- Black Hawk Helicopter was on a routine training flight.
- 12th aviation battalion responsible for evacuating the officials of the Department of Defense.
- Black Hawk flights transported US officials after the September 11 attacks.
Washington: The Black Hawk helicopter that hit a passenger plane in Washington on Wednesday was on a training flight along a route nucleus to a military mission rarely discussed to evacuate senior officials to a safe place in case of An attack against the United States, the authorities say, the authorities say. .
The military mission, known as “continuity of the government” and “continuity of operations”, is intended to preserve the ability of the United States government to operate.
Most of the days, to the teams as the murdered on Wednesday of VIP transport by Washington, which is full of helicopter traffic.
But the Secretary of Defense of the United States, Pete Hegseth, revealed the Black Hawk crew ties with the mission during a white house conference on Thursday, saying that “they were in a routine and annual rebirth of night flights in a standard corridor for a continuity of the government mission.
Even so, they are publicly discussed from those missions.
The three soldiers killed in the collision were part of the 12th Aviation Battalion in Fort Belvoir in Virginia, whose responsibilities in a national crisis include the evacuation of Pentagon officials. Another 64 people were killed on the passenger plane.
The Black Hawk team, which wears night vision glasses, flew the training mission along the Potomac River on a road known as Route 4. As the army looks under the scrutiny of operating at night near A busy airport, officials have indicated the sensitive operations of the battalion.
“Part of its mission is to support the Department of Defense if something really bad happens in this area, and we need to move our main leaders,” said Jonathan Koziol, chief of cabinet of the Army Aviation Department.
Emergency flights of September 11
The most recent, it is known that the United States government activated a mission of continuity of operations in an emergency was on September 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda kidnappers criticized airplanes to the World Trade Center in New City in City York and the Pentagon, killing almost 3,000 people.
Reuters was able to establish some of the activities of the 12th Aviation Battalion that day.
“The battalion helped transport some high -ranking leaders from Washington, DC to 'hide the sites'”, Bradley Bowman, a former army aviation officer who flew on September 11 as part of the 12th Aviation Battalion.
That night, Bowman flew a black hawk to collect the then Secretary of Defense of Paul Wolfowitz in one of those sites and fly him back to the Pentagon.
There was only one problem: Pentagon's helicopter landing platform used to collect and leave VIP was destroyed.
“We simply reposition and land in the 395 traffic circle, which had been closed at that time,” Bowman said, referring to the I-395 highway that revolves around the headquarters of the US army.
Wolfowitz was summoned in a 2017 book that describes to go to a “strange location that was prepared to survive nuclear war.”
The author of the book, Garrett Graff, said the site was called Raven Rock Mountain Complex, or “Site R”, located only kilometers from Camp David. It remains one of the three main support facilities for the United States government, and the main leadership of the Pentagon.
“Today is 100 percent operational. There is a team of perhaps 100 personnel within Raven Rock at this time, ready to collect the pieces of the United States government,” said Graff.
