Not long after Staff Sgt. Ryan O’Hara was killed in a fiery crash above the Potomac River last week, his parents said they received an offer from American Airlines to fly them over the accident site.
But their pain was too raw to accept, said Gary O’Hara, his father. Besides, he and his wife, Mary, wanted to remember that route along the river, with the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument glowing in the dark, as their son had described it.
Again and again, Sergeant O’Hara, a Black Hawk helicopter crew chief, had told them that he loved flying around Washington, his father recalled: “Dad, you can see everything because we’re flying so low. You can see every detail. It’s just spectacular.”
It was on a night like that, in a moonless sky over a sparkling city on Jan. 29, that Sergeant O’Hara and the helicopter’s two pilots were killed, now forever linked by the nation’s worst aviation crash in nearly 25 years.
For reasons still being investigated, the helicopter collided with a passenger plane carrying 64 people. Everyone died, including Sergeant O’Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Ga., a new father and, according to his parents, a mechanical genius; Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves, 39, from Great Mills, Md., who had flown that route along the Potomac “probably hundreds” of times, a friend said; and Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, 28, of Durham, N.C., who had hoped to become a doctor.
President Trump has questioned how it was possible that the crew did not see the American Airlines plane, and his supporters have speculated whether the push for more women and minorities in the military might have played a role, with no evidence suggesting that. Sergeant O’Hara’s father called the collision “a terribly tragic accident” and wondered out loud why the air traffic control tower didn’t order the helicopter to stop short of the plane and just hover.
But he bristled at Captain Lobach’s critics.
“That woman had all of Ryan’s respect,” Mr. O’Hara said. “He loved flying with her.”
The two pilots and one crew chief aboard the Black Hawk were part of the 12th Aviation Battalion, a specialized group of about 24 helicopters with a classified mission: to evacuate key government officials from Washington in an emergency.
The unit also routinely ferries V.I.P.s, including lawmakers. The night of the crash, the trio had been practicing the route that it would take to transport high-ranking officials in a national crisis, a path the crew had followed often.
The crew was “stellar when it comes to aviation,” said Ryan Falcone, a retired chief warrant officer 5 who served as the senior advisory pilot for the crew’s battalion.
Their mission was “basically, is to keep the country running, even on its very worst day,” he said, adding: “They have a dangerous job, and unforgiving job, and they understood that. But it’s an important job, and they have to accomplish the mission.”
The skies the crew navigated are extremely busy, with restricted air space over government buildings, planes flying in and out of four busy airports and helicopters crisscrossing the skies.
And flying helicopters, Mr. Falcone said, is inherently dangerous. He said the battalion had a “great safety record” but suffered a fatal crash in 2017, when a tail rotor malfunction caused a Black Hawk to crash-land on a Maryland golf course.
On last week’s flight, Mr. Eaves, the most experienced of the crew, was conducting Captain Lobach’s annual proficiency evaluation. An up-and-coming officer, Captain Lobach had accrued more than 450 flight hours, her family said.
Mr. Eaves knew the aircraft and airspace well — “exactly the kind of pilot you wanted to be flying with,” said Mr. Falcone, who had flown with Mr. Eaves.
Sergeant O’Hara, he added, was “one of the smartest crew chiefs I ever flew with, who knew every part of the aircraft.”
Sergeant O’Hara’s father said his son had more than 1,000 flight hours. As crew chief, the sergeant would have sat behind the pilots, typically on the right side, watching out the side door as their third set of eyes. A trained mechanic, Sergeant O’Hara’s main role was to handle everything except flying the aircraft, including managing passengers.
The official findings of the crash investigation will not be released for months. Not that the cause matters to Gary O’Hara. No answers, he said on Tuesday through tears, will bring his son back.
Staff Sgt. Ryan O’Hara
Sergeant O’Hara, father of a 1-year-old son, had always wanted to fly Black Hawks, his parents said, but an eye impediment kept him from being a pilot. When he signed up for the Army as a high school senior, after doing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, he picked Black Hawk mechanic as his military vocation — because “it was cool, man,” his father said.
His son could take anything apart and put it back together, Mr. O’Hara said, including the computers that his father, who worked in I.T., would leave in his playroom. The boy memorized Star Wars schematics on the Millennium Falcon and Death Star.
In the Army, he turned that love on the Black Hawks, down to the right amount of torque needed to tighten every bolt.
“He could’ve been anything in life,” Mr. O’Hara said, but his son was set on the military after a group of R.O.T.C. Marines showed up at his eighth-grade graduation.
