Ice chunks float in the Hudson River in front of the skyline of midtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in New York City as seen from Hoboken, New Jersey, Jan. 26, 2026. (Gary Hershorn/ABC News)
(NEW YORK) — A potential blizzard is headed to the Southeast this weekend, impacting the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee.
The storm will begin Fridayevening with snow over Appalachia, along the Tennessee/North Carolina border and western Virginia.
On Saturday, the snow is forecast to spread east into eastern Georgia and much of South Carolina, North Carolina and southern Virginia.
The storm could bring powerful winds, which may lead to blizzard conditions. Visibility could be reduced to less than a quarter-mile.
While it is still too early to predict exact snow totals, it appears that much of northern South Carolina, nearly all of North Carolina and southern Virginia will get 3 to 8 inches of snow between Friday night and Sunday morning. Some areas could even near 1 foot of snow, especially along the North Carolina coast where the heavy snow may last longer.
Along with a full moon causing naturally higher tides, large waves produced by the storm may lead to destructive beach erosion and coastal flooding, with 2 to 4 feet water inundation possible from the South Carolina coast to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to the coasts of Virginia and Maryland.
The Northeast coast may escape this storm mostly unscathed.
Those along the Interstate 95 corridor from Washington, D.C. to New York City should see little to no snow accumulation, but they will see gusty winds up to 40 mph on Sunday morning.
A few inches of snow is possible on the coasts of Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey, as well as New York’s Long Island and Massachusetts’ Cape Cod.
But if the storm moves slightly west, 3 to 6 inches of snow and blizzard conditions could strike the I-95 corridor from Connecticut to Boston to Maine.
On Friday, the the wind chill — what temperature it feels like — is forecast to hit minus 13 degrees in Minneapolis. On Saturday, the wind chill is forecast to drop to 2 degrees in Atlanta and minus 1 in New York City.
That cold is also spreading south to Florida.Record lows are possible across the Sunshine State on Sunday, including 20 degrees in Tallahassee, 23 degrees in Jacksonville and 25 in Orlando.
People protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they march toward the South Texas Family Residential Center, January 28, 2026 in Dilley, Texas. (Joel Angel Juarez/Getty Images)
(HOUSTON) — Law enforcement deployed tear gas during a clash with protesters outside a Texas detention facility on Wednesday, where a 5-year-old boy and his father are being held.
At least two protesters were detained, according to ABC News’ San Antonio affiliate KSAT.
Both U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers were on the scene during the protest, according to KSAT.
Video of the encounter showed troopers pushing back protesters as tear gas was deployed.
Ahead of the protest, community organizers said in a press release they were gathering at the facility to hold “a vigil to amplify the voices and protests of children and families held in detention against their will.”
The facility in Dilley, Texas, is located about 85 miles southwest of San Antonio.
The protest took place on the same day that Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, met with 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander, at the center.
Castro said he was able to meet with him and his father for 30 minutes in the facility’s courtroom.
The lawmaker told reporters that he was told by the father that the 5-year-old has “been depressed and has not been eating well” since being detained.
“His father said that Liam has been sleeping a lot, that he’s been asking about his family, his mom, and his classmates, and saying that he wants to go back to school.”
Castro added that there are other children at the detention center, including several under the age of five and a two-month-old baby.
The father and son were detained on Jan. 20 as part of the federal government’s ongoing immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
Images from the young boy’s detainment garnered international attention when he was apprehended by immigration officials shortly after arriving home from preschool while his father was in their driveway, school officials said last week.
The Department of Homeland Security said at the time that “ICE conducted a targeted operation to arrest Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, an illegal alien from Ecuador who was RELEASED into the U.S. by the Biden administration.”
“As agents approached the driver, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, fled on foot — abandoning his child. For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias.”
DHS’ account differed from what the family’s attorney and school officials said occurred.
“Another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let them take care of the small child, but was refused,” officials from Conejo Ramos’ school said.
A federal judge in Texas on Monday temporarily blocked the removal of Alexander and Ramos, saying that the father and son cannot be removed from the district in Texas pending the habeas case challenging their detention.
