They lost their son in the Reagan National Airport midair collision. Now, they're fighting for aviation safety in his honor

Yahoo

6 days ago

January 29 started with such promise.
Sheri Lilley visited a wedding venue in Savannah, Georgia, where her stepson Sam and his fiancee Lydia Coles were looking to get married. The date was already set: October 4, 2025.
Sheri thought to herself, 'This is so fortunate. This place is perfect. It's going to work out great.'
Sam was a commercial airline pilot on a trip, so Sheri asked Lydia to talk with him about the venue when he got back to their home in Charlotte.
But several hours later their lives were shattered when a passenger plane collided with a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the Potomac River.
Texts and calls went unanswered. No word from Sam.
Sam's father, Tim, who is also a pilot, joined Sheri and Lydia on a group phone call. Everyone was in tears. They knew, even without official confirmation, something horrible had happened.
'I uttered the words to (Lydia), 'A plane has crashed in DC. We think it was Sam,'' Sheri said, still haunted by that night.
Twenty-eight-year-old Sam Lilley died in January's midair collision, the deadliest plane crash in the US in 24 years. He was the first officer flying the CRJ-700 for PSA Airways, a regional carrier for American Airlines. Sixty-four people were onboard, including Sam and Captain Jonathan Campos. Three soldiers onboard the Army helicopter were also killed.
That cold, devastating night would change the Lilley's lives forever.
Telling the story of Sam
When Tim and Sheri share their story, there are no longer many tears. They've shed so many in the six months since January 29 and dealt with the trauma as parents and a couple.
It's an unthinkable situation that would test any marriage. The couple agrees they were able to get through it because of their faith.
'It takes some of the sting of death away for me, because I know when I move on, I'm going to have a chance to interact with Sam and other family members that I've lost on the way,' Tim said.
The night of the crash Tim and his family went straight to Washington. He was no stranger to aviation or crash investigations. A former active-duty Army Black Hawk helicopter pilot himself, he flew in combat on four tours, conducted accident investigations while on active duty, and worked for almost 16 years as an emergency medical pilot.
Now, he understood more about the investigation when it was his family involved.
The first time Tim walked into a conference room where victim's families were meeting with the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency responsible for investigating his son's crash, he brought an iPad loaded with helicopter routes and airplane flight paths. Tim had a lot of questions.
He wanted to know what happened to his son and why. The quest for answers was a coping mechanism, but it didn't stop the traumatizing breakdowns and cries. Tim didn't sleep for the first few nights after the accident. Despite being a former Army man, he was a father yearning for his son.
'Within 12 hours of the accident, I had a very strong instinct of everything that had happened and everything that went wrong, and all those instincts turned out to be true,' Tim said. 'I was kind of the voice of the family members that understood the aviation side of this tragedy.'
Tim often talked to the media, with his wife by his side, speaking for the victims' families when so many of them could not fathom what had happened.
Tim and Sheri recall those initial meetings with the NTSB as 'terrible,' but a time when families bonded over shared trauma.
In a conference room, there were 200 or so people, including representatives from American Airlines, PSA Airways, the Federal Aviation Administration, NTSB and first responders. Conspicuously absent during those first few days was the Army, according to the Lilley's.
'The NTSB - they are so professional,' Sheri, who spent 15 years working at Gulfstream Aerospace, said. 'They're outstanding at what they do. We have so much respect for them, but I think they probably could have briefed some of those other parties a little bit better about the fact that you are not talking to law enforcement, first responders. This is an audience of grieving and shocked family members.'
People left the room in horror when officials described 'body parts spread all over the ice.'
Families passed notes to the front of the conference room telling officials that night to not refer to their loved ones as 'remains.'
Shocked and trying to grieve, the Lilley's still pressed for answers. The couple wanted to make sure this never happened again. Without answers, the questions would keep them awake at night.
But it was a different kind of answer that woke Tim up early one morning in February. About a week after the accident, he knew Sam wanted him to get a tattoo.
Tim and Sheri never were tattoo people, they say, but Sam had six. The next day, Tim, Sheri and Lydia, all went to get tattoos in Sam's honor at Raven's Tattoo Shop in Bethesda, Maryland. For Tim, it was a plane with a ribbon across it, remembering the crash. Sheri and Lydia got lily flowers.
'I want to go to Capitol Hill'
It was clear the Lilley family wasn't going to be out of the spotlight for quite some time.
Tim's first national media interview was with NewsNation on January 31 with Chris Cuomo. In the video, his hands are crossed, he is fidgeting and fighting back tears, but he told his son's story. The day before, he spoke with a few local Atlanta TV stations.
At that point, hundreds of media requests started pouring in and a friend of Sheri, Amy Camp, started acting as their press representative.
About four days after the crash, Tim turned to Sheri and said, 'I want to go to Capitol Hill. I need to speak to some senators.'
Camp was able to connect the couple with a lobbyist in Washington who ultimately opened doors for them to meet lawmakers.
Just a few days after the crash, Tim and Sheri were in the offices of Senators Ted Cruz, Maria Cantwell, Roger Marshall and Tammy Duckworth, who was also an Army Black Hawk pilot and traded stories with Tim.
The couple also met with Rep. Buddy Carter, from their home congressional district in Georgia, who had Sam's photograph enlarged and placed on an easel on the floor of the House of Representatives.