“He saw those soldiers, came home and told me, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
His parents were thrilled when he was assigned to Fort Belvoir in Virginia, twice, his father said. During the sergeant’s tour in Afghanistan, his parents were worried sick. In Washington, his father thought, their son would be safe.
Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach
Captain Lobach, who played basketball at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., before transferring to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, also saw military service as a calling, her friends said. In 2021, she graduated from flight school to realize her dream, flying an Army Black Hawk.
“She was an aviator, not a female aviator,” said Warrant Officer 1 Jasmine Johnson, a North Carolina National Guard Apache helicopter pilot who was in the R.O.T.C. with Captain Lobach. “We’re all qualified and in the seat for a reason.”
Captain Lobach was also a White House social aide, a highly selective ceremonial job that entailed helping award the Medal of Honor to service members and the Presidential Medal of Freedom to civilians, including to the designer Ralph Lauren.
In October, she told her friend Celeste Walton that she was studying for the Medical College Admission Test and helping with a research project at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — all while finishing her last two prerequisites for medical school.
Captain Lobach also had been planning her first trip to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., with a friend, First Lt. Samantha Brown. On Jan. 29, Lieutenant Brown texted to say that she had bought the tickets.
That evening, Captain Lobach’s roommate texted Lieutenant Brown to say “something terrible happened.” Lieutenant Brown frantically texted Captain Lobach. The messages would not go through.
“I had this horrible feeling it was going to be the worst,” Lieutenant Brown said. “And it was.”
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves
Mr. Eaves grew up in the tiny Brooksville, Miss., and had a wife and two children. Before becoming an Army pilot, he served in the Navy for 10 years, the military said. He was several years older than some of his classmates at Army flight school in Alabama and ended up coaching younger soldiers.
“He became the guy to look up to and learn from — a big brother,” said Aaron Aguirre, who attended flight school with Mr. Eaves. “He always carried that wisdom and experience.”
In recent years on his personal Facebook page, the pilot posted photos of flying over Washington. He also posted about Black Hawk crews that died in crashes — once in 2024, twice in 2023 — marking the crew’s insignia with a black bar through it.
To get away from the stress, Mr. Eaves bought a hobby farm in Virginia about five hours from Fort Belvoir and met a real estate agent, Keith Gore, there while shopping for the property.
Mr. Gore said the pilot would visit with his friends and family to hunt deer and turkey, work on the cabin and unwind. The day before the crash, Mr. Gore texted Mr. Eaves, and asked him if he was working nights. Back and forth, Mr. Eaves replied. Night tomorrow.
When Mr. Gore heard of the crash, he checked in: Are you OK? Just let me know you’re OK.
Mr. Gore said the men texted nearly every day, about Mr. Eaves’s pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at Liberty University, or the hot dogs the men would wager on football games. He said Mr. Eaves would always respond.
Until this time.
Soon after, Mr. Eaves’s wife, Carrie, posted a memorial insignia of a battalion nicknamed “The Wings of Freedom” as her Facebook profile picture.
This time, the unit was her husband’s.
The memorial
On Tuesday, Gary and Mary O’Hara left the house they had bought outside of Savannah, Ga., on five acres so their son and his younger sister, Taryn, might build houses on it. They were headed to Washington to attend a memorial service at Fort Belvoir for Sergeant O’Hara and his crew. Their families also were invited to go to the White House on Thursday, his father said.
On a plane to Dulles International Airport in suburban Washington, Mr. O’Hara said he could see the passenger in the row ahead of him watching a Harry Potter film. He wept.
Mr. O’Hara had a tradition of taking his children to see Harry Potter films on Thanksgiving. Watching movies together was their thing. When his son was little, they would always hold hands in the theater.
“Am I going to tear up every time I see something that reminds me of him?” Mr. O’Hara wondered. “Will every memory be a sad one?”
The last photos Sergeant O’Hara sent to his father were from a trip that he and his son, Wyatt, took to the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum, near Dulles. They went to see the space shuttle — and the helicopters.
In the past week, so many moments have reminded Mr. O’Hara of what he told his son when he joined the Army.
“I said, ‘You know, just promise I’m never going to be one of those parents that gets that knock on the door and has to see a couple of soldiers delivering a note about you,’” Mr. O’Hara said. “And he just laughed, just like, “Oh, Dad! No, no, no, no.’”
As his voice cracked, the father added, “That’s the only promise to me he never kept.”
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