Crime Weekly - S3 Ep272: Crime Weekly News: Helicopter Collides with Jetliner at DC Airport

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

On January 29, 2025, a devastating midair collision occurred over the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. An American Airlines regional jet, Flight 5342, collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter during its final approach, resulting in the deaths of all 67 individuals aboard both aircraft. Among the victims were passengers, crew members, and soldiers, including members of the figure skating community returning from a national development camp. We're coming to CrimeCon Denver! Use our code CRIMEWEEKLY for 10% off your tickets! https://www.crimecon.com/CC25 Try our coffee!! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod ADS: 1. WildGrain.com/CrimeWeekly - Use code CRIMEWEEKLY and get $30 off your first box, plus FREE croissants!

Hey everyone, welcome back to Crime Weekly News. I'm Derek Levasseur. And I'm Stephanie Harlow. And we're going to get right into it. You can tell by the thumbnail. I'm unfortunately not here for good reasons as we usually are not are are not and uh this is a tough one because i think not only when we're going to get into like the actual passengers and some of these young children that were on this flight it's just incredibly sad uh but it's also it comes back to all of us because we all unfortunately have to fly and so i think everyone can kind of see themselves in these people because there's photos coming from the planes and you're seeing how happy they were

flying home. But for anyone who doesn't know, and I think at this point, everyone does. American Airlines flight 5342 and an army helicopter collided in midair over Reagan Airport in Washington, DC. This is an airport that I use all the time. It's one of the busiest airports you go through. And after these two aircraft collided, they plunged into the Potomac river and it killed everyone, the people on the American airlines flight and on the helicopter. And this is the deadliest us air disaster since 2001. And you can see the videos, the videos are all out there. There's now more enhanced videos coming out and you can really see exactly what happened. And I know I was reading something this morning where they've identified most of the bodies at this point. I don't know if they've

had, if they've identified all of them, but it's pretty close to the point where divers are out there. And some of them had had have been transported to the hospital for hypothermia because of how many hours they're putting in trying to find everyone who was involved in this crash so this is the first crash we're going to talk about but unfortunately it wasn't the only one last week there was also another crash on friday which we'll talk about after the break but what were your initial thoughts on this one stephanie as far as seeing it, watching it unfold? I mean, with all the video cameras around that, there's no speculating on what happened. You can clear it, see his day. Yeah. It was late at night. I mean, I don't know how late it was, but I was in bed

and I was texting with a friend and he was like, oh my God, this just happened. And then I kind of started, I looked it up obviously. And you could tell it was just, everything was coming in within minutes. It was like 12 minutes ago, 10 minutes ago, and they were just updating. And my first thought was, imagine being on the ground waiting for your loved one to come home. And they were putting in the news reports, the flight number. So it would be- Did you see the gentleman they were interviewing? I don't believe so.

There was a gentleman they're interviewing and he's like, he's sitting there at Reagan and they're like, Hey, what are you waiting here for? He's like, yeah, my wife is on flight 5342. Here's her text messages. She's telling me she was about to land. And then the text messages just stopped. And this is literally, he doesn't know at this point. So, so he's just like, I think she's on that flight. I'm just hoping they're pulling her out of the water right now. Like they're, she's okay. Yeah, exactly. Just imagine being on the ground waiting for, for, for somebody you love and care about to come home. And it's a stand, you know, we all fly all the time. People fly every day. It's a standard thing. You're just sitting at the airport or sitting at home, waiting for them to get there. And then all of a sudden your feed is flooded with this news and just

