Tim Lilley spent his life flying. Then his son died in a plane
crash.
Lilley had flown both aircraft and both routes that led to the
deadly collision near DCA that killed his son, who was also a pilot.
July 27, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Father and pilot Tim Lilley at his dining table in Savannah, Georgia,
on July 18, surrounded by the NTSB preliminary report and other
documents, researching his son’s crash. Lilley, a private pilot
with Flexjet, was also an Army Black Hawk pilot who had flown in
D.C.'s airspace. (Photos by Stephen B. Morton/For The Washington
Post) By Rachel Weiner
While other kids had posters of movie stars or rock bands on their
walls, Tim Lilley covered his with pictures of aircraft. He took
his first flying lesson at age 13, got a private piloting license
at 17, joined Army flight training at 19. He started out flying
Black Hawks, then made a career in the cockpit of choppers and
planes.
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.” Knowing better
“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.” Like father,
like son
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.
