I'm pretty sure "training flight" in this context simply means they weren't actively carrying passengers. And it's not indicative of a junior or unqualified pilot (doesn't rule it out, just can't infer much from the phrase in this context).
At the extreme, fighter pilots fly almost exclusively training flights because we're not actively waging war at the moment.
There are a few military bases in the area - Belvior (Army), Quantico (USMC), Andrews (USAF), Pentagon, and some smaller ones (some of which have helipads, but no helicopters on station). And lots of shuttling of DoD and other government VIPs from location to location across the DC metro area.
Yes, the public needs to understand this. That unit's [1] task is to provide transportation to senior government officials and security forces around the capital, including to and from that airport. If they didn't train to operate there, then their first time doing so would be with someone like the Secretary of Defense onboard or during some other mission that's critical to national security.
And the aviators assigned to that unit are typically more senior people who've already done a tour or two with more conventional units. Source: I'm a career Army officer and former Black Hawk pilot.
It'd be normal to have night vision to hand for either a training mission or for a secure VIP transport mission.
It's unclear whether they were being used at the time of the crash, but it'd be part of training.
The reporting to hand ATM makes statements such as:
Earlier in the day, Mr. Hegseth said the crew had night vision goggles. However, it was unclear whether the crew was wearing the goggles at the time of the crash, Army officials said.
> Sure, but if they weren’t in use, why mention them?
Errr, Hegseth is a functioning alcoholic recently parachuted into a job several orders of magnitude past anything in his prior experience.
He's likely to blurt out anything unredacted that he's heard in briefings without any due consideration of consequence.
That aside, these are training missions, they have night vision available, this would have been flagged as one of many possible influencing factors in the absence of a full accident investigation that crawls through everything.
It's unknown (to the public at least, and at this point no one who knows would or should say) whether they were in use for now.
As defrost said, having goggles would be normal (probably even required by local unit policy) for any night flight. Whether they are helpful or harmful will vary with conditions so, yeah, when transiting through a dense urban area with lots of ambient light you might actually flip them up (i.e. out of the way, above your line of sight) to see better.
Also as defrost said, nobody can know right now if they were actually in-use at the time of the incident. We have to wait for cockpit voice recordings.
Anyway, it's not really significant, though. I think Secretary Hegseth mentioned it because a portion of the public will equate "flying with night vision" to "flying in daylight" (even though it's not even close), so the DoD was taking all appropriate measures to be safe. Or he was just told that the crew was doing a "goggle reset" flight (because crew members need to log at least one hour of flight time with goggles every 60 days to stay current), and he jumped to a conclusion.
At the extreme, fighter pilots fly almost exclusively training flights because we're not actively waging war at the moment.
There are a few military bases in the area - Belvior (Army), Quantico (USMC), Andrews (USAF), Pentagon, and some smaller ones (some of which have helipads, but no helicopters on station). And lots of shuttling of DoD and other government VIPs from location to location across the DC metro area.