At the time of their detention, they had a pending asylum case but no order of deportation directing that they be removed from the United States.
Luigi Mangione appears for a suppression of evidence hearing in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan Criminal Court on December 18, 2025 in New York City. (Curtis Means-Pool/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Luigi Mangione should stand trial in State Supreme Court in New York starting July 1, at least three months ahead of when the accused killer could stand trial in federal court, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a letter Wednesday.
Mangione has pleaded not guilty to state and federal charges stemming from the assassination-style killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan in December 2024.
Federal judge Margaret Garnett said Mangione would stand trial in October if she eliminates the death penalty as a possible sentence, as the defense has sought. Otherwise, she said at a hearing last week, Mangione would stand trial in January. Either way, she set jury selection for Sept. 8.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office said there are “significant state interests” in putting Mangione on trial sooner.
“This heinous crime happened in midtown Manhattan, one of the busiest commercial areas in this County and spread fear and shock throughout Manhattan. New York State unquestionably has a deep interest in, upholding the fundamental right to life, maintaining public order, and delivering justice for a murder committed in its jurisdiction,” assistant district attorney Joel Seidemann wrote.
“Federal law supports our request that we proceed first and our right to a speedy resolution of this case would be severely compromised should the federal trial proceed first,” he said.
Judge Gregory Carro, the judge for the state case, is weighing a defense request to suppress evidence pulled from Mangione’s backpack, including the alleged murder weapon, a notebook and writings. After a three-week hearing, the judge said he would accept written submissions by March and issue a ruling in May.
The district attorney’s office told Carro the case is otherwise ready for trial.
“It is entirely natural then that the state case would proceed to trial prior to the federal case,” Seidemann’s letter said. “And, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York has said that it expects the State case to proceed to trial first.”
Mangione has been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since his return to New York from Pennsylvania, where he was arrested at an Altoona McDonald’s following a five-day manhunt.
Defense attorneys have said police waited too long to read Mangione his rights and unlawfully searched his backpack without a warrant. Prosecutors have argued the Altoona police officers were justified in searching the bag because the search pertained to a lawful arrest.
Ice chunks float in the Hudson River in front of the skyline of midtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in New York City as seen from Hoboken, New Jersey, Jan. 26, 2026. (Gary Hershorn/ABC News)
The details are not yet clear, but here is what the forecast shows so far:
On Friday afternoon and night, a low-pressure system may bring snow to parts of Tennessee and Kentucky.
On Saturday, snow is expected from Georgia to Maryland. Snow totals are not yet clear, but everyone along the coast from Atlanta to Baltimore should be prepared for heavy snow.
Major travel impacts are possible on Saturday at Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina.
Strong, potentially damaging winds are also possible in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.
On Sunday, the storm could take two paths.
If it heads out to sea, Sunday will be mostly dry for the East Coast, though gusty winds and coastal erosion will still be possible.
If the system hugs the coast, a nor’easter will bring snow to coastal areas of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. The snow would hit most of Sunday and end overnight into Monday.
(NEW YORK) — Murat Mayor has no need for an associate’s degree. The 58-year-old business analyst already has a Ph.D. But when he and his son, a high school senior, attempted last fall to apply for federal student financial aid, they learned that an account associated with both of their identities already existed.
Those accounts showed applications to multiple community colleges — and much more.
“We noticed that there [was] a lot of activity” on accounts created in their names, Mayor said in an interview with ABC News. “There are a lot of applications, loan applications, grant applications … then we panicked.”
Mayor knew immediately that something was amiss. He assumed his identity had been stolen. But he had no concept of the breadth of the scheme that had ensnared his and his son’s identity, and he had certainly never heard of the army of digital fraudsters perpetrating the crime.
‘A huge issue’ They are known as “ghost students,” and for thousands of colleges across the country, these sophisticated thieves have a become a scourge. The scammers will use stolen or fake identities to enroll in classes online and sign up for Pell grants and loans, then disappear once they get the money — robbing the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving an untold number of victims like Mayor and his son in their wake.
