At approximately 8:45 P.M. last night (29 January 2025), American Airlines Flight 5342 was on final approach for landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Arlington, VA after a three-hour flight from Dwight D. Eisenhower Airport in Wichita, Kansas. While around 300 feet in Altitude, the plane, a Bombardier CRJ700 collided with a U.S. Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. There were 60 passengers and four crew for a total of 67 on the CRJ. The helicopter had three people onboard. It was confirmed today that there were no survivors.
We do not have the names of all those killed yet. We know that the CRJ had many people who were coming from a figure-skating clinic in Kansas. Many of those people were children, or at least not of the legal age of 18. There is a lot of talk from certain corners of the political spectrum that a specific federal hiring initiative caused the wrong people to be in the aircraft control tower and in the cockpits when this happened. I am not inclined to wade into those waters. My concern is with properly mourning the lives cut tragically short in an unbelievable accident in one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries on the planet.
Why is this important to us as explorers? Well, it is very simple: By its very nature, fieldwork is inherently dangerous. Sometimes, accidents happen. The cause could be a something large or small. That is a risk we take. Quite frankly, you can walk outside your front door to go to work and have an accident. Fieldwork, life work, anything at all has a level of risk to it that we have to accept.
However, air travel is another matter entirely. We get in metal tubes and zip around the skies at 30,000 feet. The margin of error is very small, no matter how many redundancy mechanisms a plane might have. Air travel is also the most prevalent form of long-distance travel for all of us, but especially explorers. It is not very efficient to take a ship to Scotland for an archaeological dig, or to a remote Pacific locale to make contact with an unknown tribe. Road trips in America are actually even more dangerous - our society has sped up to a point that slow travel is no longer a thing. If we are going to continue to travel in the name of exploration, we have to get on airplanes. We will already risk our lives in the field...should the travel to the field be dangerous, too?
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