Sam Lilley died in the D.C. plane crash. His family is demanding change.

But almost everything else has changed for Tim and the Lilley family since the night of Jan. 29, 2025.

That harrowing night they realized that the plane on the news, American Airlines Flight 5342, was being copiloted by Tim’s son, 28-year-old Savannahian Sam Lilley, when it collided with an Army helicopter and fell into the Potomac River.

Credit: NYT

Credit: NYT

At the hearings six months later, Sam’s stepmother of more than 20 years, Sheri, was sitting up front, too, combing through newly released collision evidence on her iPad with Sam’s sister, Tiffany Gibson.

In this massive auditorium, Tim and Sheri have two new roles.

They are now in the unspeakably awful club of those who lost parents, siblings and children that icy night, wearing photos of their loved ones on lanyards around their necks so that each government official who walked by couldn’t ignore them.

They wiped away tears hearing some of Sam’s final words from the air traffic control recording played during an animated recreation of the crash.

“Please know that your loved ones are why we fight so hard for safety. They are why we are meeting here today,” National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy told the families before days of hearings scrutinizing officials about all the ways it seems the crash could have been prevented.

But some time after that January night, Sheri and Tim made a decision to let the tragedy change their lives in more ways than the obvious one.

Credit: The Lilley Family

Credit: The Lilley Family

They decided they wanted a front-row seat to the closed-door conversations in D.C. about how to fix the systems that failed to protect Sam and his three fellow crew members, 60 passengers, as well as three soldiers on the helicopter — including one who graduated from high school in Gwinnett County.

They’ve made near monthly trips to the Capitol to meet with lawmakers and staff, attended hearings and done dozens of interviews in what has become a strategic campaign to have a voice.

They want to be taken seriously, to be heard.

And so, during hearing breaks, they readily faced TV cameras and radio microphones, interpreted testimony for journalists, demanded accountability.

In the aisles they would turn from a hug with a fellow grieving family member to huddle with an NTSB board member or Army colonel.

Why did the Army allow helicopter pilots to rely just on their eyes to “see and avoid” planes? Why didn’t the pilots have “heads up displays” on their night vision goggles to allow them to quickly recognize they were too high?

Why didn’t the Federal Aviation Administration listen when tower controllers at Reagan, also called DCA, years ago flagged concerns about helicopter traffic?

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

“I don’t know any other way to deal with my son’s passing than to make some sense of it,” Tim told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“This is not something brave we’re doing. This is something that we do because we don’t know what else to do. We’re led to do it.”

Others who lost loved ones that night have also taken up the cause of aviation safety. The “Families of Flight 5342″ have banded together to push improvements.

But Tim and Sheri have realized that in some terrible, fateful way, they were made for this new mission.

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

‘A calling on our lives’

In the NTSB auditorium, Tim Lilley is a member of another club, too.

He is a commercial pilot who has flown the same type of jet Sam was copiloting that night.

He is also, eerily, a 20-year Army veteran who flew the same kind of Black Hawk helicopters along the very same Potomac River route the three Army aviators were flying when they crashed into Sam’s plane.

He even once landed a private jet on the same DCA runway that Sam was heading toward.

There wasn’t much during the three days of jargon-heavy testimony he didn’t understand.

In another way, Sheri — Sam’s “bonus mom” — was prepared for this mission, too, with decades of experience in information technology, including 15 years in aviation at Savannah-based Gulfstream.

It left her naturally able to dig into the back-office details of the nation’s air traffic control and aviation data systems that are key to understanding what went wrong in January.

And cutting her teeth giving management consulting presentations in her 20s gave her the skills to speak about it to reporters.

“We feel like this is a calling on our lives,” Sheri said. “Why would we have this unique combination of experience and not use it?”

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

‘Uncanny’

But all that wasn’t immediately clear in the fog of shock on Jan. 29.

That night Sheri, Tim and Sam’s fiancee ended up on a frantic three-way call as they realized Sam wasn’t answering his phone; that his was the only nonstop flight between Wichita and D.C. that day.

Tim got in a car to drive to D.C. from a work trip. His employer, Flexjet, sent a jet to Savannah the next morning to pick up Sheri; Sam’s mother, Dannah; and his brother Joshua.

Tim posted on Facebook about it.

“I was so proud when Sam became a pilot,” he wrote. “Now it hurts so bad I can’t even cry myself to sleep.”

That afternoon, the day after the crash, they attended the first NTSB briefing for the families.

It was a room full of new orphans and widows, Tim recalled, listening to unthinkable details from the fire chief about body parts strewn across the river ice.

Everyone was in shock. But Tim immediately had theories about what went wrong.

He had the helicopter route maps on his iPad — pointing out that the Black Hawk wasn’t supposed to be flying that high.

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

Tim appeared in his first national TV interview ever the next day.

NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo quickly called out the “uncanny coincidence” of Tim’s flying experience.

Cuomo toggled between asking “Dad Tim” about Sam and asking “Pilot Tim” what he thought had happened.