'A touching moment,' Sheri said. 'All three of us caught our breath.'
On March 6, they spoke with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who was sworn in by Judge Clarence Thomas on the afternoon of January 28, just one day before the crash.
The Lilley's were happy with the Secretary's response to the crash. They appreciated his effort to address what had happened to their son and were glad the tragedy brought heightened attention to aviation safety.
'It kind of lit a fire,' Tim said.
The couple knew their voices could help keep anyone else from losing their child to a tragedy like this one.
'We've got a little bit of a platform here, and this is a way that we can honor Sam,' Sheri said. 'It's also been very healing for us to feel like we may contribute to preventing disasters like this, saving other lives. That at least helped us make some sense of this whole tragedy.'
The NTSB investigation into the crash will continue for about another six months but in the meantime, the couple is going to push to make aviation safer in other ways. Fighting for funding for a new air traffic control system is one of their current goals.
Sam comes home
Nine days after the crash, Sheri and Tim finally went home to Savannah.
American Airlines would later provide an aircraft for their son's final trip home. It was an Airbus plane, because the CRJ regional jet Sam flew wasn't large enough to carry a casket in the cargo hold, Tim said.
When the plane landed Sam was honored with a water canon salute, and dozens of pilots, including other first officers and young aviators, stood in uniform to greet him.
One stood out to Tim – she told him, as he shook her hand, she wouldn't be a pilot if it weren't for Sam. He was her flight instructor and took her on her first lesson.
Sam's graveside service was private, but about 500 people attended his public memorial in person, and it was livestreamed.
In mid-May, Tim and Sheri went back to the site of the crash to lay a wreath in the water. The Washington DC Harbor Patrol took the couple out in a boat to the exact spot where the plane went down. What they didn't know was they'd be with the first responders who pulled their son out of the water.
'They volunteered to go with us because they felt like they already had a personal connection to us, and they kind of wanted to close that loop,' Sheri said. 'It was a very beautiful moment on the river with them.'
Holding the Army accountable
It's been six months since Sam died.
Tim and Sheri have been to Capitol Hill six times since the crash for hearings and meetings with lawmakers and have reviewed legislation. Often, they are acknowledged in the audience at the start of committee hearings.
They don't plan to stop.
On Tuesday, they returned to Capitol Hill to help introduce new aviation safety legislation written by Sen. Cruz and supported by the FAA, NTSB, Department of Transportation and other lawmakers. They'll also be at all three days of NTSB investigative hearings at the end of July in Washington.
While they want people to remember their son, they also want accountability. Up until this point, Tim and Sheri feel like they have heard from all parties involved, but not much from the Army.
'I feel betrayed,' Tim said. 'I'll be honest with you.'
In July, family members of the victims wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Army calling out the Army's refusal to engage with them. On Tuesday, after a private update from the NTSB, the families met with the Army.
'The most disappointing part from the Army's perspective is the reaction to it,' Tim said. 'They've taken the position to hide behind the NTSB and say, 'We can't really do anything or say anything until the final report.' That's just crazy.'
While a probable cause of the crash has yet to be determined by the NTSB, the couple does believe the crew aboard the Army Black Hawk were at fault.
'While I do say that they made some mistakes and caused the accident, I'm not going to hold that in my heart, I have to let that go,' Tim said.
The couple also reached out to the parents of crew chief Ryan O'Hara, who was in the helicopter on a training mission that fateful night.
'Our hearts really broke for them,' Sheri said, noting O'Hara was Sam's age and had a child. 'They didn't get that support like we got. Social media rallied around us.'
To this day, Sheri said, six or seven of the victims of the crash haven't been publicly identified. There's a Flight 5342 Slack channel that shares birthdays and anniversaries of their loved ones. Sheri said May was a hard month full of celebrations that never happened.
'As a pilot, you bear this responsibility to get people safely where they're supposed to go,' Tim said. 'They expected them to get there and they were almost there. It's just heartbreaking.'
A life together cut short
October 4 will still be celebrated between Tim, Sheri, and Lydia. Plans haven't been finalized, but they know they'll take a trip somewhere to memorialize Sam and what would have been the day he and Lydia were married.
Sam met Lydia at a church camp when they were 14 and were really close friends, but she was dating a friend of his at the time. Over the years, they reconnected.
About two and a half years ago, on St. Patrick's Day, Sam 'accidentally' introduced his parents to Lydia, after engaging in holiday 'liquid celebrations,' Sheri said laughing. Very quickly, Tim and Sheri saw exactly what their son saw in Lydia.
'She has so much emotional maturity, she really brought out the best in him,' Sheri said. 'They brought out the best in each other.'
Last October, just east of Dublin, Ireland, Sam got down on one knee with an emerald ring in hand and asked Lydia to be his wife.
In July, Tim, Sheri and Lydia went to Ireland and she showed them where Sam proposed. That spot felt sacred to Sheri – where Sam felt one of the most joyful moments of his life.
The three also sat down at a seafood tapas restaurant Sam and Lydia had gone to after she said 'yes.' When their server put their food down, Sheri noticed an airplane tattoo on the server's arm.
'My eyes just filled with tears,' Sherri said.
It's those little moments that let them know whether on Capitol Hill, at home in Savanah or deep in Ireland, Sam will be with them forever.
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