Progress Update: New article coming soon, and a teaser

Hello readers! It’s been a while! Over the past several months, I worry that many of you lost hope that you would see more content from me; I know quite a few understandably stopped supporting my Patreon. But it turns out that for much of that time, I’ve actually been hard at work on something so big that I’m not even going to know what to do with myself when it’s done.

First, I need to explain some things that have been happening in my life. During the first three months of 2026 I went through what might have been some of the worst depression of my adult life. It wasn’t that bad compared to what many people have experienced but everything is relative, all pain is valid, etc., etc. I managed to produce the Hawker stall test article during that period, but then the final report on the Potomac River midair collision came out, and I knew I had to do it next. But in my depressed state, I couldn’t find the motivation to work on a project that large, with a 400-page final report forming just the tip of a massive iceberg that includes 18,000 pages of NTSB evidence and thousands of news articles, in addition to a scope so wide it was hard to know where to even begin. In truth I didn’t even start working on the article until late April, after coming back from a 10-day car camping trip in the Southwest US intended to reset my brain and my life, followed by a week lost to some kind of Victorian wasting disease (read: the flu probably).

However, since late April, I’ve been working on this article almost nonstop. That’s 3 full months now, for those keeping track. And now, as we approach the end of July, with headlines no doubt reporting my almost certain death, I’m happy to report that my long-awaited article on the Potomac midair will, with 100% certainty, release before the end of the month and possibly as soon as next weekend, July 25/26.

Update: On July 25, I finished a draft; it still needs editing, review by SMEs, formatting, and visuals, so I’m aiming for publication on Wednesday the 29th.

So, in the interest of building some hype for that, I want to talk about the article and my process of researching and writing it, and offer a teaser.

This article is my longest ever by a margin of approximately two thirds. By that I mean my previous longest article, Aeroflot 1492, which clocked in at over 30,000 words, will fall 20,000 words short of this one. I’m not quite done drafting so I don’t have an exact word count but based on what I’ve already written and what I have left in my outline I expect 50,000 words will be about where it ends up. That corresponds to over 90 pages of 12-point, single-spaced text in a Microsoft Word document with standard margins.

At that point, one might fairly question whether this is an article at all, as opposed to a book. But it’s not a book; if I were writing a book I would have structured it rather differently, and it would have been much, much longer. I haven’t done things that I would do if I were writing a book, such as sitting down for interviews with people who were involved in order to hear from them myself, instead of just reading the transcripts of their interviews in the NTSB evidence docket. Therefore I think it would be more accurate to characterize this as a long-form essay.

One might question the point of writing an essay this long, when one of the advantages (albeit far from the only advantage) of my articles is that readers can learn what happened in reasonable detail without having to sit down and read an entire accident report. But, as a good friend said to me the other day, if people want a summary, they can read Wikipedia. I always strive to give a heavily contextualized, engaging analysis of the events in a way that allows the reader to truly understand what happened, and I write however many words I feel are necessary to accomplish that.

How does one write an essay that long? Well, here’s a breakdown.

I always start by reading the accident report while taking detailed notes. I create a bulleted list organized by section so I can find the corresponding text in the report more easily later. I write notes in complete sentences and without using much shorthand because I find it reduces mistakes and commits the content to memory more effectively.

After taking notes on the whole NTSB report, I check out other major sources, which can include articles or documents linked in the Wikipedia references section, or in this case, ones I had been collecting in a “links document,” like a crow collecting shiny things, ever since the accident occurred in January 2025. Those produced more bulleted notes. From there, I dived into the NTSB evidence docket, downloading dozens of documents that I thought might contain useful information and scanning them for relevant details, producing yet more notes. By this point, a picture of the accident and the themes of the article would have been coming together in my head, which led me to start formulating questions that I couldn’t have considered earlier in the process. And that led me to hunt down more documents in an effort to answer them.

My research included, among many other things, watching nearly 27 hours of NTSB public hearing footage, where I wrote down every relevant snippet of information with the approximate time stamp so I could find it again later. I also spent several days combing through a giant Excel spreadsheet of traffic count data from DCA in the week before the accident and comparing it to slot control statutes, a big table of slot awards, and FAA arrival rate limits, all in an effort to understand the NTSB’s conclusion that the airport was suffering from excessive traffic.

