January 13, 1982, 40 years ago: Air Florida Flight 90, at the beginning of a flight from Washington National Airport to Tampa, crashes into the 14th Street Bridge, over an icy Potomac River. There are 78 people killed.
It was in a snowstorm, in the middle of one of the Northeast's worst cold snaps in recent memory, and the plane was not sufficiently de-iced. So it was due to pilot error. The fact that President Ronald Reagan had fired the nation's air-traffic controllers the preceding August, and that they had been replaced by less-experienced people, had nothing to do with it.
Nevertheless, Reagan had fired the air-traffic controllers. And National Airport was the airport closest to the White House. Did the public turn on Reagan for this?
No. Many people turned on him because his stupid tax cut had made the national economy significantly worse. But it was understood that his firing of the air-traffic controllers had nothing to do with the Air Florida crash.
Still, it was in very bad taste for a Republican-controlled Congress, in 1998, to rename the facility Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. But when have Congressional Republicans ever been accused of doing something in good taste?
Air Florida went out of business on July 3, 1984, 4 months before Reagan was re-elected.
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