“It’s a huge issue,” said Jason Williams, the assistant inspector general for investigations at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General. “As they’re stealing identities … these loans are not being repaid. They’re being assigned to people [who] don’t even know they have a debt with U.S. Department of Education … [until] the Internal Revenue Service says you owe the Department of Education money.”
Fraudsters have attempted to steal student financial aid for decades, Williams said. But “when the pandemic [hit], everybody went to online learning. Well, by doing that, it really did open the door” for more widespread fraud, said Williams.
Scammers have realized that the move to remote learning at community colleges provides an opportunity to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to expand their reach and circumvent identity verification controls. Almost overnight, experts said, the fraud grew exponentially.
Over the past five years, the federal government has investigated more than $350 million in fraud perpetrated by “ghost student” schemes, Williams said. “And that’s only in the universe of what we know, and what we have adjudicated,” he added. “There’s a lot of stuff that we don’t know that’s out there.”
Williams said his office has more than 200 investigations open nationwide, with some schemes suspected of racking up more than a billion dollars in ill-gotten gains.
Open season on open enrollment The federal government is on the hook for tuition aid lost to scammers. But it is the community colleges, which accept almost all applicants through open enrollment, that often carry the burden of sniffing out fake applications. And doing so requires the resources, technology and expertise that many institutions do not possess.
Experts say the scope of the fraud is enormous. In California alone, nearly a third of all community college applicants in 2024 were identified as fraudulent, according to the California Community Colleges, the state’s administrative body for the community college system.
Similar figures exist across the country. ABC News and its nationwide network of owned and operated stations investigated the rise of “ghost students” and found that almost no community college has been spared.
Gina Macklin, a senior administrator at Delaware County Community College, told WPVI-TV in Philadelphia that the school found more than 500 fake students enrolled in its classes in 2023, which she described as “a terrible year” for the school, not least of which because those fraudsters “had taken seats from legitimate students.”
Dr. Beatriz Chaidez, the chancellor of the San Jose Evergreen Community College District, told KGO-TV in San Francisco that at one point, a 50-person online class was booked in minutes and had 100 individuals on its waitlist. The school later learned that just six of those “students” were real people trying to get an education.
“The rest were fraudulent accounts,” she said. “Ghost students.”
Software solutions The Trump administration last year implemented enhanced fraud controls and identity verification requirements for schools, which experts say helped schools combat fake applicants. But to help root out the fraud, many community colleges have turned to a growing marketplace of identity verification software vendors.
Maurice Simpkins, a retired NFL linebacker, operates one such business. His software is called Student Application Fraudulent Examination, or S.A.F.E.
The platform acts as a firewall for the schools, Simpkins said. “From a football term,” he likes to say, “it’s an offensive line.” He says it catches around 95% of fake applications instantaneously and refers more to the school for additional scrutiny. After just two years on the market, S.A.F.E. is in use in more than 150 schools nationwide, he said.
Administrators at more than a dozen community colleges characterized the rise of “ghost students” as a true crisis. The fraudsters, those administrators say, are taking advantage of a vulnerability created by the degree to which these schools are accessible to students.
Officials say the scammers’ schemes range from the savvy to the sloppy — and all are brazen. One school administrator at a midwestern community college who asked not to be identified shared a “business proposal” he said he received last year from an alleged scammer.
In an email, the alleged scammer, who identified themselves as “Ken from Tanzania,” offered to pay the administrator a share of the proceeds for his help in perpetrating the fraud. “I would really like us to partner and work for 3semesters [sic] and we get something good for us and our families.”
Scammers who operate from overseas present a special challenge, according to investigators. But many of the “ghost students” operate within U.S. borders.
Before their arrests in 2018 and 2019, a father and son in Arizona made off with more than $7 million from ghost student scams, and both served 12-month prison sentences after pleading guilty. And a Maryland man who used the identities of 60 people to take in more than $6.7 million in fraudulent financial aid was sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison.