how your stomach would drop. And knowing how unlikely it was that anyone would survive such a thing, still hoping beyond hope that the person you care about, who you've been waiting for to come home is going to be coming home and then they don't. So this was a regional jet. It was out of Wichita, Kansas, 60 passengers, four crew. It was preparing to land at that time. And then this UH-60 Blackhawk, which was based out of Virginia, was on a training exercise carrying three soldiers. The skies were clear. There were no issues. A few minutes before the American Airlines plane was scheduled to land, air traffic controllers asked flight 5342 if it could use a shorter runway. And the pilots were like, sure, fine. Controllers cleared the landing. Flight tracking sites show the plane adjusted its approach to the new runway. Less than 30 seconds before the collision, an air traffic controller asked the helicopter if it had the plane in its sight. So it asked the Blackhawk, do you have the plane in the sight? The military pilot responded, yes. And then 30 seconds later, the controller made another call to the helicopter, apparently telling the copter to wait for the American Airlines plane to pass. And there was no reply. And then the aircrafts collided. I almost wonder if they were the helicopter pilot, because when you look at other angles and obviously there's no depth perception on these videos, right? Like you don't know

how far away something is from the camera lens when you're watching it. But I almost wonder just from my angle, it looked like there was another plane as well. And I wonder if when the air traffic controller said, hey, do you have the plane in sight? This helicopter pilot was actually referring to a different plane and that they're probably potentially looking behind them and going, yep, I got it in sight, not realizing there's a plane in front of them that they're going directly towards. That's the only thing, that's the only way I can justify this. Listen, at this point, obviously, there's an investigation. The National Transportation Safety Board, they are going to be investigating. They're going to use things like flight data recordings, cockpit voice recordings, the

helicopter's black box. They're going to download all this information. Now, these kinds of investigations usually take a year, more sometimes. Investigators said they hope to have a preliminary report within 30 days. We don't know what happened. We know that everybody on board died. And these are real people who had lives and families and things they were coming from and things that they were going back to. Among the passengers were members of the skating club of Boston, who were returning from a development camp that followed the 2025 U.S.

Figure Skating Championship in Wichita. Victims included teenage figure skaters Gina Han and Spencer Lane, the teen's mothers, and then two coaches who were Russian. The victims also included a group of hunters returning from a guided trip in Kansas, nine students and pairments from Fairfax County, Virginia schools, and four steamfitters, members of steamfitters local in suburban Maryland and two Chinese nationals. The plane captain was 34-year-old Jonathan Campos. And the Army identified the soldiers on the helicopter as the pilot, who is Captain Rebecca Lobach of Durham, North Carolina, Staff Sergeant Ryan Austin O'Hara, just 28 years old, of

Lilliburn, Georgia, and Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Lloyd Eves, 39, of Great Mills, Maryland. O'Hara was the crew chief, and Eves and Lobach were pilots. So obviously, they started right away trying to recover passengers from the water. Yep. I remember watching the news. Tomic's cold. Very cold. But I was watching the news and the reporter was like,

well, you know, it's been warming up here the past few days. And I'm like, I don't care how much it's warming up because it's been so unbelievably freezing that that water is ice. Well, like I just said, the divers are literally getting hyperthermia. And I don't know how true this is, but I saw one news reporter say that the water in that area is only like waist deep. I don't know if that's true or not.

It seems like it would be deeper than that. Yeah. Based on what I saw just in the videos and photos, it feels like it'd be deeper than that. But I was talking to my mother about this and she was saying how some expert who came on and was like, oh, you know, how long would they have lasted when, you know, as far as the passengers in the plane, would they have known what was happening? And he's like, no, within like eight seconds,

it would have been lights out. And I just, I just hope that was the case because when you, when I look at the video, it almost looked like the, most of the plane stayed intact. It was just kind of spinning. I agree the water. And so I hope now with the outcome that we have that he's right and that they weren't still alive in that water. Because that just compounds how terrible this whole situation really is to think that they might have been in that water trying to get out. And because of the way the plane struck the water, they weren't able to do so. So we are filming this on Monday, the Monday after this crash. As of yesterday afternoon, they said they have recovered the remains of 55 victims.

