{"id":324,"date":"2026-01-28T17:22:53","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T17:22:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=324"},"modified":"2026-02-04T21:14:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T21:14:17","slug":"six-seven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=324","title":{"rendered":"Six Seven"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
One year ago tomorrow, 
on twenty-nine 
January 2025
sixty-seven humans 
lost their lives in a
\u201cone hundred percent avoidable\u201d
midair collision 
between a 
U.S. Army Sikorsky
Black Hawk
on a training mission and
American Airlines 
Flight 5342 on its 
final descent 
from Wichita.

Seventy-five feet 
would have separated
the two aircraft on the 
best of circumstances.
 
But on that 
one icy 
winter night, 
the distance
became zero.

The one jet held
sixty-four people,
mere seconds and 
eight hundred meters
from landing at DCA
runway thirty-three.

The one helicopter
carried three soldiers: 
one student Captain, 
one Chief Warrant
Officer instructor, 
and one 
Staff Sergeant 
crewman.

None of them, 
zero, saw the plane 
through their
periphery-restricting
night vision goggles
as their craft rose  
three-hundred feet
in elevation.

None of them heard
over the radio static
as frantic
air traffic controllers
pleaded for the
chopper to give way.

Sixty-seven private worlds\u2014 
each filled with dreams
and fears and bills,
families and pets
and friends and hobbies
and plans and to-do lists
and frustrations and hopes
and goals and vocations \u2014
all came to a cruel end 
in the frigid Potomac River.

One could count
the number of suitcases, 
laptops, winter coats 
and tennis shoes 
recovered by
scores of first responders.

All these numbers
and metrics
\u2014 while necessary, 
helpful to measure
record and analyze \u2014
fail to calculate
the human impact
of this 
horrendous crash.

Children
would-be Winter Olympians 
fresh off their performances
at the Figure Skating
Championships in Kansas;

Gold Medal coaches
and proud families from the
Ashburn Ice House;

Six public school families;
Fianc\u00e9s and 
cat dads and 
attorneys.

Defenders of 
our homeland;
veteran pilots and
dedicated flight crew.
Four union members.

People hailing from
all over the world,
previously on
their own flight paths, 
now eternally 
intertwined in death.

No figures 
can summate
what is an 
immeasurable loss, 
felt exponentially 
by the
innumerable 
communities
left here
to grieve 
and remember.

Sixty-seven lives
Sixty-seven deaths 
give rise to
infinite ripples
in the 
fabric of our future.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Six Seven” an accounting of numbers surrounding the midair collision of Flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk on 29 Jan 2025. A conceit that numbers cannot capture it all. Poem 028 in a series of 365 poems written by Diana Ludwick in 2026. Photo: Author’s passenger view of the cockpit, on a United plane leaving DCA on 29 Jan 2025, by Diana Ludwick (c) 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,2],"tags":[30,31,33,34,35,36,32],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-poetry-challenge","category-poems","tag-air-travel","tag-crash","tag-dca","tag-death","tag-grief","tag-numbers","tag-remembrance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}