It’s a toggle Tim has been unable to shut off since.

“If they were wearing (night vision goggles), I have seen this before where it’s almost impossible to see an aircraft when it’s backlit by the city,” Tim surmised. “I’m guessing that might be what happened.”

The final NTSB report and recommendations aren’t set to publish until early next year.

But as testimony in the hearings would confirm, night vision goggles narrow one’s field of vision dramatically. The lights of Washington at low altitude along the river can make it difficult to discern other aircraft, Army officials said.

And while the helicopter pilots told the controller they had Sam’s plane in sight, less than 30 seconds later they crashed into it.

Before tearfully asking to end that first TV interview, Tim said presciently, “I don’t want to blame anybody, but I would like to know exactly what happened. And I just want to find a way to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Nobody else should have to go through this.”

When he signed off, he had 300 more media requests on his phone.

Credit: The Lilley Family

Credit: The Lilley Family

‘A whole lot of living’

Unlike many pilots who harbored childhood dreams of flying, Sam, who grew up in the Savannah area, made a sudden pivot into it in his 20s.

Everyone was pretty surprised, including his pilot father.

Sam had been working in Atlanta in beer merchandising, building American flags out of beer boxes in grocery stores, as Sheri put it.

When Sam told his dad he wanted to fly instead, Tim tried to warn him: “It’s going to be a big expense. It’s going to be difficult. You can lose your medical; you can get furloughed.”

But after Sam’s introductory flight, Tim said, “it clicked with him.”

Within a few years he jumped from zero flight hours to working at an airline. He was about to make captain at PSA, a Charlotte-based American Airlines subsidiary.

Sam’s mother, Dannah Lilley, told the AJC she had lunch with him before his Georgia Southern graduation.

“He said to me, ‘Mama, I can’t sit behind a desk. I want to see the Northern Lights and help save the coral reefs and see the world.’”

Dannah recalled being “more than a little surprised, and I think (I) said something like, ‘It would have (been) nice if you had this epiphany before all the student loans.’”

But with his new career and flight benefits, see the world Sam did. He dreamed of flying a Boeing 777 between Asia and Europe, Tim said.

Sam went to Iceland to see the Northern Lights. To Japan. To Spain. He got engaged in Ireland.

“If he had more than four or five days in a row off, he was going to take a flight somewhere and see something,” Tim said.

As his mother, Dannah, put it, “Sam put a whole lot of living in 28 years.”

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

‘We want to go to the Hill’

The day after the crash, Amy Key Camp — a Bluffton, South Carolina, public relations veteran — texted her friend Sheri Lilley with her condolences. And she put her phone down.

But then, as Camp tells it, “I felt as if God had taken my Bible out of the nightstand, smacked me over the head, and said, ‘No, ma’am. You have expertise to help this family.’”

So she texted Sheri again adding: No pressure, but if they were overwhelmed with media, Camp would be happy volunteer her services.

Sheri responded gratefully. Two days after the crash, Camp began drafting a statement for the family.

But the same evening, Sheri texted again: “We want to go to the Hill. Can you get us meetings with Senators (Ted) Cruz, (Maria) Cantwell and (Tammy) Duckworth?”

Neither Sheri nor Tim had lobbied on Capitol Hill for anything, ever.

Camp reached out to an old friend who had just started a D.C. government relations business, Aleix Jarvis. “You tell me what they need, and I’m on board to volunteer with you,” he replied.

By that Tuesday, less than a week after the collision, they had their first round of many lawmaker meetings, demanding answers and reforms.

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

Several policymakers — that day and since — canceled appointments to spend more time with the Lilleys.

One was Cantwell, D-Wash., who said in a statement that Tim’s “invaluable insights into the systemic failures that led to this tragedy have been instrumental in shaping meaningful aviation safety reforms.”

“A lot of politicians want to hug the victim. But the Lilleys have never acted like victims,” Jarvis said.

“They’ve turned that pain into advocacy, and they are making a difference.”

The Lilleys and their unpaid team took a brief pause to get through Sam’s funeral in Savannah.

But pretty soon Camp and Jarvis got another text: “Who are we meeting with next?”

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

‘This is the way he is grieving’

To Lydia Coles, Sam’s fiancee, Tim’s new role as national aviation safety expert makes perfect sense. He already was one.

“He’s one of the biggest reasons why Sam was a fantastic pilot,” she said.

While Tim wasn’t his son’s instructor, he constantly quizzed Sam about standards and procedures, even over dinner at a Mexican restaurant.

“Sam hated it. But you know what? He made it to where (Sam) really knew his stuff,” she said.

And that’s why, Lydia thinks, Tim innately weaved analysis into his earliest conversations and interviews.

Though at first no one understood how or why he was doing it, she said. Not even Sheri.

But, as Lydia recalls saying: “This is the way he is grieving. We have to let him do it the way that he knows how.”

Sheri is now right there with him, doing solo interviews, attending events Tim can’t make — and serving as the team’s wordsmith.

