It’s not easy to find a lot of people who are willing to go back and revisit the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency. Conservatives don’t want to relive the whole nightmare, for obvious reasons. And for their part, Democrats would rather move on, too. They don’t particularly want to dwell on Obama’s “Russian reset,” for example, where he told us that Vladimir Putin wasn’t really a bad guy. That kind of thinking isn’t exactly compatible with Democrats’ current narrative. Nor are Democrats interested in reminding anyone of Obama’s promise to lower healthcare costs, or his promise to close Guantanamo Bay, or his promise to stop the weather from changing, and so on. So if there’s bipartisan agreement on anything, it’s that Obama’s presidency isn’t worth talking about anymore.
But there is one moment from the early Obama years that’s suddenly become relevant again. I’m talking about the crash of a Colgan Air passenger plane, which was flying under the brand name of Continental Airlines. The crash occurred in February of 2009, just a month after Obama’s inauguration. It was the fourth in a string of crashes involving regional airliners from 2005 to 2009. 50 people died, including one person on the ground. An investigation revealed that the pilots — one man and one woman — were overworked and underpaid. They were also objectively bad pilots, at least on that particular night. They weren’t paying attention to their instruments, to the point that they stalled their plane while on approach for landing. And then, when the aircraft warned them of the stall, they panicked and turned a bad situation into a catastrophe.
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