So almost everybody still. Getting close. Yeah. But they're obviously going to keep looking until they've recovered everybody they can, everybody hopefully, or until they've been looking long enough where they know that whatever they can't find, they can't find at that point. I think when they get out all the wreckage too, they may find more. They're still probably pulling things out of the water. There's a lot of wreckage getting pulled out. I saw a video, they were taking something

massive. It just looks so massive and it's the plane's engine and it keeps it into perspective, you know, how small the planes look in the air, but these are massive, you know, pieces of machinery. And obviously right now, they're going to first focus on retrieving the mangled passenger plane before turning to the helicopter and its associated debris. And officials said the bodies of several victims remain in the aircraft and their dignified removal is top priority. So, you know, I do appreciate the efforts of these people who are out there, these search and rescue teams, law enforcement officials that are trying to bring these people home. It's not the best homecoming, but they want to bring them home so they can have burials, so they can be mourned by their families, so that their loved ones have a place to go and see them. It's going to take a while. They said it'll probably take a few more

days. And once the airliner and the Blackhawk are removed, they're going to be taken to a designated hangar where they're obviously going to be a part of the investigation being done. Yeah, NTSB will get them. They'll let me go. Yep. And then they're going to just start obviously working on identifying everybody based on the manifest, the flight manifest. Where they were sitting, all that stuff. I mean, listen, people are already talking, as you would expect, as far as who's to blame here, what happened.

Before I even dive into that, I think what I said at the top of the show is important, which you're seeing the photos of the passengers from the plane who right before taking off, they're taking like photos of like them traveling from Wichita back to D.C. And I know I'm sitting there going, wow, I take those flights all the time. You know, I've been on the CRJ 700 a thousand different times because I fly out of Providence to D.C. Usually in D. in DC is a hub and Providence is more of a smaller airport. So usually you have to fly to the hub before you go to your main destination. But I think we see ourselves in each and every one of these passengers and you realize, again, it's such a cliche comment, but like how fragile life is. And you just,

you really never know. I mean, they were, they were five minutes away from landing. Five minutes. Yeah, minutes away. Yeah, and then you think about how big the, I mean, obviously there's a lot of traffic in the air around DC, but just to think about how vast of an area the sky is and just the perfect timing for this to happen. And that's where we transition to who's at fault because when you have a tragedy like this you want to you want to figure out what happened so you so that it doesn't happen again and initially people were saying oh you know this could be the air traffic controller they weren't they weren't monitoring the airs properly and they they misdirected the aircraft and that's what happened they showed like a uh basically the the radar of it and you can see there's a CA warning that pops up. It flashes orange or red on the screen when there's two aircraft on a similar flight path at a similar altitude, and it showed it.

You could see CA, CA, CA. There's things in place to prevent this from happening, obviously. Yeah. Correct. And I think that's when you were referring to the air traffic controller saying, hey, are you seeing this plane? And they're going, yep, I see it. That's what they're referring to. Yeah. So the ATC. They saw each other. They knew that they, you know. a night operation. And it's a very difficult operation to conduct because you really,

you don't have a lot of peripheral vision because you're wearing night vision goggles. So they, they equate it to like having two like paper towel rolls on your eyes. And that's the type of, that's your, that's your field of view. And now you're trying to also fly this massive helicopter. That's got all this advanced technology in it. And they said, it's very difficult. It decreases your ability to see by like 40%. So they practice this so that you're prepared for it in an act, an actual situation. And just initially, and this could change, it does look like this was a user error by the pilot of the Blackhawk.

The, the pilots flying the American airlines flight were doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. They were on approach. They were doing. They were on approach. They were landing. They were on the right path. It was the helicopter. You can see from the video. The helicopter cuts right across the flight path and hits the plane.

So initially, that's what I'm gathering from it. And now it's kind of taken on a life of its own, which we're not even going to address here. But then you always have the politics that come into it because initially they didn't identify the pilots of the helicopter. And now they are, and you mentioned Rebecca and they're going into her political affiliations and who she was supporting it to me. It's just a lot of nonsense. And you and I were talking about this before we hit record. And it, to me, it's like either she was qualified enough to fly the helicopter or she wasn't, we're going to find that out. I can guarantee you at this point, people that she was in school with and all that are probably going to come out and start saying,

yeah, she was a great pilot or she wasn't. And then we can get into that. But at the end of the day on that Wednesday night, she from again, from what it looks like so far, she made an accident. I don't think it was intentional. I don't think she did this deliberately. This isn't some type of terrorist attack, at least from what I'm hearing so far. It looks like she just made a mistake, and it was a big mistake because it cost a lot of people their lives. Including hers. Including her own.

