They are names that should be remembered for their valor alone: Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Cully, Sgt. Jadalyn Good, Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Kraus, and Sgt. Donavon Scott. These four “Night Stalkers,” elite soldiers from the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, died when their MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed during a routine training mission in Washington state.
Their commanding officer praised them as warriors who “embodied the unwavering dedication, selflessness and excellence that define the very spirit of the Army.” Their deaths are a national tragedy.
But they are not an anomaly. They are a statistic in an administration whose defining characteristic is not ideology, but staggering, lethal incompetence.
The crash that killed these four soldiers is not an isolated incident; it is a single, fiery data point in a cascading failure of governance, a direct consequence of a deliberate campaign to dismantle the very institutions that keep Americans safe, both on the ground and in the skies.
To read the timeline of aviation disasters that have marred the first nine months of this administration is to witness a system in catastrophic freefall.
The list is numbing in its length and variety: midair collisions over the nation’s capital, commercial jets skidding off runways and bursting into flames, private planes plunging into fields and lakes. Each entry is a headline; collectively, they form an indictment.
The common thread weaving through this tapestry of chaos is the calculated sabotage of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
This is not the predictable groaning of a bureaucracy resistant to change. This is the predictable result of replacing expertise with ideology, and safety with sycophancy.
The carnage began almost immediately, with the Trump administration dissolving the Aviation Security Committee and enabling a purge of hundreds of critical FAA personnel—air traffic controllers, safety inspectors, engineers—under the guise of Elon Musk’s profit-driven “DOGE” initiative.
These were not redundant bureaucrats; they were the sentinels of our airspace. Their removal was not efficiency; it was arson.
The administration then compounded the crisis by installing unqualified loyalists—a former reality television star, for instance, as Transportation Secretary—and allowing a billionaire with a personal vendetta against the FAA to strong-arm the agency into adopting his unproven Starlink technology, overriding established and reliable systems.
The result is an air traffic control system now managed by a combination of terrified, overworked staff and demoralized civil servants threatened by SpaceX engineers who have been given FAA email addresses.
This isn’t deregulation; it’s a hostile takeover, and the body count is the dividend.
The warning signs are no longer subtle.
They are flashing in bright red at airports like Newark, where controllers have walked out in protest of the unbearable conditions, stranding thousands and exposing the brittle fragility of the system.
They are evident in the near-misses, the laser attacks, the fumes in cockpits, and the planes skidding into swamps and houses. Each incident is a scream from a system bleeding out.
So, when a routine training flight ends in a one-acre fire in rural Washington, claiming the lives of four of our most highly trained soldiers, we must call it what it is: not just a tragic accident, but a probable symptom of a wider disease.
The “unwavering dedication” of the Night Stalkers was met with the unwavering negligence of their commanders-in-chief. Their lives were entrusted to machines—both the helicopter and the federal government—that have been systematically stripped of safeguards by leaders who view public service as an opportunity for plunder and governance as a reality show.
The skies above America are indeed falling.
And the responsibility for every life lost to this preventable chaos rests squarely at the feet of an administration that looked at the gold standard of aviation safety and saw not a vital protector of human life, but an obstacle to a friend’s profit margin and a talking point for a rally.
The legacy of this incompetence is etched not only in the hearts of the Night Stalkers’ comrades but in the smoking craters across the country that bear the names of the forgotten.