Murat Mayor, the 58-year-old business analyst, believes he and his son had their identities stolen as part of a massive hack of their health care provider in 2024. After months of back-and-forth with law enforcement and administrators at community colleges in Maryland and Utah, he finally cleared himself and his son from enrollment records earlier this month.
“He’s a straight-A student, has been very successful — an honor student, so he’s doing well,” Mayor told ABC News regarding his son.
Mayor’s son has applied to study business finance in the fall. And this time, it will really be him.
(NEW YORK) — A person was shot in an incident involving U.S. Border Patrol in Arivaca, Arizona, a Pima County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson told ABC News.
The shooting occurred early Tuesday morning, the Santa Rita Fire District said. Emergency responders provided first aid at the scene and the person was taken to a hospital in unknown condition, officials said.
The FBI described the incident as “an alleged assault on a federal officer” and said “the subject was taken into custody.”
Pima County Sheriff spokesperson Angelica Carrillo said, “All we have to release at this, at this point, is that a U.S. Border Patrol agent was involved in a shooting here in Arivaca, and that the FBI Phoenix office has called the sheriff’s department to assist in this investigation.”
The sheriff’s office said it’s leading the use-of-force investigation involving the agent, at the request of the FBI.
“We ask the community to remain patient and understanding as this investigation moves forward,” the sheriff’s department said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
In this booking photo released by the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, Michael McKee is shown. (Franklin County Sheriff’s Office)
(COLUMBUS, Ohio) — The doctor who is accused of gunning down his ex-wife and her husband had allegedly told his ex “he could kill her at any time,” according to court documents.
McKee and Monique Tepe married in 2015 and divorced in 2017. According to court documents, Monique Tepe’s friends and family said Monique Tepe told them McKee “had been abusive, and had made numerous threats on her life during and after their marriage.”
One witness told detectives that Monique Tepe alleged McKee strangled her and “forced unwanted sex,” court documents said.
Another witness told detectives that “McKee had told Monique that he could kill her at any time and would find her and buy the house right next to her, that she will always be his wife,” documents said.
During the Dec. 30 homicides, McKee’s phone was left at his workplace — an Illinois hospital — and “showed no activity for approximately 17 hours,” according to court documents.
Police — who zeroed in on McKee after linking him to a car seen on surveillance video — said they also recovered video “of the same suspect” by the Tepes’ house weeks before the murders, on Dec. 6, according to court documents.
On Dec. 6, the Tepes were in Indiana at the Big Ten Championship game, and during that trip Monique Tepe allegedly told friends “she was upset about something involving her ex-husband,” according to court documents.
McKee is charged with four counts of aggravated murder and one count of aggravated burglary. His defense attorney, Diane Menashe, entered not guilty pleas to all counts on his behalf during a court appearance last week. Menashe declined to comment to ABC News on Tuesday about the new allegations revealed in the court documents, saying she doesn’t comment on pending matters.
US President Donald Trump attends the signing ceremony of the Peace Charter for Gaza as part of the 56th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 22, 2026. (Photo by Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The families of two Trinidadian nationals killed in an October airstrike are suing the U.S. government for wrongful death and extrajudicial killings.
In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, attorneys representing the families said the Oct. 14 attack was “part of an unprecedented and manifestly unlawful U.S. military campaign of lethal strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean.”
The two men — Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo — had been fishing off the Venezuelan coast and were returning to their homes in Trinidad and Tobago when the strike occurred, according to the lawsuit.
“These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification,” attorneys for the families wrote. “Thus, they were simply murders, ordered by individuals at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”
President Donald Trump said in October that “six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike” and the vessel was affiliated with an unnamed “designated terrorist organization conducting narcotrafficking.”
The lawsuit argues that because the strike did not occur within an active armed conflict, the laws of war do not apply.
“Instead, the rules under international human rights law and federal law regulate the government’s strikes,” the lawsuit states “And those rules protect the right to life and prohibit extrajudicial killings.”
