Business

Conditions May Have Stymied Black Hawk Crew Before Fatal Crash

Published

9 months ago

February 4, 2025

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.”

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Business

Commentary: Meme stocks are still with us, offering new temptations for novice and unwary investors

Published

12 hours ago

October 31, 2025

Press Room

Commentary: Meme stocks are still with us, offering new temptations for novice and unwary investors

If you blinked you may have missed this, but the stock of Beyond Meat, the purveyor of meatless burger patties, had a spectacular run a few days ago.

The stock had surged by more than 1,400% in the four days through Oct. 22, when shares hit an intraday peak of $7.69, up from a low of 50 cents on Oct. 16.

Given that this El Segundo-based company has never had a profitable year since its 2019 initial public stock offering, the run-up was apparently triggered by the online touting of the stock by a trader named Demitri Semenikhin, and the shares have since settled back to $1.65 (in intraday trading Thursday), the action has market observers asking if “meme stocks” are back.

The answer is no — because they’ve never gone away.

I’ve been seeing signs of a ‘flight to crap’ recently.

— Market strategist Steve Sosnick

The appetite of small retail investors for what beckon as big scores in unloved stocks has remained strong since the meme stock trade attracted attention during the pandemic year 2021.

The “meme” sobriquet points to the most notable factor driving the swift run-up and rapid downfall of these stocks: They feed on momentum generated by internet touts, not sober assessments of business prospects and financial results. Indeed, the quintessential meme stock has little in the way of profits to catch the eye of serious investors.

Beyond Meat is just the latest company to enjoy sudden meme-dom, followed by an equally sudden dose of reality. In Beyond’s case, the surge came in the wake of its Oct. 13 announcement of the results of a debt swap deal that will massively dilute the stake of shareholders. Short sellers piled into the stock, setting up the momentary rebound typical of meme stocks.

Over the last few months, meme stock traders have piled into, and then out of, shares in Krispy Kreme, GoPro, Kohl’s and other companies that are disdained as underperformers by the Wall Street establishment, only to be taken up by an internet-fueled army of small investors. But those investors seldom have the resources to survive the almost inevitable snapback.

For those who may not recall the meme stock frenzy of 2020-21, here’s a trip down memory lane.

The emblematic meme stock of 2021 was GameStop, a spavined mall-based video game retailer that was struggling through the transformation of its franchise from brick-and-mortar stores to online commerce. The company had lost a combined $1.36 billion from 2018 through 2020, and its future looked bleak.

Then, as if out of nowhere, the stock got noticed by online investment promoters, who urged followers to buy GameStop shares to hurt Wall Street short sellers, who were betting that the stock would keep falling.

The shares climbed relentlessly through January 2021, soaring from a low of $12.16 in mid-December to an intraday high of about $483 on Jan. 28. It closed that day at $193.60, delivering a prompt lesson that investing in stocks based on claims touted online is a mug’s game.

All this action was the product of several confluent factors. One was the pandemic and its attendant lockdowns, which prompted people deprived of social contacts and customary entertainment pursuits to fill their empty hours day-trading stocks. Internet influencers goaded their followers into trading in concert with the goal of putting it to the Man — i.e., rich Wall Street hedge fund managers who were shorting unloved stocks and deserved to be taken down a peg.

GameStop stock wasn’t the first issue to get memed. In 2020, investors piled into Hertz, even though it had been forced to seek bankruptcy protection after the COVID-19 outbreak cratered the rental car market,. Bloomberg even declared 2020 “the year of the meme stock.” (Hertz abandoned a plan to sell new shares into the frenzy after regulators raised questions about it.)

But it was GameStop that made meme stock trading into, well, a meme. GameStop displayed all the elements that drove the meme frenzy, the Securities and Exchange Commission ultimately reported: “(1) large price moves, (2) large volume changes, (3) large short interest, (4) frequent Reddit mentions, and (4) significant coverage in the mainstream media.”

A key element of the meme market was an influx of young individual investors enthralled by get-rich-quick trading come-ons. Robinhood, an online brokerage that cut commissions to zero and enticed new customers with an app that made stock trading resemble playing a video game, disclosed that “its average customer is 31 years old and has a median account balance of $240,” the SEC reported.

One might have expected that as these factors ebbed, the meme stock frenzy would evaporate. It did, somewhat, but not nearly as much as Wall Street pros expected. Indeed, as GameStop rose, the buyers gleefully declared victory over the shorts, fueling the search for more meme-able stocks. Some investors made the theater operator AMC Entertainment a meme stock. Some joined new crazes, such as cryptocurrencies, nonfungible tokens and other assets more or less immune from the traditional investment fundamentals such as revenues and profits and business plans.

Nothing was especially new about individual stocks having a moment in the sun before falling back into obscurity, but the frenzy of early 2021 turned meme stocks into an assiduously followed investment category all its own. Financial pages and tout sheets ran wrap-ups of meme action every year. GameStop and AMC were perennial members of this club, supplemented by newcomers.

In 2022, the star was the bankruptcy-bound retailer Bed Bath & Beyond, which staged a nine-day rally that summer culminated in a one-day 40% surge Aug. 8 on extraordinary volume of 120.5 million shares. (Its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing finally arrived in April 2023.)

To define the category, market analysts generally rely on the factors mentioned by the SEC in its reference to GameStop. But not all meme stocks were similarly obscure before having their day. One that has recently landed on meme stock rosters is Tesla: “Wildly overvalued compared to rival automakers, its shareholders are betting that they can sell their holdings to a greater fool in the near future,” economist J. Bradford Delong of UC Berkeley wrote in May 2024.

Earlier this year, Yale professor Jeff Sonnenfeld polled the attendees of his most recent CEO conference on the question: “Compared to NVIDIA’s 40x P/E forward multiple and Apple’s 30x multiple, has Tesla at 160x become the biggest meme stock in modern financial market history?”

Of the 100 participants, 83 voted “yes.”

Meme investors have acquired new tools to follow and invest in meme targets. Bloomberg and UBS have developed meme stock indexes, and in October a meme stock exchange-traded fund — a mutual fund that trades like a stock — was launched by the investment house Roundhill.

One can hardly fault Roundhill’s warning of the risks of meme investing: “Meme Stocks are characterized by high trading volumes and significant price volatility, often driven by social media trends and investor interest,” it advises potential investors. “Meme Stocks often trade untethered from … fundamentals, driven instead by speculative fervor and viral momentum.”

“Volatility” is the mot juste for this ETF: Despite notching a 17% gain over four days shortly after its introduction, MEME is currently down more than 23% from its Oct. 14 peak.

Meme-stock buying is often triggered or sustained by a nugget of bull-market sentiment. The Beyond Meat narrative included its Oct. 21 announcement of a deal with Walmart that will place its products in more than 2,000 stores. But whether that’s enough to overcome the company’s evident financial headwinds remains questionable.

For Opendoor Technologies, a money-losing residential real estate broker that quintupled in price during a few weeks this summer and nearly doubled in price on a single trading day in September, the story was that lower interest rates would spur more housing transactions.

Opendoor Chairman Keith Rabois bristled at a CNBC anchor’s description of the company as a meme stock during an interview in September, arguing that investors have begun to appreciate its “potential upside.” Beyond Meat didn’t respond to my request for comment on its share price. (Opendoor was the Roundhill ETF’s largest holding when the ETF was launched; more recently, the largest holding has been Beyond Meat.)

The economic fundamentals underlying the overall stock market don’t seem to have much to do with meme stock rallies. The original craze developed when interest rates were close to zero, making stocks look attractive compared with fixed income investments; the current craze has unfolded during a period of high interest rates and economic uncertainty — though that hasn’t stopped the major stock indexes from notching record highs lately.

Small investors would be well advised to keep in mind that the meme market could be the very definition of a risky place to trade. Meme investors tend to crowd into a stock after it has already begun its rapid march upward — and sometimes when that trend is about to reverse.

GameStop hasn’t fallen back to its pre-frenzy price in the low double digits, but with its current price below $23, investors who bought at its January 2021 peak have lost about 80% of their money. (The company staged a 4-to-1 stock split in July 2022, so one must multiply its current price by four to replicate its 2021 prices.)

The smart money says that the meme trade is with us to stay. There’s just too much uninformed, misinformed and self-interested commentary washing about in the investment sphere, too easily accessed by unwary and novice investors. Most of the advice being pushed on investors today isn’t much good, and what can be gleaned from promoters on Reddit even worse. The term “buyer beware” has never been so important.