By the time I was done, I had a Word document containing 62 pages of notes (again, 12 point font, single spaced, standard margins).

I then sat down and drafted an outline of the essay, with a planned nine chapters and dozens of subheadings intended to cover all the major topics in the order I felt made the most sense. I then assigned each chapter a color, and I went through the notes highlighting each bullet point in the color corresponding to the chapter where I felt that piece of information was most likely to be mentioned. This helps me quickly find the notes I need, when I need them. By the time I was done, the final product looked like this:

To finish research and note-taking took me just under two months. At that point, around mid-June, I transitioned to actually writing the essay.

This was not an especially quick process, especially at first. When I start putting words onto the page, it always raises new questions that prompt new research, and as a result the notes document actually increased by about 8 pages to its final length of 62 after I had already started writing. I’m also following a strict in-line citation policy, where everything I say needs to be tied to a specific line in a specific source, so whenever I pull something out of my notes I have to find the corresponding line in the source and cite it. As a part of this process I’ve been building up a bibliography, which currently stands at 42 sources and could push 50 by the time the essay is done.

It would also, however, be dishonest of me not to mention that I watched every single World Cup match (except for two that I missed), so I was only writing in between matches. It only comes around once every four years; what are you gonna do, sue me?

Ever since I started, I’ve written an average of probably about 1,500 words per day, although that number has been increasing lately as the finish line approaches. After I reach the end of my draft, I’m going to go back and closely read the whole thing, editing syntax for clarity; putting in any missing citations; removing any details that don’t feel so important in hindsight; and adding any that in hindsight appear to be missing. After that, I’m going to send the draft to a couple other subject matter experts for final review, and then I’ll format it for upload here on Medium. Due to its length, I’ll also be making a downloadable PDF version available.

The essay covers a very wide scope, from the politics of slot controls to the safety culture at the DCA control tower to the decline in experience among military aviators. It contains eye-opening details from the evidence docket that have not been widely reported.

As a teaser while you wait for the final product, here’s the introduction to the essay:

It was a clear and mild evening in America’s capital, warm enough to melt the concreted banks of nearly month-old snow and send the last frigid fragments of ice fleeing down the dark waters of the Potomac. Above the black expanse of the river, aircraft approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were strung across the sky like a chain of Christmas lights, lining up for the last big push before traffic trailed off into the night. The clock read 8:47 p.m.

By January 2025, it had been nearly 16 years since the last time a major disaster befell a US airline. Countless aviation professionals had begun, developed, and even ended their careers without ever seeing one. On an intellectual level, all understood the statistical certainty that that record would one day end, and that the time and place of its ending, whether it be today or 10 years from now, in New York or Alaska, could not be predicted. And when it finally did happen, at 8:47 p.m. on the 29th of January 2025, at a height of 278 feet above the Potomac River in Washington D.C., it was difficult to comprehend that that day had in fact been today, and that an unprecedented period of safety had suddenly been consigned to the past. But for many who flew or worked in that crowded, hectic airspace, the fact that it ended at National Airport was not a surprise: their sentiment tinged by hindsight, they collectively said, “If it had to be anywhere, it would have been DCA.”

How could it be that such a tragedy retroactively struck so many as inevitable? The fact is that some people did see it, or something like it, coming from a long way off. And the story of how it was nevertheless allowed to happen is one that spans decades, disciplines, and institutions, from the cockpits of the two downed aircraft to the halls of Congress itself. It was born out of a web of interlocking interests and policies that formed a seemingly intractable milieu of dysfunction, in which those who had the whole picture lacked the power to change it, and those who did have the power to effect change did not see the whole picture.

Now, lubricated by the shock of disaster, the gears of bureaucracy have begun to turn, advancing safety improvements that will help make American airspace safer. But even as I write this, the same forces that created the conditions for that disaster remain at work, steadily pushing us into the jaws of the next one.

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See you in a week or two! And don’t forget to support me on Patreon.

— Kyra