From his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, with reference to the recent mid-air collision over Washington DC:
We should have had the proper control. We should have had better equipment. We don’t. We have obsolete equipment. They were understaffed, for whatever reason. I guess the helicopter was high, and we’ll find out exactly what happened. But the odds, even if you had nothing — if you had nobody, the odds of that happening are extremely small.
It’s like, did you ever see — you go to a driving range in golf and you’re hitting balls, hundreds of balls, thousands of hours. I never see a ball hit another ball. Balls going up all over the place. You never see them hit.
It was amazing that that could happen. There was a lot of mistakes made, and it should have never happened. But regardless of that, it’s amazing that it happened.
And I think that’s going to be used for good. I think what is going to happen is we’re all going to sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers, brand-new — not pieced together, obsolete, like it is — land-based — trying to hook up a land-based system to a satellite system.
And the first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites, and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It doesn’t work. And we spent billions and billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying, “Cut it loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system.” Done by two or three companies — very s- — good companies, specialists. That’s all it is.
They used 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen. And I don’t know how many people of you are good in terms of all of the kind of things necessary for that — and it’s very complex stuff — but when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities and different people — you need one company with one set of equipment.
And there are some countries that have unbelievable air controller systems, and they would have — bells would have gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height, because it traveled a long distance before it hit. It was just like — just wouldn’t stop — you follow the line. But bells and whistles would have gone off. They have them where it actually could virtually turn the thing around. It would have just never happened if we had the right equipment.
And one of the things that’s going to be — I’m going to be speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and to everybody. We have to get together and just — as a single bill, just pass where we get the — the best control system.
When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country, because my captain tells me — I’m landing in New York, and I’m using — I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country, because the captain says, “This thing is so bad. It’s so obsolete.” And we can’t have that.
So, we’re going to have the best system and it’s a lot of money, but it’s not that much money. And it’ll happen fast, and it’ll be done by total professionals. And when it’s done, you’re not going to have accidents. It’s just not — they’re not — they’re virtually not possible to have.