The lawsuit alleges violations of the Death on the High Seas Act and the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign citizens to sue in U.S. courts over human rights violations committed abroad.
One of the victims, according to the lawsuit, 26-year-old Joseph, lived in Trinidad with his wife and three children. He frequently traveled between Trinidad and Venezuela for fishing and farm work.
According to the filing, he was fearful of the trip due to reports of U.S. military strikes in the region.
“But he was determined to return to his wife and their children as soon as possible,” the lawsuit states.
On Oct. 14, Joseph’s wife heard reports of a boat strike just off the Venezuelan coast. Because no one has heard from him since Oct. 12, the family concluded that Joseph “was a passenger on board the boat that the United States destroyed on or about October 14.”
The second victim, 41-year-old Samaroo, was a Trinidadian construction worker and fisherman, the lawsuit says. He had been working on the same farm as Joseph and planned to return home to care for his mother who was sick, according to the complaint.
“Mr. Joseph and Mr. Samaroo were two of at least 125 victims of the United States’ 36 lethal military strikes against people on boats since September 2,” the attorneys said.
The families are seeking compensatory and punitive damages.
The Pentagon told ABC News on Tuesday, “As a matter of policy, the Department does not comment on pending litigation.”
As of Jan. 27, 2026, there have been 36 total kinetic strikes with 37 go-fast boats destroyed, including 1 semi-submersible and 1 low-profile vessel; with 116 narco-terrorist deaths and 10 active searches suspended, according to U.S. Southern Command.
Oren Alexander, Tal Alexander and Alon Alexander attend Chanukah With The Stars Gala on December 10, 2014 at Harmonie Club in New York City. (Photo by J Grassi/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Three sons of wealth and privilege “were partners in crime” who used their money and status to lure women and girls with promises of trips, exclusive parties and celebrity encounters so they could sexually assault them, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday during opening statements in the trial of Alon, Oren and Tal Alexander.
“These three brothers masqueraded as party boys when really they were predators,” the prosecutor, Madison Smeyser, said. “The brothers used whatever means necessary — sometimes drugs, sometimes alcohol, sometimes brute force — to carry out their rapes.”
The former real estate titans, Oren and Tal Alexander, along with their brother, Alon Alexander, have denied sexually assaulting anyone or running a sex trafficking conspiracy, as prosecutors have charged. They sat at the defense tables with their lawyers in suits and open-collar shirts.
If convicted, Oren and Alon Alexander, 38-year-old twins, and Tal Alexander, 39, could face life in prison.
“They came from a wealthy family, and they lived a life of luxury. But their luxurious lifestyle had a dark side,” Smeyser said.
A defense attorney called the brothers successful, ambitious, arrogant young men “who liked and pursued women” so they could have as much sex as possible.
“That’s not trafficking. That’s dating. That’s hooking up,” the lawyer, Teny Geragos, said during opening statements. She said the accusers, many of whom are expected to testify under pseudonyms, are motivated by shame, regret or money.
Prosecutors told the jury of six men and six women they would see a recording of Oren Alexander’s alleged rape of a then-17-year-old who will testify under the name Amelia. She was “far from sober, almost incoherent” at the time and has no memory of what happened, Smeyser said.
At an exclusive party in Manhattan, Alon Alexander allegedly raped a woman who regained consciousness to find him standing over her naked. When she told him she did not want to have sex, prosecutors said he laughed and said she already had, before raping her again.
Prosecutors said Tal Alexander invited a woman to the Hamptons, chased her into the shower, grabbed her by the neck and sexually assaulted her from behind as the woman cried, “no, no, no.”
Jurors were told they would read the brothers’ exuberant text messages after some of the encounters. “They celebrated raping women and girls,” Smeyser said.
Other messages, she said, suggested “the defendants knew they had to stay out of a courtroom like this one,” including one text that said the only thing that could bring down the brothers is “some ho complaining.”
The defense conceded the brothers were womanizers who jurors might find immoral but insisted they were not criminals.
“It was crude, it was arrogant, it will make you cringe,” defense attorney Deanna Paul said. “But we’re not here for the Asshole Awards.”
