By Christopher Kuo | Photographs by Anna Ottum for WSJ

WASHINGTON -- Tim and Sheri Lilley watched as a video on a large screen displayed the final seconds of their son's life.

Gray shading marked the contours of a cockpit window. Commands from an air-traffic controller crackled. Through the cockpit, the city glowed on the horizon, a strip of twinkling lights severing the night sky from the dark Potomac river.

Then, one of the lights morphed into the looming shape of a helicopter, careening into view and growing larger. The screen snapped to black.

The animation showed what Sam Lilley, the first officer of American Airlines Flight 5342, likely saw, the National Transportation Safety Board believes. The NTSB played the video in a large auditorium as an opening presentation of its investigation.

A year ago, on Jan. 29, Sam was in the cockpit of the American Airlines regional jet when it was hit midair by a Black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, killing all 67 onboard both aircraft including 28-year-old Sam. It was America's deadliest aviation disaster in two decades.

For the Lilleys, seated among other victims' families, the board meeting would finally grant an official answer to a question that had dogged them since the crash: Would investigators conclude that Sam had contributed to the accident?

"Our human condition is we want answers," Sheri, Sam's stepmother, said during a break from the board meeting. "We want to know why something happened. And it's probably because we feel like once we know the who and the why, then we can demand some justice."

The crash killed 11 young figure skaters as well as parents and coaches who were returning from a national development camp in Wichita, Kan., including the parents of a Team USA figure skater who brought a photo of his parents to the Olympics in Milan this past week.

From the beginning, the Lilleys had fought hard to show that their son had done everything right. Systemic failures in the FAA and Army had led to the crash, they believed, a conviction that drove them to push for safety reforms.

The Justice Department and other victims' families had also made their claims about who or what had contributed to the collision. It had been a year of crowded news conferences and Senate committee deliberations and lengthy legal filings.

Now, the nation's top safety investigators would deliver a verdict.

"This still consumes me," Tim said. "During the day, I can remember and be glad that we had 28 great years with Sam. But when it's dark and I close my eyes, all I see is the accident, and the things that led up to the accident and the leaders that didn't stop it."

Tim now works as a pilot for a private jet company. As a child, Tim taped cutouts from flight magazines across the walls of his bedroom. His first piloting lesson came at 13; he flew solo just after his 16th birthday.

He served in the Army as a combat mission pilot-in-command in Iraq. Later, he flew Black Hawk helicopters hundreds of times in nearly the same D.C. route that the helicopter was navigating when it crashed.

The Lilleys raised Sam, along with his three siblings, in the Savannah, Ga., area, where they still live.

When Sam was 10, Tim took him in the air for the first time, flying a small twin-engine Duchess from Savannah to Charleston, S.C., for a lunch outing. Sam attended Georgia Southern University and studied marketing and logistics.

After graduating and spending two months stacking cases of beer, he decided to become a pilot and enrolled in flight school in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Sam had flown with PSA Airlines, a subsidiary of American Airlines, for about two years before the crash. He had proposed to his fiancée, Lydia, in a seaside town in Ireland in 2024, and the two had planned to marry on Oct. 4, with a hot dog truck and hundreds of guests.

On the night of Jan. 29, Tim was in a hotel room in New Jersey between flights when he turned on the TV and saw mangled aircraft sinking into the Potomac.

As details of the crash emerged in news reports, his heart sank: The plane was a Canadair Regional Jet, or CRJ in airline parlance, the same aircraft that Sam piloted. It was operated by PSA, Sam's employer. A series of desperate texts to Sam went unanswered.

Sheri had spent the day looking for wedding venues for Sam and Lydia. She and Tim arrived in D.C. the following day.

When the Lilleys and other families met with the NTSB the day after the accident, Tim brought an iPad filled with helicopter routes and runway diagrams. After the fire chief described a scene of body parts in the icy river, many family members dashed from the room in anguish. Tim and Sheri stayed put.

He became both an investigator and an activist, asking questions about the possible causes of the crash and advocating for changes in the crowded D.C. airspace. It helped that he knew how to land a CRJ and how to steer a Black Hawk while peering through night vision goggles. He understood Class B airspace, the designation for the airspace around the busiest airports.

