After January’s tragedy near Reagan National, family of victim advocates for air safety

WASHINGTON (7News) — Friday marked 100 days since 67 people lost their lives when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with American Eagle Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, as the plane’s pilots were preparing to land at Reagan National Airport (DCA) just outside D.C.

On Thursday, some of the family members of the victims were at the Department of Transportation headquarters in Southwest D.C. to support a plan to overhaul the nation’s aging air traffic control system. Among them was Sheri Lilley, who lost her stepson, Sam Lilley, that night. Sam was the copilot of the American Eagle plane.

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“When he decided he wanted to become a pilot, he embarked on that career with a passion,” Sheri said. “As his younger brother Patrick has said, the only two things he’s ever seen Sam speak about so passionately were aviation and his fiancé Lydia.”

Sheri Lilley said she and her husband, Tim – a former U.S. Army pilot who now flies in the private sector – have become aviation safety advocates since the collision, which is why she was in D.C. Thursday supporting U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s plan to replace aging air traffic control equipment.

“Better technology is going to allow those controllers to see what the separation is between aircraft,” she said. “It will have just a better view for them overall, and notify them when midair collisions are likely to happen.”

Lilley said she advocates for safety in memory of her stepson, and so other families don’t have to go through what her family has. She said that in the future, it shouldn’t take a tragedy before aviation dangers are addressed.

“Aviation professionals a lot of times say that aviation legislation, changes, and reforms are written in blood. That should not be the case,” she said. “The data is out there, and we should be able to predict where these accidents may happen and prevent them from happening.”

Sheri Lilley said it was not easy to learn that there had been years of incidents before the collision that should have served as a warning that something could happen. The National Transportation Safety Board said in March that there had been more than 15,000 “close proximity events” between helicopters and commercial aircraft between October 2021 and December 2024.

“That is pretty distressing – the fact that there is a lot of data that the FAA possessed and it had not been analyzed previously,” she said.

But Lilley strongly supports many of the steps taken by Duffy and the FAA since the collision, including the decision to ban all helicopter flights over the Potomac near DCA except in limited circumstances, during which planes are not supposed to be allowed to fly anywhere near them.

“The recommendations that they came out with during the [NTSB] preliminary report were implemented even more strictly than we expected,” she said. “The FAA took it a step further, and we greatly appreciate that.”

Although steps have been taken to make the skies near DCA safer, there have still been several concerning incidents since January’s tragedy, including just last week when an Army Black Hawk helicopter flying near the Pentagon veered too close to the DCA flight path. Air traffic control ordered two planes with passengers to abort their landings and go around because of it.

READ MORE | Army helicopter flights on pause around DCA after recent string of aborted landings

“I want to make sure that the airspace is safe. And when I have a breach of minimum separation between helos and fixed wing aircraft, that concerns me,” DOT Secretary Duffy said when asked about that incident Thursday. “[Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has] shut down the airspace for two weeks at the Pentagon, which I appreciate, and we are going to work together to figure out what’s an appropriate level of helo traffic coming out of the Pentagon, and what works for the DCA airspace.”

Duffy said the plan he announced Thursday to replace thousands of pieces of aging air traffic control equipment nationwide and to modernize the system is part of an effort to avoid any more tragedies.

“It’s my job to say, what other risks do I see?” he said. “Because I don’t want to have a conversation with a family who lost a loved one because I didn’t take action in something that was foreseeable. This is foreseeable, and this country has to come together to get it done.”

Duffy did not have an exact cost estimate on the plan, but said it would cost more than $12.5 billion. The funds would have to be approved by Congress.

Among other things, the plan Duffy announced includes:

• New fiber, wireless & satellite technology at more than 4,600 sites
• 25,000 new radios
• 475 new voice switches
• The replacement of 618 old radars