Last week: Tonight: Aviation expert James Fallows wrote last night: There appears to have been a disastrous collision between a regional jet, a CRJ made by Bombardier and flown by American Eagle Airlines, with more than 60 people aboard en route from Wichita, and a military helicopter, reportedly a Blackhawk flown as “VIP Transport” by the US Army. News footage from local TV stations captured the collision, for instance this from local NBC news. The news is tragic and still unfolding. As in all aviation disasters, early reports can be misleading; I’ll follow up with more details tomorrow, as more become known. The most recent mass-fatality crash had been almost 16 years ago. That was in February, 2009, when the crew of a Colgan regional jet, a feeder for United Airlines, apparently mis-managed an icing emergency, and crashed on approach to Buffalo, New York. Since then, the relentlessly safety-minded collaborative culture of the US air travel system has made commercial airline travel in the United States the safest mode of travel ever invented. Not counting today, a total of two people had died in US airline accidents (over more than 12 billion passenger journeys) in the preceding 15+ years. Now, tragically, that record is at its end. On his second day in office, as part of his careless-or-intentional destruction of the institutions that have made the United States strong and safe, Donald Trump disbanded a group called the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. As I had planned to write that day, this casually…