So I'm going to wait to hear all the facts and how they come out. And I think from what we've heard so far, it is leaning that way, but that's like you said, it's could take up to a year to do this investigation. I would just say, respect everybody involved because that pilot as well, her family's mourning her loss as well. And they got to hear about their daughter in this light and how she might not have, she shouldn't have been flying that helicopter. It's kind of ridiculous. You're talking about the internet. They they go nameless and faceless on the internet, nobody, I mean, not nobody, but a lot of people don't have respect and they don't care and they're not thinking. They do not care.

They do not care and they're not thinking about that. So yeah. And I've even seen jokes made about this based on who the passengers were and how they could have been, you know, connected at like higher levels. And it's like, oh, now when I get on a plane, I'm going to ask who's on the plane that might, you know, be connected or have like money. And then I'm not going to, it's just absolutely, I'm already terrified of flying. You know this. Yeah. You are not a good flyer. Not a good flyer. Already terrified. I remember getting on a flight with you and I was walking by and you didn't even know I was

on the same flight with you. And I just saw you leaning out, looking out the window, kind of zoned out. And I could tell like, oh, she's not doing it. My knee was probably going a hundred miles an hour to the knee bounce thing. But yeah, I didn't see you because I was completely fixated on just praying to, I always do that before we take off. I'm like, please get me to where I'm going safely. You know, like, especially when I'm on a trip without the kids, I'm like, please get me to where I'm going safely. Especially when I'm on a trip without the kids, I'm like, get me back to my kids safely, please. That's all that I want. And so it's like, let's not. This was an accident.

Of course. It shouldn't have happened. It's crazy that it did because, like we said, there are things in place to stop this from happening. But let them do their investigation. And then if there's something that we need to speculate on, we can speculate that it's far too early to do that. Gotta let everyone, let's get, let's recover everybody first.

Let's reunite them with their families. Let people mourn, you know? Yeah. But let's change the outcome. Let's take our first break, our only break. And then we're going to come back and talk about another crash.

You would think it'd only be one this week, right? Yeah. It just happened two days later. And this one's incredibly sad too. So we'll be right back. All right, so we're back. And this is another video that has been making the rounds.

The video I saw, I don't know how many videos there are. Was it a guy walking out of his house and then behind him? There just looks like there's an explosion. Yeah, no, there's even a better angle where there's a guy like out of Wendy's. Oh my God. And you don't see the plane hit, but you see the explosion as it's hitting. And he's like, whoa. I mean, he's probably a couple hundred feet away from it.

And this one's a little different, though. This one, and I don't know all the details on how this happened. This is another one they're going to have to investigate. But this, it was a much smaller aircraft. There were six passengers. It was a medical jet and it crashed in the Northeast Philadelphia area on Friday night. And the plane, the medical company. It crashed in a residential area.

Yeah. Yeah. This was a Mexico-based company that was operating this small plane. It was a Learjet 55 aircraft, and it included a pediatric patient who had recently finished treatment at Shriners Children's Hospital. So this was a young child. 11 years old. 11 years old that just went through some life-saving surgery. Life-saving medical surgery. She's 11 years old, Valentina Guzman Murillo, along with her mother. And then obviously the other people on there were the captain, the co-captain, paramedic. And yeah. There was a doctor too, wasn't there?

Yes. And obviously all six of these people did, well, all six of these people did pass away, as well as one person on the ground. And there's many, many more injured. Yeah, no, the crime scene that they're having to go through is horrific. It's vast. It's going to take a while. They've kind of got it all shut down right now. This was Friday night after 6 p.m.

