Tim Lilley spent his life flying. Then his son died in a plane crash.
So on the evening of Jan. 29, as he saw news that an Army helicopter had collided with a passenger plane over D.C., he was struck by the enormity of the disaster. Tim reached out to someone else who would understand: his son Sam, who followed in his footsteps and became a pilot for PSA Airlines. Sam didn't respond. Tim realized the plane that had plunged into the Potomac was a PSA jet. After a series of frantic calls to family he learned that he had just watched on television the death of his youngest son, the first officer on the flight.
In those first moments of raw grief, and every day since, Tim has found himself in two roles. He's a dad in mourning. He's also an aviation expert — one who has flown both types of aircraft in the Jan. 29 collision at Reagan National Airport, and both routes — focused on finding answers and accountability for the families of all 67 people killed in what was the deadliest domestic plane crash in over two decades.
'I started — even though I let my emotions get in — I started trying to think critically about it right from the get-go and try to, you know, be a problem solver,' Tim said. 'I still miss Sam terribly, and that will never be solved. But … most aviation regulation is written in blood. That means somebody had to die in order for us to figure out a better way to do things. And that's probably going to be part of Sam's legacy.'
Less than 24 hours after the crash, Tim was talking not just about how Sam raised money for charity and was about to get married but about how night-vision goggles, combined with the light from the city, might have blinded the helicopter crew to the passenger jet. He hasn't stopped talking, digging, pushing for answers that he thinks could help prevent another tragedy — including stricter protocols for Army maneuvers around passenger flights and an updated and fully staffed air traffic control system.
The former service member is particularly upset with what he sees as a lack of responsibility from the Army. From the beginning, he said it was clear the helicopter crew made 'a grave error,' probably mistaking a farther-away plane for the jet they were told to avoid. But he wanted to know why Army leadership and the Federal Aviation Administration allowed them to be so close to another aircraft and rely only on their eyes to navigate around it.
Initial reporting from the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that the helicopter crew were probably wearing night-vision goggles, were flying too high and may have had a faulty height reading. The report also found that they were not broadcasting their location with a satellite system and may have lost crucial messages from air-traffic control. Tim hopes a three-day NTSB hearing this week will answer more of those questions.
In the meantime Tim has analyzed the air traffic, listened to podcasts from veterans of the Black Hawk's battalion, made charts of the air traffic at National. At an air safety conference, he rolled out a tape measure to illustrate how close Army helicopters and commercial planes were supposed to fly in the airspace at National — a mere 58 feet apart, which he called 'unacceptable' and 'insane.' He also privately contacted military leaders, including a veteran who served with him in Panama, where he witnessed a crash between two Black Hawk helicopters that led his unit to require four-person crews rather than the three that were flying at DCA.
'I knew my dad was smart, I knew my dad had a lot of knowledge, but I'm just amazed at how much, in the middle of grief, and in the most horrific time that any of us have ever experienced, I'm amazed at his wherewithal to be able to think about, okay, this should have happened, this should have happened, this is not what should have went on,' Tiffany Gibson, Sam's older sister, said. 'I'm just very, very proud of him.'
'Gary, my name is Tim Lilley, my son Sam Lilley was the first officer on flight 5342. I want you to know that we grieve with you. At some point when you are ready, maybe we can get together for a good cry.' Gary O'Hara received that message in March. It took him until May to reply.
O'Hara's son was the crew chief on the helicopter that crashed into Sam's plane. While Staff Sgt. Ryan O'Hara was not piloting the craft, his father felt the entire crew had been pitted against the PSA victims in the public eye. But by the time he and his wife met Tim and his wife, Sheri, at a restaurant in Richmond Hill, Georgia, it was clear there would be no such division. 'There's really nobody else that can relate to what we're going through other than another parent dealing with this,' he said. They realized that their children, both 28 and living less than 20 miles apart, in another reality might have been friends.
Tim reached out because he wanted the families of the three service members who died to know that he does not blame them for Sam's death. He blames Army leadership for allowing them to train in such a crowded airspace without making sure they did everything possible to mitigate the risk of a collision. He told O'Hara that when he flew those routes in the 1990s they would never rely on visual separation — pilots using their own vision and discretion to avoid other aircraft.
'We knew better,' he said. 'But when all that experience left after the wars ended, you know, nobody passes on the notion that asking for visual separation is a dangerous thing to do.'
At first, Tim and Sheri were encouraged by the response from the Army, from everyone. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy immediately restricted helicopter traffic around the airport and vowed to address the lapses that occurred in the tower at National through better equipment and staffing. The Lilleys met with members of Congress and watched as their representative described Sam on the House floor as 'a charismatic and intelligent young man who loved his fiancée, Lydia Coles, flying, his family and the Lord.'
But as Tim's questions got more pointed, and his emails to military personnel started featuring phrases like 'ineffective leadership,' the Army stopped engaging and 'started to ghost me,' he said. Only after 168 family members and loved ones, the Lilleys among them, wrote a letter saying the Army is 'persistently refusing to accept responsibility or even acknowledge the families throughout these ordeals' did Army Secretary Dan Driscoll agree to meet them.
The Army declined to comment on the letter. Driscoll said at a hearing in June that the Army is 'doing everything we can to learn from the incident to ensure that it never occurs again' but needs to let the legal and investigatory process 'play out.'
Sam and his father always shared a love of adventure, but as Sam approached his 30s, the resemblance between them grew. Most obviously, Sam decided to become a pilot. But he also started wearing Hawaiian shirts and making the same corny jokes. He had gone from saying he might never get married to preparing to start a family.
Now Tim is following in his son's footsteps. He was the only member of the family to view the autopsy. He would like to know Sam's last words, not sanitized in an NTSB readout as some kind of expletive. Last month he and his wife went to the rocky cliff in Dublin where Sam proposed to his girlfriend a few months before the crash. He has thought about something his pastor once wrote: that we are not humans with spirits but spirits having only a brief human experience on Earth. He likes the idea that when he dies, Sam will be the one to show him around.
Sam had six tattoos, none of which his father was crazy about. But about a week after the crash, while he was still waiting to bring Sam's body home, Tim woke up from a dream he can't remember convinced that he should get a tattoo in Sam's honor. On his bicep he now has a black ribbon bisected by a plane, next to the name of the flight — a symbol shared by the families of the victims.
A month after the crash, Tim went back to work flying private planes. Sometimes his passengers recognize him or ask a question that leads back to the crash. Any time he flies American Airlines, which owns PSA, it happens. He doesn't mind. 'I talk about it every day. That's my therapy,' he said. 'All my co-pilots get to hear about Sam.'
This summer he has been all over Europe — Milan, Paris, Majorca, Sicily, Nice, Innsbruck. He thinks about texting Sam to tell him how beautiful it is and how different the flying rules are, to tease him about being stuck on a layover in Kansas while his dad was on the Cote d'Azur. Sam would have countered that he flew the bigger plane.
Sometimes Tim would forget and send the message anyway until one day he pocket-dialed Sam's number and was startled to receive a text in reply. The number had been reassigned. The new owner said they had been getting messages from Sam's friends and knew the pain of losing a son. Tim could message the number any time, they said. 'And also thank you for your service.'
Ian Duncan contributed to this report.
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