Drawing on transcripts of the cockpit recording, the Lilleys made the case in dozens of media interviews that Sam had followed the correct protocol. In one TV interview, a teary-eyed Tim said that "Sam was flying just the way he was supposed to."

A week after the accident, while they were still in D.C., Tim woke with a sudden urge to get a tattoo. Sam had six of them, including a crown of thorns, pilot wings and his fraternity symbols. The tattoos were how Tim had identified his body.

Tim got a tattoo on his right shoulder of a bow wrapped around a passenger jet, and Sheri and Lydia each got a tattoo of a lily.

On Capitol Hill, with the help of two friends, a communications consultant and a lobbyist who volunteered their services, they met with lawmakers from both parties, including Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell to discuss possible causes of the crash and to push for changes to the nation's safety infrastructure.

After nine days in the capital, they returned to Savannah on a large Airbus jet carrying Sam's casket, accompanied by more than a dozen PSA pilots. More than 100 other pilots, flight attendants and ground crew said farewell on the tarmac or greeted them when they landed.

In February, Tim sent a direct message on Facebook to the father of the Black Hawk crew chief.

"I want you to know we grieve with you. At some point when you are ready, maybe we can get together for a good cry," he wrote, according to a screenshot of the text.

The Lilleys and the passenger families started corresponding regularly in a "Flight 5342" Slack group. Each week, they would gather on a group call to discuss advocacy efforts or to offer comfort. Sheri was an active participant.

On Sept. 24, lawyers and families of some of the passengers announced that the families were suing American Airlines, its subsidiary PSA Airlines and the federal government, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army.

When Sheri received the 115-page copy of the initial lawsuit, she read it in one sitting. The suit alleged that Sam and his co-pilot had made critical errors that contributed to the crash, including failing to react to a traffic warning and failing to see and avoid the helicopter.

Tim and Sheri felt hurt and blindsided. They say they respected the families' rights to seek accountability in their own ways, but they had never expected the lawsuits to blame their son. After the lawsuits, Sheri became less vocal in the Slack group.

Tim posted on LinkedIn soon after.

"To claim the pilots of both aircraft 'utterly failed in their responsibilities' is factually untrue and serves only to shamefully tarnish the legacies of the CRJ pilots, while dishonoring everyone who tragically and unnecessarily lost their lives that night," he wrote.

The Lilleys reached out to some of the family members, saying they wished the CRJ pilots hadn't been mentioned in the suits.

"My parents felt like Sam couldn't defend himself, so we've got to be his voice," said Tiffany Lilley, their daughter. "It lit a fire underneath them."

Several weeks later, the Lilleys received an email from some of the plaintiff families saying that they would be removing the Lilleys and the family of Jonathan Campos, the captain of the plane, from the Slack group. This was in keeping with their lawyers' advice, they wrote in the email, according to a screenshot reviewed by The Journal.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the families said, "We share in our grief with the Lilleys, and all of the crew members' loved ones, during this difficult time and greatly respect and appreciate their continuing advocacy to improve aviation safety."

A spokesman for American Airlines declined to comment. In a motion filed in the case, the company's attorneys wrote that "proper legal recourse is not against American. It is against the United States government."

In a filing in the case, the U.S. government accepted fault for the collision, saying the Black Hawk pilots had failed to avoid the jet. They also said the pilots of the American Airlines flight had "failed to maintain vigilance" to avoid the Army aircraft.

A spokesman for the Army said the Army is committed to working with the FAA, NTSB and others to improve aviation safety and enhance its training protocols.

The morning before the NTSB meeting, Tim had spoken at an aviation safety conference in Wichita. Later that day, he boarded a flight to Baltimore.

Sam had passed through the same airport to board Flight 5342 almost exactly a year earlier. When Tim struck up a conversation with the Transportation Security Administration agent who reviewed his ID, the agent told him that he had scanned Sam's information that day.

Tim and Sheri arrived early to the meeting and sat close to the front.

After nine hours of reports and deliberations, the NTSB concluded that " systemic failures" on the part of the FAA and Army had caused the crash, not any errors made by the PSA pilots.

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February 13, 2026 20:00 ET (01:00 GMT)

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