So you could see it's like a high trafficked area. The fact that only one person on the ground was killed is an absolute miracle. So far, there's a lot of people injured going to the hospital. So obviously that could change. Yeah. And there's another video that's further away. That's like a far distance away and you see the plane and it takes like a, it almost looks like a comet. It takes a complete nosedive. It exactly looks like a comet. That's the one I think I saw. There was a man and a woman leaving their house with a ring doorbell, captured it. And it's far away, but you can see it sort of coming down.

And you're like, what is that? And then all of a sudden, poof, and just like fire flares up. And I think they said that something like 11 homes, it kind of got into the area, and at least 11 homes in some businesses were significantly damaged. 22 people were injured. Five remained hospitalized following the crash. And the National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, they revealed they recovered the black box eight feet underground at the site of the impact. So now they have this crash over the Reagan Airport to investigate and this new crash now to investigate. And the NTSB has to be like, what the hell is going on at this point? Like, what are we doing here? This is crazy. And obviously, these are completely two different planes, two different situations. One is a commercial flight, one's private,

a medical flight, two different reasons. But still, plane crashes are not common. My mom has always told me, because I've always been afraid of flying, and she's like, hey, you're more likely to die in a car crash than you are in a plane crash. But what we have here, this series of events, is very stressful for everybody. And this poor little girl, 11 years old, went to Shriners to get this life-saving treatment. So now things are going great. We have this treatment that you needed, only to die in a plane crash on the way back. Yeah.

No, it's brutal. And as far as the actual flight itself, they've given a little bit of detail on it. So the plane flew into Philadelphia, was on the ground for a couple hours. It took off at 6.06 PM. Okay. It climbed to 1500 feet before making a slight right turn and then a slight left turn. And then it began a deep descent and crashed. And the entire flight was less than one minute. And so just initially, and by all means, no expert here, but it seems like there was some type of mechanical failure there where as the plane was climbing, something went wrong, maybe with one of the flaps on the wings or something where the plane went right into the ground and it didn't really try to make any like life-saving measures to save the flight. Something happened where the pilot lost control. It seems like, and I hear this a lot and I don't know how true it is, but they say that most plane crashes like this happen within the first like five minutes because it's usually during takeoff where you get up there, something goes wrong and then that's it. Hopefully it's not something that's going to completely disable the plane. But in this case, that appears to be exactly what happened. So the fact that it happened within one minute tells me

when they left the ground, they were already doomed. Something had already broken on that plane. But they didn't know. There's no way to know. There's no way to know. That's what's so scary about flights, I think, for all of us, right, is you're so hopeless. Like, I always hear the argument,

oh, you know, you're more likely to be injured or die in a car accident than you are a plane. And I'm like, okay, but there's also another argument to be made because in a plane accident, or if there's something that goes wrong up there, more than likely you're not making it. Where most car accidents, they'll happen, but you'll still survive. There's a chance you're going to make it, especially if you're wearing your seatbelt and depending on the circumstances of the crash itself. But there's a chance you're going to make it especially if you're wearing your seatbelt and depending on the the circumstances of the crash itself, but there's a there's a likelihood that you're going to walk away from it where If something goes wrong on this plane, you are absolutely hopeless. There's nothing you're not in control at all

You're strapped into that seat And you're there for the ride no matter what happens and I think that's what scares people Yeah, that's why I have an issue with putting my life in somebody's hands. And not only just somebody's hands, but the pilot, all the mechanics that have ever touched this plane, the manufacturer, like air traffic control. All of these people that you're just hoping are doing everything right. Doing their job. And based on what I know about people, I don't have a huge amount of confidence in anybody to do everything right all the time, which is scary. It's scary.

It is scary. And that's why I usually drive when I go to see you. I could hop on a flight and be in Boston in 45 minutes, but I'd rather take a six-hour drive. I love the train. Even when I go to New York, I take the train. But obviously with this case, she's coming from Mexico. Yeah. When I go to New York, I take the train. But obviously with this case, that's not what you, she's coming from Mexico. She's got to go to Shriners. There's no choice here.

