Two Georgia families forever connected by the D.C. midair collision

Lilley was a pilot on American Airlines Flight 5342 as it came in for landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport along the Potomac River the frigid night of Jan. 29, 2025.

Sam’s dad, Tim, is also a pilot. He immediately texted his son to talk about the crash when he saw the news, because they always discussed aviation happenings.

It was odd when Tim didn’t hear back.

Not far to the south, in the small city of Midway, live the parents of U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Ryan O’Hara.

They, too, sent unanswered texts to their son that night after seeing the news.

It soon became clear that O’Hara, who grew up in Lilburn, was the crew chief sitting behind the Army pilots of a Black Hawk helicopter traveling along the Potomac River that night when his aircraft collided with Sam’s.

Credit: NYT

Credit: NYT

The two Georgians, both 28 years old, lost their lives while doing their jobs alongside 65 others. It was the first fatal U.S. commercial aviation accident in 16 years.

According to the NTSB report this week, the victims were failed by a litany of systems, from the Federal Aviation Administration’s aircraft route maps to air traffic control staffing, from Army safety practices to a lack of collision avoidance technology in the aircraft.

“Many things need to go wrong for an accident to occur,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said when the board voted on its recommendations last month.

“We should be angry. This was 100% preventable,” she said. “We’ve issued recommendations in the past that were applicable to use.”

As the FAA and U.S. Army deal with the recommended reforms and ongoing litigation, and as Congress continues to wrangle over proposed legislation, for two grieving Georgia families, nothing will ever be the same.

‘All this potential’

Ryan O’Hara enlisted in the Army at 17 on deferment — his parents had to sign for him — until he finished high school, always “with the mindset that he wanted to work with the Black Hawks,” his mother, Mary O’Hara, recalled.

He was the kind of child who loved to figure out how things worked. “He was a very precocious kid. Had to have his hands on everything,” she said.

As a toddler, he could run their entertainment system, Mary said. He was fascinated with flying, but dreams of being a pilot were dashed because of a retina issue.

O’Hara’s wife, Dani, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution her husband was “brilliant.”

“His mind was always working, always going, always figuring things out,” she said.

Credit: Courtesy of Dani O'Hara

Credit: Courtesy of Dani O'Hara

With helicopters, “every single little piece works together to make that happen, and the way that it all went together just kept his mind stimulated,” Dani said.

He loved the mental challenge of the maintenance side of his job as much as he loved flying, she said.

In flight, the job of a Black Hawk crew chief includes helicopter maintenance and airspace monitoring. In combat, it can also involve being an aerial gunner.

Ryan graduated from Lilburn’s Parkview High School in 2014, where he had participated in JROTC, managed the armory and been on the rifle team.

A few hours away that same year, Sam Lilley graduated from Richmond Hill High School and headed off to Georgia Southern University.

About the time Ryan deployed to Afghanistan in 2017, Sam was wrapping up a degree in marketing and logistics.

But pretty quickly Sam realized that career wasn’t for him. He wanted to see the world. By 2019, he would follow in his father’s footsteps and start flight training.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

In 2022, Ryan took his second and final posting at Fort Belvoir in Virginia after postings that took him to Washington state, Germany, Kentucky and other places.

That same year, Sam joined PSA Airlines, a subsidiary of American Airlines.

In 2023, Ryan and Dani got married, and their son was born.

The next year, Sam proposed to his fiancee, Lydia; they began plans for a 2025 wedding.

“Talking to (the Lilleys) about Sam, it seems that they had some similar personality traits, and they were both just doing life,” Dani said.

“Ryan had an infant son at home. Sam was about to get married,” she said. “We see all this potential that was lost overnight. Two young men at the beginning of their lives.”

Ryan’s parents were grateful when he was posted to Washington, D.C.

“For us, that was great, because we worried about him every day in Afghanistan,” his father, Gary, said.

Dani also didn’t worry about Ryan’s safety given the strong record of Army aviation.

In fact, she had a will — but he did not — because of the worse statistical risks in her profession as a paramedic.

“Paramedics get killed in crashes every day,” she said. Not so with Army crew chiefs.

Sam, meanwhile, was a jokester much of the time but took his pilot training seriously. (“He was a clown,” his stepmother, Sheri, puts it.)

His father, Tim, would constantly quiz Sam about standards and procedures.

“He made it to where (Sam) really knew his stuff,” Sam’s fiancee, Lydia, told the AJC in a previous interview.

Ryan did talk about the crowded D.C. airspace, Dani recalled, but said he believed in its FAA-governed structure.

Ryan “had an appreciation for complicated things working. That’s how he viewed that airspace.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

‘Shameful’

But as the NTSB has laid bare, the system worked until it didn’t.

