the southeast.
00:07:17.000 Going west on their intended route to land at Reagan National.
00:07:21.000 So this is a sequence in about eight steps.
00:07:24.000 The American Airlines flight 5342 makes its final approach for a night landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport with 64 people on board.
00:07:33.000 The U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter carrying three soldiers flies through the airspace on a training exercise.
00:07:42.000 The Blackhawk helicopter received a radio call from air traffic control.
00:07:46.000 So ATC did their job, allegedly.
00:07:48.000 We'll find out more.
00:07:49.000 This is all according to the current public reports.
00:07:52.000 Saying, quote, Do you have a CRJ in sight?
00:07:56.000 Pass behind the CRJ. Now this is where it gets confusing, and I'm sure we'll end up getting an answer.
00:08:03.000 I sure hope so.
00:08:04.000 Very perplexing.
00:08:05.000 It is a clear night.
00:08:07.000 You have a helicopter on a training exercise.
00:08:10.000 Knowing that they're going to fly by one of the busiest airports on the planet, where they fly approaches over the Potomac, you then hear an audible warning from air traffic control.
00:08:23.000 Do you have a CRJ in sight?
00:08:26.000 passed behind the CRJ.
00:08:28.000 At that moment, the Blackhawk helicopter very well could have diverted, changed altitudes.
00:08:35.000 You see, a helicopter is actually in many ways more nimble than an airplane.
00:08:41.000 It's able to ascend vertically within seconds.
00:08:48.000 We don't really know what happened after that, why the pilot did not recognize that warning, why it did not internalize that warning.
00:08:56.000 Moments after, the jet collided with the helicopter at an altitude of 400 feet while traveling at a speed of 140 miles per hour.
00:09:07.000 Now, People who know what they're talking about are speculating this must have been like a direct collision because potentially a CRJ still could have maybe made the landing at 400 feet.
00:09:20.000 Footage shows a violent fireball erupting above busy roads as the passenger jet banked hard to the right.
00:09:28.000 The wreckage of both the aircraft plunged into the Potomac River a few hundred meters from the Ronald Reagan Airport.
00:09:34.000 And that is what we know right now.
00:09:38.000 Commercial airliners all come equipped with collision warning technology.
00:09:43.000 President Donald Trump wrote this in the wee hours of the morning, quote, The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time.
00:09:59.000 It is a, quote, in all caps, clear night.
00:10:02.000 The lights on the plane were blazing.
00:10:05.000 Why didn't the helicopter?
00:10:07.000 Go up or down or turn.
00:10:09.000 Why didn't the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane?
00:10:16.000 This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented.
00:10:21.000 All caps, not good.
00:10:24.000 Sean Duffy has confirmed, based on what he has seen so far, this looks to be a preventable tragedy.
00:10:33.000 I'm going to save any commentary regarding this.
00:10:36.000 For another time.
00:10:38.000 Instead, we just look at this in somewhat a reflective and personal way that we've been on flights like this before and we pray for all the victims and their families.
00:10:49.000 It's just a tragic and awful situation.
00:10:54.000 And I hope we'll get clarity on everything that happened so that something like this can never happen again.
00:10:59.000 And it has been confirmed there are no survivors.
00:11:03.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:11:04.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.