Montana Helicopter Pilot Veteran Gives Analysis on DC Plane Crash

How did an Army Blackhawk helicopter collide with an American Airlines jet over our nation's capital in Washington, D.C.? That's just one of many questions Americans are asking after the gut wrenching tragedy that downed both aircraft and 67 people are expected to have perished.

We got insight from Helena, Montana's Darin Gaub. He's a retired Lieutenant Colonel and helicopter pilot who runs a national security think tank called Restore Liberty. You've likely seen him on Fox News discussing various national security topics.

Lt. Col. Gaub joined us on Montana Talks with Aaron Flint on Thursday morning as the news was still being reported the morning after the crash.

The full audio starts about 15 minutes into the below podcast:

Here's some of what we talked about with Lt. Col. Gaub (Ret.).

First, could pilot or crew visibility on the Blackhawk helicopter have been an issue?

Lt. Col. Gaub (Ret.): "I suspect you're going to find some sort of additive factors that there's no- there may not be one thing that you can point to...I've never had an issue with visibility in a Black Hawk, unless I'm landing in something like moon dust in the middle of Middle Eastern desert. Flying around DC that time of night, clear night, you wouldn't have had any issues at all whatsoever."

He also tells us that we may never know what actually happened inside the cockpit of that Blackhawk helicopter.

Lt. Col. Gaub (Ret.): "That system does not exist on a U60 Lima Blackhawk. Nor does a black box voice recorder or data recorder in that particular model. So you're not going to get the typical NTSB black box that says, you know, you can replay back everything that was said, or be able to replay back all of the instrumentation and readouts that were there all the way up to the point of impact."

Again, full audio of our chat can be heard below about 15 minutes in: