Business
Conditions May Have Stymied Black Hawk Crew Before Fatal Crash
Flying helicopters near Ronald Reagan National Airport always carries some risk. But the conditions on the moonless night of Jan. 29, when an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet collided, were unusually challenging.
Many of the factors that contributed to the disaster are still being uncovered as investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board try to reconstruct the collision that killed 67 people. The midair crash, which caused wreckage from both aircraft to tumble into the icy Potomac River below, was the nation’s deadliest aviation accident since 2009.
Investigators have said the helicopter was flying about 100 feet higher than authorized in its designated portion of the airspace and are trying to determine why.
But interviews with helicopter pilots suggest that the Black Hawk was also dealing with a set of complex flying conditions, some of which are typical for the bustling area around National Airport outside Washington and some of which were unique to the series of events that happened last Wednesday. And the crew was flying an older-model aircraft that lacked certain safety technologies in its cockpit that are commonplace in those of commercial airplanes in the United States.
“Given the complexity of everything going on there, it is a higher-risk place to fly,” said Austin Roth, a former Black Hawk instructor for the Army who says he often flew the helicopter routes near National Airport while in service.
N.T.S.B. safety investigators have not assessed any blame on the Black Hawk crew, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as “fairly experienced.”
The safety agency said on Tuesday that there was still information that needed to be collected from the helicopter, a process that is expected to begin this week when its wreckage is lifted from the Potomac. Investigators said the two aircraft collided at 300 feet — a detail that has raised questions about how the helicopter got off course, given that it was not authorized to fly higher than 200 feet above ground.
The New York Times, through interviews with six current and former military aviators and a civilian helicopter pilot who frequently flies the routes near National Airport, has pieced together some understanding of the conditions that the crew faced the night of the crash.
The crew in the UH-60 Black Hawk left its home base, Fort Belvoir in Virginia, after dark last Wednesday to conduct a training mission to allow the co-pilot, Capt. Rebecca Lobach, to perform a required annual evaluation flight.
It was part of the small group of military and civilian law enforcement helicopters authorized to fly in the highly restricted airspace over Washington and Northern Virginia. Those pilots must fly along designated routes that generally follow the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. The air traffic controllers inside the tower at National Airport manage that airspace for helicopters and planes alike.
These routes specify certain altitude restrictions for helicopters along the water, including Route 4, the one that prohibits flying higher than 200 feet over the stretch of the Potomac where the collision occurred.
That restriction, according to several of the pilots, provides little room to maneuver in case of an emergency. At such a low altitude over a river, moving up — not down — is the more realistic response.
Mr. Roth said there are helicopter routes at Dulles International Airport and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport that allow pilots to fly over the commercial jet airspace rather than through it, which gives pilots more options in the event of an emergency.
“I can’t think of anywhere where you can fly next to a major airport at 200 feet,” said Mr. Roth, who was in the same unit as the crew of the helicopter that crashed. A combination of dark skies and surrounding city lights — lights that would have been amplified exponentially if the crew members were wearing night-vision goggles — may have distracted them as they searched for nearby air traffic.
“So they’re flying over a black water surface of the Potomac with ground clutter and the buildings behind them,” said Senator Tammy Duckworth, the Illinois Democrat who flew Black Hawk helicopters during her military career.
At about 8:46 p.m. last Wednesday, an air traffic controller warned the helicopter crew that a passenger jet was nearby. That plane, American Airlines Flight 5342, had been redirected from Runway 1, which regional jets commonly used, to the lesser-used Runway 33.
Captain Lobach was most likely in the right-hand seat, said a senior Army official who has flown the National Airport helicopter routes repeatedly but requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
This is significant, the official said, because if the instructor pilot was busy or distracted with something, Captain Lobach’s seat on the right side of the aircraft might have put her in poor position to view the descending American Airlines flight on her left.
Still, other experienced military pilots said they were puzzled at the crash, given that military pilots are trained to be ready for such hazards.
The Black Hawk, a twin-engine aircraft introduced in the 1970s that has inspired a variety of models, has long been a fixture in the U.S. military, both for general purposes and for more tailored missions. In the Army alone, about 2,000 Black Hawks are in operation today.