An exhaustive investigation has highlighted how the crash happened after years of warnings and near collisions.

The board released 74 findings and 50 recommendations, outlining “systemic failures in airspace design, safety oversight, and risk management by the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Army.”

“It’s shameful,” Homendy said last month to a crowd that included the Lilleys and O’Haras. “I don’t want to be here years from now looking at other families that had to suffer such devastating loss.”

The disturbing reality of what happened to Ryan and Sam was underscored again and again.

How their two aircraft were reliant on the same air traffic controller managing seven airplanes and five helicopters simultaneously.

How the two sets of pilots couldn’t hear each other’s air traffic control communication nor see each other’s locations because collision avoidance technology wasn’t required or activated.

How Ryan’s FAA-approved route somehow allowed helicopters to fly directly beneath commercial jets’ approach corridor — and how aeronautical charts for airliner pilots like Sam didn’t show how close the nearby helicopter routes came.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

“There were so many things that caused it that they could have fixed a long time ago,” Mary O’Hara said.

In a statement, the FAA has said it will “carefully consider” the NTSB’s recommendations and pointed out it “immediately acted to improve safety” after the accident.

Among many other changes, the agency has already decreased DCA’s arrival rate, increased its air traffic controller staff and restricted helicopter traffic around the airport. It has permanently closed the route Ryan’s Black Hawk was on that night.

An Army spokesman said in a statement the military branch is “continuing to implement meaningful changes to strengthen aviation safety, enhance training, and improve coordination in our nation’s most complex airspace.

“The Army remains committed to collaborating closely with the NTSB, FAA, and other federal partners to support lasting improvements in aviation safety that honor those who were lost.”

The hardest part of the NTSB hearing was watching the animations of what might have been visible from the two cockpits, said Sam’s mother, Dannah Lilley. How Sam probably didn’t see the Black Hawk until the last few seconds.

“But he did see it at the last second,” she said. “And he couldn’t do a thing. There was no time for anything.”

The animations also showed how difficult it could have been for Ryan and his colleagues to have seen Sam’s plane against the bright lights of the city.

Night vision goggles can impede depth perception. The airplane was also above them, possibly in a blind spot, Dani surmised.

Ryan’s pilot colleague had assured the air traffic controller they had Sam’s nearing plane in sight, mere seconds before the collision.

“You see the two (aircraft) coming together, and there’s nobody warning them, nobody telling them,” Ryan’s father, Gary, said.

“You know without a doubt, the helicopter never saw the plane.”

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

‘Set up to fail’

To both the Lilleys and the O’Haras, their loved ones were doing what they had been trained to do.

Sam’s father, Tim, is also a former Army helicopter pilot who flew those same D.C. routes decades ago.

The helicopter pilots “were set up to fail. As a former Army aviator, I still have a lot of compassion for them and their situation.”

He and Sheri told the O’Haras that, when they met for lunch last spring, Tim said.

Neither family has filed lawsuits to seek compensation, but both have, to varying degrees, felt the sting of misinformation and split-second social media opinions that have cast quick blame on their loved ones.

Sam was named as a defendant in litigation filed by the families of the passengers against the airlines, the FAA and the Army, though the NTSB has not found the plane crew to be at fault.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

Both families have also opted to speak on their lost loved one’s behalf, facing news cameras in the days after the accident and since.

For Tim and Sheri, Sam’s stepmother, it has become part of a campaign to champion reforms, as the tragedy has turned them into newly minted aviation safety advocates.

They will be in Washington again next week to push for House passage of a package of industry reforms inspired by the crash.

“We have to keep going until everybody gets where they’re going safely for the rest of our lifetime,” Tim said. “It is never-ending.”

It’s also a part of their grieving process.

“A lot of people think grieving happens in a year, and I’m not done,” he said. “We’re not even close.”

Credit: Courtesy of Dani O'Hara

Credit: Courtesy of Dani O'Hara

For Gary, speaking out is a chance “to actually have something on the record that somebody spoke on Ryan’s behalf. He mattered.”

Gary agrees grief hasn’t gotten easier.

“Until you lose your child, it’s hard to even relate. Your life becomes two separate lives, the life that we had with Ryan and what we’re left with afterward,” he said.

And the heart-wrenching milestones continue to pass.

Putting up the Christmas tree last year with ornaments Ryan and his sister made was tough, Gary said.

Dani and Ryan had been making plans for her to go to medical school. She wonders if she’ll still be able to pull that off as a single mom. Their son is now 2 and looks, walks and acts just like Ryan, she said.

Last October was when Sam and Lydia were supposed to be married.

And this May would have brought Sam’s 30th birthday.

June would have brought Ryan’s.