In this U.S. Coast Guard handout, the Coast Guard investigates aircraft wreckage on the Potomac River on January 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Petty Officer 1st Class Brandon Giles/ U.S. Coast Guard via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday presented a cockpit visual simulation demonstrating what contributed to the deadly mid-air collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines jet near Washington, D.C., last year.
The simulation indicates it was very difficult for both aircraft to see each other before the January 2025 crash that occurred as the jet was landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, according to the NTSB.
The first video shows the last three minutes before the collision from the viewpoint of the right seat of the helicopter.
Around 8:46:15, a magenta circle with a label “Flight 5342” appears just above the horizon on the right side of the upper portion of the screen. The label “Flight 5342” fades out about 8:46:35. The magenta circle tracks the lights of Flight 5342 and remains visible until the airplane becomes visually recognizable about a minute later.
After a Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System warning indicated in the transcript, the local controller on the ATC recording is heard asking the pilots if they have the CRJ (Flight 5342) in sight and the pilots confirm they do. It remains unclear what they thought they had in sight. There was only one controller working both the helicopter and plane traffic, the NTSB said.
The simulation screen goes black at the moment of the collision.
The second animation shows the viewpoint of pilots from Flight 5342 as the plane approaches the runway to land. According to the cockpit voice recorder transcript shared by the NTSB, the last words about one second before the crash from both the first officer and the captain were “oh” and “ohhh ohhhh” as the animation shows the helicopter colliding with the plane.
About 90% of wreckage from both aircraft was recovered by the NTSB.
A third animationshows what the local controller from the DCA tower saw at the time of the crash as they were handling the air traffic and issuing instructions. Based on the recordings, the NTSB said Flight 5342 was not warned by the controller of the nearby helicopter at any point. A conflict alert came 26 seconds before the collision between the two aircraft as they were 1.6 miles apart, according to the NTSB.
According to the NTSB, the local tower said they were concerned about the close proximity of the helicopter and Flight 5342.
“This coupled with the conflict alert that was active at the time, the controller should have issued a safety alert, which would have included updated traffic advisory information and an alternate course of action if feasible, neither were done. In this case, had a safety alert been issued, it would have increased the situation awareness of both crews and alerted them of their closing proximity to one another. Additionally, a timely safety alert may have allowed action to be taken by one or both crews to avoid avert the collision,” NTSB investigator Brian Soper said at the hearing.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy also said that a $400 GPS device known as ADSB-In could have prevented the DCA crash. The NTSB has recommended ADSB-In be required in aircraft 17 times since 2006, but the FAA has repeatedly disregarded the recommendation, she said.
The system would have alerted the American Airlines crew 59 seconds before the crash that they were going to collide, and the helicopter crew would have been alerted 48 seconds before the crash, the NTSB chair said. The Army has since installed the system.
DCA controller overwhelmed
The controller working the night of the crash was handling both helicopter and plane traffic and had been doing so for four hours, NTSB investigators said.
A human behavior investigator said the controller’s mental awareness had diminished over time. He should have given a definitive warning of the impending collision and he should have given clear avoidance instructions, the investigator said.
NTSB investigators said the last communication between the helicopter and the controller where they asked the pilot if they have the AA5342 in sight was “not a safety alert by definition, but it was an attempt to de-conflict.”
Ninety seconds before the collision, the local controller working in the tower became overwhelmed as he was handling aircraft both on ground and in the air. On the night of the collision, the controller was working two controller positions. This is a routine practice which is usually done later at night when the aircraft volume goes down.
The NTSB said, “keeping the local control and helicopter control positions combined on the night of the accident, increased the local controller’s workload and reduced his situation awareness.”
Investigators said the controller could have asked for the positions to be decombined because of being overwhelmed, but it would have taken at least a couple of minutes before anyone else could take over. Additionally, the assistant local controller and the supervisor overseeing operations at the time could have served as an extra set of eyes to help the local controller.