In the Washington area, which is home to the White House, the Pentagon and several air fields from which both training flights and the transport of the president and other senior officials often originate, Black Hawks are ubiquitous.
The 12th Aviation Battalion at Fort Belvoir flies two types of Black Hawks: the UH-60L, an old model, and the VH-60M, a newer one. The aircraft involved in the crash was the older model. It does not have the ability to let pilots fly on autopilot but it is not considered insufficient for the job, according to the senior Army official.
Regardless, the official said, the crew flying along the Potomac River would not have found autopilot helpful. Low-level flying, he said, requires constant attention to terrain, obstacles and routes.
The Black Hawks, even the older models, are not especially hard to operate, said current and former military aviators. But the congestion around National Airport, one of the country’s busiest public airspaces, requires particular adeptness and a willingness to hang back if necessary to let passenger jets take off or land safely.
“That aircraft was in the wrong place well before they were in the same literal airspace with the CRJ,” said Jon-Claud Nix, a former Marine Corps helicopter pilot, using the abbreviation for the jet that was involved in the collision.
Mr. Nix, who has reviewed the air traffic control recordings and other public details of the crash, added, “They just needed to hold off a little bit to properly identify or locate their correct traffic.”
He said that in the final moments before the crash, the Black Hawk crew was essentially on its own to avoid collision. That is because the crew, according to a recording of the air traffic control audio, had requested what is known as “visual separation,” which under aviation rules means the crew would search out nearby traffic on its own, without assistance from controllers.
And the older Black Hawk model the crew flew last Wednesday most likely did not have certain air-safety systems that are standard among U.S. passenger jets.
For example, it would not have had the Traffic Collision Avoidance System, nicknamed TCAS, which alerts pilots to the fact that their planes are dangerously close to other aircraft and can redirect pilots to quickly climb or descend if a crash seems imminent.
The pilots say one or all of these factors could have contributed to a tragic sequence of events.
“Especially on that route,” Mr. Roth said, “it’s 200 feet which is a low altitude. It’s in proximity to other aircraft. The lighting conditions are tough and there’s just not many places in the world where all of that is happening to anyone all at once.”
Business
Devin Nunes Departs Trump Media After 4 Years as C.E.O.
President Trump’s social media company, which has consistently lost money and struggled with a flagging share price, announced Tuesday that it was replacing Devin Nunes as its chief executive officer.
The announcement offered no reason for the sudden departure of Mr. Nunes, a former Republican congressman from California. Mr. Trump had tapped him to run the company, Trump Media & Technology, in late 2021.
The announcement was made in a news release by the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a company board member and oversees a trust that controls his father’s 115-million-share stake in Trump Media. President Trump is not an officer or director of the company.
Mr. Nunes said in a statement on Truth Social, which is Trump Media’s flagship product, that it was an “appropriate time” for a new leader with experience in media and mergers to “steer Trump Media through its current transition phase.”
Trump Media has incurred hundreds of millions in losses, and its shares have performed poorly since the company went public by completing a merger with a cash-rich special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in March 2024. The stock, which ended its first day of trading around $58 a share, closed Tuesday at $9.82.
Shares of Trump Media trade under the symbol DJT, which are President Trump’s initials. Truth Social has emerged as the main social media platform for Mr. Trump to communicate his policy decisions and opinions to the world.
Last year, Trump Media took in $3.7 million in revenue and recorded a $712 million net loss.
In December, Trump Media announced a plan to merge with TAE Technologies, a fusion power company. The all-stock deal, which was valued at $6 billion at the time, would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies.
Trump Media said in February that it was considering spinning off its Truth Social platform in a merger with another cash-rich SPAC, Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp.
Mr. Nunes is being replaced on an interim basis by Kevin McGurn, who has been an adviser to Trump Media since the end of 2024. Mr. McGurn, a former executive at Hulu, the streaming service, was listed in a recent regulatory filing as the chief executive of Texas Ventures.
The Trump Media release announcing the management change provided no update on the merger with TAE Technologies or the proposed SPAC deal for Truth Social.
Business
Netflix plans to buy historic Radford Studio Center
Streaming entertainment giant Netflix is in negotiations to buy the historic Radford Studio Center lot in Studio City.
Netflix plans to purchase the Los Angeles studio that has been home to generations of landmark television shows, including “Gunsmoke” and “Seinfeld,” according to two people with knowledge of the pending deal who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.
The studio’s previous operator, Hackman Capital Partners, defaulted on a $1.1-billion mortgage in January. Investment bank Goldman Sachs took over the property and is in talks with Netflix to sell it for between $330 million and $400 million.
Representatives for Hackman and Netflix declined to comment on the planned sale.
Culver City-based Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management teamed up to buy the Radford Avenue property from ViacomCBS in 2021 with a winning bid of $1.85 billion, after a competitive battle for the 55-acre studio beloved by the television industry.
At the time, the staggering price tag underscored the value — and scarcity — of TV soundstages in Los Angeles as content producers scrambled for space to shoot TV shows and movies to stock their streaming services. It was one of the largest-ever real estate transactions for a TV studio complex in Los Angeles.
Since then, production has substantially declined in Southern California. L.A. continues to battle the loss of production to other states and countries, as well as the lingering effects on the industry of the pandemic and the 2023 dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. Cutbacks in spending at the major studios after a surge in streaming-fueled TV production have further damped film activity in the region.
Founded by silent film comedy legend Mack Sennett in 1928, the lot became known as “Hit City” in the decades after World War II as popular TV shows such as “Leave It to Beaver,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Will & Grace” were made there. The storied lot gave the Studio City neighborhood its name,
Netflix, which has a market cap of about $455 billion — more than double that of Walt Disney Co. — has maintained its dominance in the global streaming business with more than 325 million subscribers.
The Los Gatos-based company has production offices worldwide, including facilities in Albuquerque, Brooklyn, London, Madrid and Toronto.
Netflix had secured an $82.7-billion deal to buy Warner Bros. studios and streaming services in December, but withdrew from the bidding war in late February after Paramount Skydance offered $31 a share. As part of the switch, Netflix was paid a $2.8-billion termination fee.
Business
Kevin Warsh, Trump’s Pick to Lead Fed, Faces Senate at Tricky Moment
Kevin M. Warsh, President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve, has spent years refining his pitch for why he should get one of the most powerful economic jobs in the world.
At his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, he will have to convince Senate lawmakers that he is ready to step into the role, which has become politically explosive amid Mr. Trump’s relentless attacks on the institution and its current chair, Jerome H. Powell.
Mr. Warsh, who is scheduled to testify before the Banking Committee at 10 a.m., plans to commit to being “strictly independent” on decisions related to interest rates, according to his prepared remarks. He also plans to tell lawmakers that he is unbothered by Mr. Trump’s incessant calls for substantially lower borrowing costs. And he will use his opening statement to underscore his focus on disrupting the “status quo” at an institution he said just last year was in need of “regime change.”
“In a time that will rank among the most consequential in our nation’s history, I believe a reform-oriented Federal Reserve can make a real difference to the American people,” he plans to tell lawmakers, adding: “The stakes could scarcely be higher.”
Mr. Warsh, 56, faces significant hurdles to winning confirmation. He has broad support among Republicans, who control the Senate and can confirm him along party lines. Yet his candidacy has stalled because of an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department into Mr. Powell and his handling of the Fed’s headquarters renovations.
Mr. Powell’s term as chair ends May 15, but Mr. Warsh looks increasingly unlikely to be in place by then. That’s because Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina — a Republican on the Banking Committee who has expressed support for Mr. Warsh — has vowed to block any attempt to confirm a new Fed chair until the legal threats into Mr. Powell are resolved. For Mr. Tillis, the investigation is a blatant attempt to coerce Mr. Powell into lowering rates, undermining the Fed’s independence and confirming the politicization of the Justice Department.
“I’m not going to condone bad decision-making and bad behavior,” Mr. Tillis told reporters on Monday in reference to the Justice Department’s lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.