No choice. I mean, we'll see what happens with it. Like Stephanie had said at the top of the show, these two cases, it's, there'll probably be some like preliminary results where they'll come out and try to, you know, dispel any of the, like the rumors that are out there, but it could take a while. I think we're going to find that more than likely it was user error in the first incident where the Blackhawk pilot just made a mistake. As far as the second incident, I think it's going to end up being a mechanical failure. So we'll have to wait and see. Apparently the crew was top of the line. Like they, they grabbed their best people for this. Cause it was a long and important flight. Yeah. Well, our thoughts are with all the pilots, all the

passengers. It just, this doesn't happen often. And yet in one weekend we have two of them. So when you see it, people are starting to question like, Oh, should I fly now? I would say overall, it's never going to make you feel good. There's nothing we're going to say that's going to make you feel great. But my mother's actually going on a flight tomorrow to DC. And I said, listen, you just, you can't stop living. You got to get there. Is she stressed? What do you think? Yeah.

Yeah. She's like, I don't know. Maybe your mom's just like a badass. And she's like, I'm not scared of anything. You know? No, she's like me and your dad were thinking about driving. I'm like, I mean, you do whatever you got to do, whatever makes you feel comfortable. But I'm flying in a couple of weeks. I'm flying L.A. and you just got to do it. You just got to hope there's a million ways you can go. portion of this flight they're just flying over desert nothing to be seen for miles and miles and miles and you're like man how am i even going to be saved you know if if something does happen and

you manage to survive like who's gonna even be able to know we're out here at this point and i mean you're not on a desert island it feels like it feels like it okay vegas is scary man but like it's just like this tiny little dot. And then for like hundreds of miles around, it's just desert. And it's, it's scary. You feel like you get a, you know, and, and I've heard about plane crashes before, you know, I think it was, um, were they hikers or something or climbers and they like crashed in, in the snow. And then they, they had to, they, nobody came to save them for a long time.

So I just saw a movie about it. But anyways. Talking about the Russian, were they Russian or? Something, I just saw a movie and they basically, they couldn't be found because they had stopped transmitting the location and you just hope that somebody's gonna fly over the right place and locate you.

And they're sending off flares and they're writing things in the snow. But yeah, there was a movie I watched recently. Not recently, but there was a whole entire flight of like it was all men. And it was like it was like I don't know if it was a sports team. Yeah, I think like skiing or something. Yeah, they made a movie. I can't remember what it is, but.

Okay, I just I just found the movie. We just had to cut to look it up. So it's called the Society of the Snow. Yeah, which is the movie that i watched and it was an entire flight there were 72 they were out there for 72 days yeah um and it was if you haven't seen the movie it's on did they have to eat each other i i feel like that was the movie they were eating each other yeah i'm never i never want to be put in a position where i have to decide if i'm going to eat or be eaten i all that's all'm saying. I don't want it. Yeah, definitely.

It's a great movie. It was a really, really good movie based on a true story too. Yes. But I don't know how we got there, but we did. It was a very good movie. But yeah, those are the things I think about every time I board a plane is what I'm saying. That does not surprise me at all. Do you not?

No. No. I know that if the plane has a problem at that point, I should just text my family and that's it. Well, Derek's in charge of his intrusive thoughts. I am not. Okay. We're thinking about everybody involved in this. And I know it's going to affect some people

and they may second guess their decision to travel. My thought is you got to live your life. And if it's going to happen, it's going to happen. You do the best you can to prevent those things. But in some instances, there's just nothing you can do. You just got to go with fate and hope for the best. If it's your time, it's your time. But we'll keep following it. Our thoughts are with the family members, the loved ones, obviously. There's a lot of people suffering. As many people that died in these two flights, there's dozens more who loved

them and cared about them who are suffering right now. And our thoughts are with them. That's going to do it for us, guys. We're going to be back later this week with Ray Rivera part three. This is going to be part three of four. So until then, everyone stay safe out there and we will see you soon. Bye. Thank you.