By Esti DeAngelis, Opinions Editor
At 8:47 PM on January 29, a military helicopter crashed into a passenger jet over the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. All 67 people on board the plane and helicopter were killed, making this the deadliest aircraft disaster in the United States in over two decades. Among the victims traveling from Wichita was a group of young teenage ice skaters coming back from a development camp, a college student returning to campus after attending her grandfather’s funeral and a young pilot engaged to be married later this year.
As body after body was pulled out of the icy Potomac, something interesting but expected happened: the crash became political. Both sides rushed to score ideological points, and suddenly the crash was the fault of Donald Trump, a female service member who perished on the helicopter, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) all at once. I understand both the genuine desire for accountability and justice as well as the disingenuous impulse to blame everything on the opposing political party. But that’s not what really struck me about this discourse.
What struck me was a seeming inability to sit and process the tragedy first. We still don’t know what caused the crash, and it likely isn’t one thing that will be easy to pin down, but we certainly did not know in the minutes and hours following the disaster. How productive was theorizing really, while search and rescue teams were still hoping against hope to find survivors? How right was it to use logic to explain away a body still floating in the Potomac, waiting for discovery and burial? Perhaps in these early moments, it’s best to just surrender to the disaster of it all.
The question is: why is this hard? Why was it so hard, in fact, that thousands were incapable of just mourning and instead tried to hammer over calamity with logic?
Psychologists have often attributed people’s fear of flying to the availability heuristic, the idea that because plane crashes get more attention than car crashes, they stick in our heads more, so we overrate the danger of plane travel. But I think there’s something more to it too: On a plane, we are completely helpless.
Whether that plane lands safely or crashes is completely out of our control. Plane travel is a subconscious reminder that we are mortal. More than that, plane crashes are a reminder that we don’t get to choose when that mortality asserts itself and we are no longer. Grieving the loss of those who could very well have been any of us – because they died in a situation over which they had no control – is an impossibly terrifying thing to do.
You can argue, though falsely, that you won’t die in a car crash if you just drive carefully. You can argue that if you stay active and eat well you will never get a life-threatening disease. You cannot really argue that, apart from not flying at all, there is a way for you, the non-pilot, to prevent a plane crash. Many will try their hand at the blame game, but we all know somewhere deep down that tragedy is ever-enduring and not a genre of experience that is ever wholly preventable.
The validity or lack thereof of any of the claims made to explain the Washington, D.C. plane crash is not the point. The point is that every time you get on a plane, there’s the ever so slight chance that you won’t make it off. There’s a chance every time you get in a car you won’t make it out, either, and a chance that any day may be your last. But as sure as this fact is, another is just as true: This is a reality too terrifying for most people to accept. So the excuses and explanations, valid or otherwise, negate the very concept of tragedy. If everything is preventable and only flaws in otherwise good systems lead to death, then mortality and tragedy are not inherent to the human experience.
But they are. There will always be tragedy, and sometimes that tragedy will be confusing and leave people wondering, But we did everything right. That may be true. Some things may only be explained by the fact that tragedy is embedded in the reality of living on earth.
If this sounds depressing, it isn’t meant to be.We can only value life and live it right if we know it is ephemeral, ephemeral even if we drive carefully and eat healthy and make sure FAA control towers aren’t understaffed. To live with the belief that death can always be prevented is to live with a profound hubris. When 67 people die in a plane crash, we should evaluate how to lower the chances of that ever happening again. But we should not believe that it never will. Rather because it may, life is a whole lot more precious and worth living.
This is also the way to best honor the lives of those who do perish, especially in unexpected disasters. To pretend that through pure human exertion we can one day completely override G-d’s confusing plan, and to pretend this minutes after a disaster has occurred particularly, is to deprive so many families of the ability to call a tragedy a tragedy. To say all disaster is preventable is to say that your loved one may have died, but, as two colleagues of the titular character in Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” believe, “We’l1 do better, you and I.” Ultimately, none of us will do better.
One of the victims of that plane crash was 12-year-old figure skater Brielle Beyer, who perished alongside her mother Justyna. Brielle had already survived cancer. “You know, that cancer was like one in 100,000,” her father Andy said. “And, you know, plane travel is supposed to be safe.” Nothing about Brielle’s story is likely. But it’s her story, and I share it because the death of a special little girl should not be overshadowed by analyses of the way she was lost. “I mean, everyone dies, right?” Brielle’s father asked. And he’s right.
Photo Caption: The U.S. Coast Guard responding to the plane crash over the Potomac
Photo Credit: U.S. Coast Guard