Business

Universal Music Group settles with AI music startup Udio

Published

1 day ago

October 30, 2025

Press Room

Universal Music Group settles with AI music startup Udio

Universal Music Group said Wednesday it has reached licensing agreements with artificial intelligence music startup Udio, settling a lawsuit that had accused Udio of using copyrighted music to train its AI.

Millions of users create music using Udio’s AI, which can compose original songs — including voices and instruments — from text prompts.

Udio has agreed with UMG to launch a new platform next year that is only trained on “authorized and licensed music,” and will let users customize, stream and share music.

“These new agreements with Udio demonstrate our commitment to do what’s right by our artists and songwriters, whether that means embracing new technologies, developing new business models, diversifying revenue streams or beyond,” Lucian Grainge, UMG’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

Udio declined to disclose the financial terms of the settlement and licensing agreements. UMG did not immediately return a request for comment on the terms.

Artificial intelligence has brought new opportunities as well as challenges to the entertainment industry, as AI startups have been training their models on information on the internet, which entertainment companies say infringes on their copyrighted work.

In the music industry, music businesses have accused New York City-based Udio and other AI music startups of training on copyrighted music to generate new songs that are based on popular hits without compensation or permission.

UMG, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and other music businesses sued Udio last year. In the lawsuit, Udio was accused of using hits like The Temptations’ “My Girl,” to create a similar melody called “Sunshine Melody.” UMG owns the copyright to “My Girl.”

“A comparison of one section of the Udio-generated file and ‘My Girl’ reflects a number of similarities, including a very similar melody, the same chords, and very similar backing vocals,” according to the lawsuit. “These similarities are further reflected in the side-by-side transcriptions of the musical scores for the Udio file and the original recording.”

Udio said on its website at the time that it stands by its technology and that its AI model learns from examples, similar to how students listen to music and study scores.

“The goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas — the basic building blocks of musical expression that are owned by no one,” Udio had said in a statement. “We are completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set.”

On Wednesday, Udio’s CEO and co-founder, Andrew Sanchez, said he was thrilled at the opportunity to work with UMG “to redefine how AI empowers artists and fans.”

The collaboration is the first music licensing agreement that Udio has reached with a major music label.

“This moment brings to life everything we’ve been building toward — uniting AI and the music industry in a way that truly champions artists,” Sanchez said in a statement. “Together, we’re building the technological and business landscape that will fundamentally expand what’s possible in music creation and engagement.”

Udio said that artists can opt in to the new platform and will be compensated, but declined to go into the specifics or the artists involved.

Udio, launched in 2024, was co-founded by former Google DeepMind employees. Udio’s backers include music artist will.i.am, Instagram co-founder and Anthropic’s chief product officer Mike Krieger and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Udio has had 128,000 app downloads in Apple’s App Store since it launched, according to estimates from New York-based mobile analytics firm Appfigures.

On Thursday, UMG also announced a partnership with London-based Stability AI to develop music creation tools powered by AI for artists, producers and songwriters.

Business

Disneyland Resort lays off 100 people in Anaheim

Published

2 days ago

October 29, 2025

Press Room

Disneyland Resort lays off 100 people in Anaheim

Disneyland Resort has laid off about 100 people in Anaheim, as Walt Disney Co. becomes the latest media and entertainment company to cut jobs.

The layoffs occurred Tuesday and came from multiple teams, Disney confirmed.

“With our business in a period of steady, sustained operation, we are recalibrating our organization to ensure we continue to deliver exceptional experiences for our guests, while positioning Disneyland Resort for the future,” a Disneyland spokesperson said in a statement. “As part of this, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a limited number of salaried positions.”

Disney attributed the cuts to an increase in hiring after the parks reopened once the COVID-19 pandemic waned.

Disney’s theme parks are a major economic engine for the Burbank media and entertainment giant.

Last year, the company’s experiences division — which includes its theme parks, cruise line and Aulani resort and spa in Hawaii — brought in nearly 60% of Disney’s operating income.

Earlier this month, the company announced price hikes on most of its single-day, one-park tickets.

The Disneyland Resort layoffs come as entertainment and tech companies have recently shed thousands of jobs.

On Wednesday, Paramount laid off 1,000 employees in a first round of cuts after the company’s takeover by tech scion David Ellison’s Skydance Media. Amazon, Meta, Charter Corp. and NBC News also have announced cuts.