February 7, 2025
Come home safely. That was the text I received from my husband as I crossed the threshold of the Airbus A321 jumbo jet that would transport me across the country on yet another business trip. This message was heavy with grief. A week ago, we witnessed the mid-air collision between American Airlines flight 5342 and a military Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River in our nation’s capital. Sixty-seven lives were cut short by the deadliest air crash in the US in over 15 years. A stark reminder that a safe return home is not always guaranteed.
But I knew that all too well. In 2008, my pilot brother, Captain Cesare D’Antonio, was one of five people who died when TACA Airlines flight 390 overshot the runway and crashed into an embankment at Honduras’s notoriously dangerous Toncontin International Airport. A deadly landing that would forever define Cesare’s last 26 seconds on earth. I learned of the crash on a CNN breaking news report which sent me on a numbing journey as I sat stunned watching the recycled images on TV replay throughout that first night. Perhaps if I heard the news enough times, I could finally believe the unbelievable.
We are a society with a need for instant gratification and immediately experts go on TV to speculate and conjecture on what may have caused the deadly crash. As an engineer, I know all too well that getting answers to that question will take, what seems like, an eternity. In the meantime, everyone is an expert with a self-proclaimed theory. Perhaps those in command of the biggest bullhorn are quick to steer the messaging whether accurate or not. Immediately following Cesare’s crash, the President of Honduras lay blame on the pilot. Fifteen years later, the President of the US blamed diversity, inclusion, and equity policies for the DC crash. In both cases, rescue efforts were still underway when the irresponsible finger pointing started.
As consumers, we’ve been conditioned to believe that flying is the safest mode of travel. The odds are in our favor that we will board a 150,000-pound flying machine, rise to 35,000 feet over the surface of the earth, and land safe and sound at our destination. Decades of safe travel have convinced us that something like this couldn’t possibly happen to us or those we love. So, when the unimaginable happens the shock and disbelief are crippling.
As a society, we lose sight of the victims and the families whose lives have forever been shattered. Family members going on about their day most likely receiving the news with a knock on the door. The magnitude of the message is such that they might only retain snippets of the conversation. Airplane accident. Crash. No survivors. Propelling them into a tailspin of insurmountable grief and pain. Or perhaps like me learning of the disaster on national TV hanging on to hope that loved ones had boarded other flights and would return safely home.
As I watched the breaking news, my thoughts gravitated to the family members. We are kindred spirits forever bound by tragedy. I am them. And they are me. We are members of a group none of us want to belong to, a group whose membership was founded in pain. And our heartache would be revived every time another plane crashed and added new members to the group.
For many, the story of a plane crash typically ends when the media moves on to the latest breaking news. But I can attest that as a family member of a plane crash victim, the story only begins there. For these families, their hell has just begun. I watched the images of the families as they visited the site of the crash. They stood huddled at the edge of the Potomac River, at the end of the world. A world they no longer know and one that they must learn to navigate without an essential member of their existence.
I want to wrap them in my arms and guide them through the upcoming dark days with endless tasks and milestones in the midst, each one an excruciating blow on the road to an elusive closure. The recovery of the remains from the wreckage, laying loves one to rest, recovering personal belongings, and the long and arduous investigation for answers. Along the way, they will falter, struggling to regain their footing, trying to figure things out, like feeling their way out of a room with no source of light. I want to tell them that the answers will come as to what happened that night. But I also want to warn them that, like me, they will be bound by a litany of unanswered questions that will forever remain buried in the wreckage. Did our loved ones know that the end was near? Did they hurt? Did they call out to us? Did the end come quickly? We will never get answers to these questions that will haunt us, a modern-day Boogeyman that keeps us up on dark nights. And I want to reassure them that it is ok for them to write their own versions to these answers to fill the timeline gaps in order to retain a level of sanity. Finally, I want to remind them that our loved ones would want us to go on. And go on we must, if not for anything else but to keep their memory alive.
To the powers that be, investigators, regulators, and policy makers, I plead with you to keep the victims and the families as your North Star. Heed the lessons learned from this deadly disaster. Follow the truth and implement whatever changes must be made to increase aviation safety to the highest levels so that we may all come home safely. If not, then the victims of American Airlines flight 5342 and the Black Hawk helicopter tragedy will have died in vain. And rest assured, history will repeat itself.