Contract for ICE tent facility in El Paso under review, DHS says

(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 killed 67 people as the jet was landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport, 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 animation shows 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.

Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, Chair Jennifer 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. 

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(NEW YORK) — The State Department announced on Wednesday that a charter flight for American citizens stuck in the Middle East was en route to the United States — days after the war with Iran left thousands of American travelers stranded as combat operations led to the closure of airspace around the region.

The department said the flight is “part of our ongoing efforts to assist Americans return home” and said additional flights will be departing from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The move comes as hundreds of thousands of Americans stranded across the Middle East are trying to leave the region, faced with canceled flights and other travel disruptions. 

Chris Elliott, a pastor from Lexington, North Carolina, told ABC News that he and his family were stranded while visiting sites in Jerusalem. He said they ended up in a bomb shelter as sirens sounded and incoming missiles were intercepted.

“We want Americans to be on American soil right now,” Elliott said.

Eliott’s daughter, Riley, said it’s been frustrating and frightening to be forced to shelter in place since the joint U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran began on Saturday.

“The scariest for me was trying to go to bed at night and then being woken up by the sounds of sirens,” Riley Elliott told ABC News.

The U.S. State Department issued an advisory on Monday, three days into the military operation, urging Americans to immediately leave 14 countries in the region via commercial flights, but stranded U.S. citizens have said that’s become extremely difficult, given the significant disruptions to air travel.

The Trump administration is facing some criticism for apparently not having a plan in place to get American citizens out of harm’s way ahead of the joint operation.

Responding to a question on Tuesday from ABC News about why so many Americans became stuck in the Middle East absent any advance warning of the attack on Iran, President Donald Trump said, “Well, because it happened all very quickly.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a Wednesday press briefing that the U.S. did communicate the danger of traveling to the region.

“There was many signs, put out by the State Department,” Leavitt said. “The secretary of state issued level four travel advisories dating back to January for many of these countries in the region,” adding that they were “advising extreme caution and do not travel alerts to Americans in the region.”

However, a review of travel advisories issued by the State Department indicates that prior to the start of the conflict, of the the 14 countries American travelers were later urged to depart, eight of them were only listed at a Level 1 or Level 2 — meaning to exercise normal precautions or increased caution.

Leavitt also claimed that since the start of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, over 17,500 Americans “have safely returned home from the Middle East, with over 8,500 American citizens returning home to the United States just yesterday alone.”

Multiple U.S. embassies in the region, including some that have been attacked, have said they are unable to help citizens trying to leave.

“Our embassies and our diplomatic facilities are under direct attack from a terroristic regime,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Tuesday in Washington.

Asked if there were plans in place to evacuate Americans before the attack took place, Rubio said, “That’s the plan we’re trying to carry out.”

“The problem is, or the challenge we are facing, is airspace closures,” Rubio said, adding that some airports were closed after being hit in strikes. “So, that’s a challenge, but rest assured, we are confident that we are going to be able to assist every American.”

Odies Turner, a private chef from South Carolina, told ABC News that he’s been stuck in his hotel in Doha, Qatar, since the military operation began. He said the unexpected experience of being in a war has left him “frustrated, anxious” and feeling helpless.

“How do you expect us to leave a country where the airspace is closed? People are really stranded here,” Turner said in a self-video recorded on Tuesday. “I really don’t know what to do. I’ve reached out to the embassy, consulate and airlines. There’s no information on when I will get back home. It’s a mess.”

American Lisa Butler said the military conflict left her and her family, who were part of a large travel group, stranded in Abu Dhabi before they were evacuated to Dubai.

“We were standing … outside of this beautiful mosque, looking up in the sky and seeing these missiles that have been intercepted,” Butler told ABC News about how she and her family learned while in Abu Dhabi that they were vulnerable to a major military conflict breaking out in the region.

Oliver Sims, an American from Texas, told ABC News that he has been stuck in Qatar.

“I was just a few minutes ago, listening to some explosions that are going off above my head,” Sims said. “And, you know, I know that officials have said use commercial means, but there are really no commercial means here for us to use. So it’s really difficult to try and figure out a way out.”

Asked to describe conditions in Qatar, Sims said that he has been awakened at night by “extremely loud explosions” that shook the windows of his hotel room.

“I looked out my window and I saw a bunch of debris that was raining down outside of my hotel window,” Sims said. “And it’s very jarring, too, because it’s not just how loud it is, just how it actually physically shakes you. The rumbling is really, really just as violent.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The world’s largest association of historians is suing the Trump administration over a recent effort to justify the president keeping his official records rather than turning them over to the National Archives.

The American Historical Association and a second organization, American Oversight, filed the suit in Washington, D.C., District Court Monday, describing the case as an attempt to “preserve the historical record that belongs to the American people, before it is forever lost.”

“This case is about the preservation of records that document our nation’s history, and whether the American people are able to access and learn from that history,” the complaint said.

Last week, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an advisory opinion that stated Trump “need not further comply” with the decades-old law governing the handover of presidential records for public preservation after a president leaves office.

American Oversight, which is a nonprofit watchdog group, and the American Historical Association, which was founded in 1884 and is comprised of more than 10,000 historians, are asking a federal judge to declare that the Presidential Records Act is constitutional and to block Trump from using the opinion to justify keeping official records for himself.

“The Administration’s actions nullifying a law duly enacted by Congress, based on a legal determination that contravenes a decision of the Supreme Court, violate the separation of powers twice over,” the complaint said.

Passed by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Presidential Records Act established that official presidential records — such as emails, phone records, and other materials created by White House staff over the course of their official duties — become public property and are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration.  

After his first term in office, Trump was accused of violating the Presidential Records Act by storing boxes of sensitive presidential records at his Mar-a-Lago estate and taking steps to thwart the government’s efforts to retrieve them.

He was indicted for allegedly retaining classified information and obstructing justice, though the case was dismissed over U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s concerns about the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith. 

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