“She knows how to make people listen to her,” Lydia said. And she’s helped her husband “fine tune” his message for non-aviation audiences.

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

In his dual role as veteran and grieving father, Tim has a rare perspective. He has been calling out his Army “brothers” as only a family member could.

He has been unafraid to point out what he sees as the military’s fault in the crash.

“I want them to live up to their Army core values. They haven’t treated this with honor, with integrity or respect,” Tim said.

He demanded immediate safety protocol changes, like four-man crews for Black Hawks using night vision goggles, to no avail. His dozen Freedom of Information Act Requests to the Army have been denied.

He wants accountability for those responsible for a culture that he argues tolerated laxer safety standards.

“You killed 67 people,” Tim told Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll at a family-only briefing in late July, the day before the NTSB hearings.

The two-hour meeting was the first time that they’d heard anything close to an apology from the military, the Lilleys said.

Before his NTSB testimony, Army Col. Andrew DeForest, commander of the Army Aviation Brigade at Davison Army Airfield, turned to the families in the audience: “This is something we think about every day. And your memory of the loved ones we lost are forever in my heart.”

Credit: The Lilley Family

Credit: The Lilley Family

‘You can’t ask for everything at once’

There were many systems that failed that January night. The Lilleys have been pushing for progress strategically.

“You can’t ask for everything at once,” Tim said. “We’ve been prioritizing … and then we say, ‘OK, this is our next ask.’”

There were 85 near-collisions in DCA airspace in the three years before the crash.

The NTSB first recommended the kind of aircraft tracking technology that could have allowed Sam’s plane and the helicopter to spot each other 20 years ago.

New military and civil requirements for that technology, known as “ADS-B,” are in the three bills recently introduced with the Lilleys’ backing.

Without it, Sam’s plane and the helicopter were left to rely on one air traffic controller — who was managing plane and helicopter movements simultaneously.

Controllers in D.C. had warned about the risks of helicopter traffic years prior, but the warning went nowhere because of a bureaucratic technicality, testimony seemed to show last month.

A hotline between the Pentagon’s Army heliport and the D.C. tower had been broken since 2022.

To fix these shortfalls, the Lilleys have joined Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s multibillion-dollar effort to replace the country’s aged air traffic control system.

“The tone and tenor in which they engage has been remarkable and therefore effective,” Duffy told the AJC of the Lilleys. “I don’t know how they do it.”

After the hearings, the Lilleys’ focus has expanded to include accountability at the FAA.

They had six agenda items ready for a follow-up meeting between the families and the agency’s administrator last week.

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

‘A forever thing’

The family talks about the investigation and reform efforts every day, Lydia said.

“But I think that that’s a good thing,” she said. “However much it does consume our lives, we’re thinking about Sam.”

For Tiffany, it’s about speaking for Sam. “He can’t speak. And so, we’re his voice,” she said. “As his big sister, that’s part of my job.”

Credit: The Lilley Family

Credit: The Lilley Family

Reckoning with the crash also is part of the healing process, Sheri said.

Along the way, they are trying to protect the adventurous, hilarious, joyful way in which Sam lived — from the cold, technical analysis of the way he died.

Sam who had striking blue eyes and a lot of best friends; who loved scuba diving, mojitos, animals and oyster shooters.

Between questions about aviation regulations, there’s a smile when Sheri recalls the time Sam bragged to an Uber driver about flying a bigger plane than his dad.

A chuckle about the mess from childhood Sam’s first baby powder fight with his stepbrother Patrick, or about prankster Sam instigating a skirmish between his dog and his sister’s cat to get a laugh.

“If he could make you laugh, he had succeeded for the day,” Tiffany said.

Sam was “perpetually happy, almost from birth,” his mother, Dannah, put it. “This world is a much dimmer place without him.”

Then comes the gut wrench of Lydia talking about their unfinished fall honeymoon plans — perhaps to Oktoberfest in Germany.

There’s the pang when Tim and Sheri reach to call Sam and tell him about the latest D.C. meeting.

Dannah still carries one of his old Hot Wheels toys she found under his childhood bed the night of the crash.

Like the grief, the Lilleys have come to accept that their new mission for safer skies also has “no real finish line.”

This is “a forever thing,” Lydia said.

Credit: For the AJC

Credit: For the AJC

They’ve basically taken on second full-time jobs, Sheri explains. At night, she spends hours combing through Google alerts and aviation databases.

After the FAA meeting will come another with the Army this fall. The Lilleys are pushing for bipartisan compromise on a Senate reform package; they’re looking for a House sponsor.

Tim is still more comfortable in a cockpit than speaking at a podium, but he’s learning to stop clicking pens while on camera.

Camp sees a future for him as an aviation safety authority quoted in articles and at conferences. He wants to give safety presentations at the Army someday.

Lydia thinks Sam would be “extremely honored” by it all. He’d be doing the same if it had been another plane, everyone agrees.

Some of his closest pilot friends are still flying in and out of DCA every day.