The department has vowed to continue its investigation, despite numerous legal setbacks.
“I think ultimately, he will be confirmed,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, another Republican on the committee, told reporters on Monday. “I just don’t know what decade.”
Mr. Warsh’s ascent would mark a homecoming for the Wall Street financier, who served as a Fed governor from 2006-11.
Since leaving the Fed, he has amassed assets worth well in excess of $100 million, according to financial disclosures submitted before his hearing. Those have drawn scrutiny because Mr. Warsh repeatedly invoked “pre-existing confidentiality agreements” to avoid disclosing the details behind several of his investments. He has said he would divest a substantial amount of his assets before taking the job.
The global financial crisis dominated Mr. Warsh’s first tenure at the Fed, thrusting him into the middle of discussions about how the central bank should respond to the threat of bank failures, turmoil in financial markets and a painful recession that followed. Mr. Warsh, then the youngest-ever member of the Board of Governors, was initially supportive of the Fed’s efforts to shore up financial markets by buying enormous quantities of government bonds and expanding its balance sheet to ease strains in financial markets and support growth by keeping market-based rates low.
But he soon soured on subsequent efforts to buy more bonds and resigned in protest. That experience has stuck with Mr. Warsh, who has made a smaller balance sheet a pillar of his plans if he takes over as chair.
Mr. Warsh would also be likely to usher in changes to how the Fed communicates its policy views, having expressed misgivings about its strategy of providing so-called forward guidance, or hints about how interest rates may change in the future to guide expectations. He has also suggested that policymakers across the Fed system should speak far less. Mr. Powell held a news conference after each rate decision, or eight a year, and delivered speeches with regularity. Mr. Trump’s pick to join the Fed last year, Stephen I. Miran, often speaks multiple times a week.
“Once policymakers reveal their economic forecast, they can become prisoners of their own words,” Mr. Warsh said in a speech last year. “Fed leaders would be well served to skip opportunities to share their latest musings. The swivel-chair problem, rhetorically waxing and waning with the latest data release, is common and counterproductive.”
What is far less clear is how much Mr. Warsh would heed the president’s demands for lower interest rates. Mr. Trump said he would not pick someone for chair who did not support lower borrowing costs.
Mr. Warsh sought in his opening statement to downplay the costs of a president’s voicing his opinions about rates, saying central bankers must be “strong enough to listen to a diversity of views from all corners, humble enough to be open-minded to new ideas and new economic developments, wise enough to translate imperfect data into meaningful insight and dedicated enough to make judgments faithfully and wisely.”
Earlier this year, many officials at the Fed saw a path to gradually lower rates as the impact of Mr. Trump’s tariffs faded and inflation restarted its slide back toward 2 percent after almost of year of stalling out. The war in Iran — and the energy shock it has unleashed — has upended those forecasts, however, prompting officials to turn wary about lowering rates.
Mr. Warsh will face questions on Tuesday about the economic impact of the war and how it has changed his thinking around the Fed’s ability to lower rates. While at the Fed, he was known as an inflation hawk who often argued against providing policy relief for fear that it could stoke price pressures. He also said the Fed should aspire to engage in rule-based policymaking that stems from formulas that prescribe how officials should set rates based on levels of inflation and employment.
While campaigning to be chair, Mr. Warsh embraced the need for rate cuts, arguing that there was a path for lower borrowing costs because of his plans to shrink the balance sheet, which would lift longer-term rates that then could be offset by lowering short-term ones. He also argued that higher productivity from the boom in artificial intelligence could unleash higher growth without stoking inflation, which could give the Fed more space to lower rates than otherwise would be the case.
In his opening statement, Mr. Warsh made clear, however, that a failure to bring down inflation, which has been stuck above the Fed’s 2 percent target for roughly five years, would strictly be the Fed’s fault, suggesting that he would shoulder the blame if he did not bring it back down during his tenure.
“Inflation is a choice, and the Fed must take responsibility for it,” he will tell lawmakers.
Megan Mineiro contributed reporting.
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