However, Homendy revealed that at the time, the assistant controller was writing down information on helicopters and the supervisor did not exhibit situational awareness as they learned during the interview that the supervisor only recalled one helicopter in the area at the time when there were five.
Following the crash, the NTSB issued recommendations for better training to be provided for controllers so they can recognize safety issues and threats in the environment.
NTSB chair’s concerns
Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, Chair Homendy said she fears that some of the agency’s safety recommendations, which will be issued at the conclusion of the hearing, may once again go unimplemented.
“Of course I’m concerned. We have 300 aviation recommendations that still haven’t been implemented. Those recommendations were issued because somebody died or was injured, and they have not been implemented yet. So here we are again,” Homendy told ABC News.
“So yes, at the end of this, I am concerned that we’re going to issue recommendations and that they won’t be implemented,” Homendy said. “I can tell you, and anyone who knows me knows I vigorously advocate for the implementation of our recommendations. I don’t care when it is. Could be 50 years later, as I did with positive train control, and I will not hold back on these.”
At Tuesday’s hearing, NTSB investigators will present their investigative findings to board members and the public. NTSB board members, including Homendy, will then question investigators and the parties to the investigation.
At the end of the hearing, the board members will vote on the probable cause of the crash and the agency’s safety recommendations. The NTSB can only make recommendations and does not have the authority to enforce them, therefore they are not always adopted.
Though a formal final report will be released two weeks after the hearing, this hearing will mark the end of what Homendy described as “one of the most complex investigations” conducted by the agency, which they had aimed to conclude by the first anniversary of the mid-air collision.
Homendy told ABC News the investigation “was not easy and it was definitely not straightforward.”
“We will start in one direction and then take it in a different direction, depending on what we’re finding, and then we’ll exclude things that didn’t have anything to do with the investigation. But we have to do our due diligence to make sure that we’re tracking all of that down, all that evidence to support that it wasn’t a factor, while also looking at the issues that were,” Homendy said.
Homendy said the helicopter altimeter discrepancy is what surprised her the most in this investigation.
“The altimeters I did not see coming, that we would have some problems with how the altimeters were reading,” Homendy said.
During last year’s three-day investigative hearing, investigators said they found discrepancies in the altitude data shown on radio and barometric altimeters on Army helicopters after conducting test flights following January’s accident.
It is likely that the helicopter crew did not know their true altitude due to notoriously faulty altimeters inside this series of Black Hawks, according to the investigation. At their closest points, helicopters and planes flew within 75 feet of each other near DCA, an astonishingly close number. During the hearings, the NTSB was told Army Black Hawks can often have wrong readings and a margin of error of +-200 feet.
Another key focus of Tuesday’s hearing is the close proximity of the helicopter route to the runways at Reagan National Airport. According to the NTSB, which cited FAA surveillance data, there were over 15,000 close-proximity events between helicopters and commercial aircraft at DCA between October 2021 and December 2024.
Homendy said warnings about the close proximity were raised by people, but they were ignored.
“Years ago, that hot spot was identified and [people] repeatedly tried to say that the helicopter route needed to be moved, and nobody listened. It was like the ultimate in government bureaucracy,” Homendy said.
“They were completely ignored. Told it couldn’t be done, not responded to, said it would probably be too political. Those are quotes from our interviews, but they went nowhere.”
At last year’s hearing, FAA officials cited “bureaucratic process” as a deterrent to addressing these issues.
Other topics expected to be discussed include the approval of helicopter routes near DCA, the experience level of the air traffic controllers working in the tower at the time of the crash, the visibility study, and the testing of the barometric altimeters.
When asked what stays with her from this investigation, Homendy pointed to a personal item recovered with the wreckage.
“In the hangar, we had the Black Hawk laid out. We had the wreckage laid out for 5342 and on the side next to 5342 there were some personal effects, and a lot of people mentioned different things, but every time I passed, there was a brown teddy bear, just eight inches maybe, and it was muddy and dried mud, dried water, and I just kept looking at the teddy bear, and that’s the thing that sticks with me,” Homendy said.
