Pod Insights Crime Weekly S3 Ep272: Crime Weekly News: Helicopter Collides with Jetliner at DC Airport About this episode On January 29, 2025, a devastating midair collision occurred over the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. An American Airlines regional jet, Flight 5342, collided with a U. S. Army Black Hawk helicopter during its final approach, resulting in the deaths of all 67 individuals aboard both aircraft. Among the victims were passengers, crew members, and soldiers, including members of the figure skating community returning from a national development camp. We're coming to CrimeCon Denver! Use our code CRIMEWEEKLY for 10% off your tickets!https://www.crimecon.com/CC25Try our coffee!! - www. CriminalCoffeeCo.comBecome a Patreon member -- > ｿ https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeeklyShop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> ｿ https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shopYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcastWebsite: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.comInstagram: @CrimeWeeklyPodTwitter: @CrimeWeeklyPodFacebook: @CrimeWeeklyPodADS:1. WildGrain.com/CrimeWeekly - Use code CRIMEWEEKLY and get $30 off your first box, plus FREE croissants!
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:14 Derrick Levasseur? Hey everyone, welcome back to Crime Weekly News. I'm Derrick Levasseur.
0:18 Stephanie Harlowe? And I'm Stephanie Harlow.
0:19 Derrick Levasseur? And we're gonna get right into it. You can tell by the thumbnail, unfortunately not here for good reasons, as we usually
0:25 Stephanie Harlowe? are not.
0:26 Derrick Levasseur? are, are not. And this is a tough one, because I think, not only when we're gonna get into like the actual passengers and some of these young children that were on this flight, it's just incredibly sad. But it's also, it comes back to all of us, because we all unfortunately have to fly. And so I think everyone can kind of see themselves in these people, because there's photos coming from the planes, and you're seeing how happy they were flying home. But for anyone who doesn't know, and I think at this point, everyone does, American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army helicopter collided in midair over Reagan Airport in Washington DC. This is an airport that I use all the time. It's one of the busiest airports you go through. And after these two aircraft collided,
1:09 Derrick Levasseur? they plunged into the Potomac River, and it killed everyone, the people on the American Airlines Flight, and on the helicopter. And this is the deadliest US air disaster since 2001. And you can see the videos. The videos are all out there. There's now more enhanced videos coming out, and you can really see exactly what happened. And I know, I was reading something this morning, where they've identified most of the bodies at this point. I don't know if they've had, if they've identified all of them, but it's pretty close to the point where divers are out there. And some of them have been transported to the hospital for hypothermia, because of how many hours they're putting in, trying to find everyone who was involved in this crash. So, this is the first
1:54 Derrick Levasseur? crash we're gonna talk about. But unfortunately, it wasn't the only one last week. There was also another crash on Friday, which we'll talk about after the break. But what were your initial thoughts on this one, Stephanie, as far as seeing it, you know, watching it unfold? I mean, with all the video cameras around there, you really, there's no speculating on what happened. You can clear it, see his day.
2:13 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah, it was, I was, it was late at night. I mean, I don't know how late it was, but I was in bed. And I was texting with a friend, and he was like, oh my God, this just happened. And then I, I kind of started, I looked it up, obviously. And you could tell it was just everything was coming in within minutes. It was like 12 minutes ago, 10 minutes ago, and they were just updating. And my first thought was imagine being on the ground waiting for your loved one to come home. And, and they were putting in the, in the news reports, the flight number. So
2:45 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah. Did you see the gentleman they were interviewing?
2:48 Stephanie Harlowe? Uh, I don't believe so.
2:49 Derrick Levasseur? There was a gentleman they're interviewing, and he's like, he's sitting there at Reagan, and they're like, hey, what are you waiting here for? He's like, yeah, my wife is on flight 5342. Here's her text messages. She's telling me she was about to land. And then the text messages just stopped. And this is literally, he doesn't know at this point. So, so he's just like, I, I think she's on that flight. I'm just hoping they're pulling her out of the water right now. Like they're, she's okay.
3:11 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah, exactly. Just imagine being on the ground waiting for, for, for somebody you love and care about to, to come home. And it's a stand, you know, we all fly all the time. People fly every day. It's a standard thing. You're just sitting at the airport or sitting at home, waiting for them to get there. And then all of a sudden, your, your feed is flooded with this news and just how, how your stomach would drop and knowing how unlikely it was that anyone would survive such a thing, still hoping beyond hope that, that the person you care about, who you've been waiting for to come home, is, is going to be coming home. And, and then they don't. So this was a regional jet. It was out of Wichita, Kansas, uh, 60 passengers, four crew.
3:49 Stephanie Harlowe? It was preparing to land at that time. And then this UH 60 Blackhawk was, which was based out of Virginia, was on a training exercise carrying three soldiers. The skies were clear. There were no issues. A few minutes before the, the American Airlines plane was scheduled to land, air traffic controllers asked flight 5342 if it could use a shorter runway. And the pilots were like, sure, fine. Controllers cleared the landing. Flight tracking sites show the plane adjusted its approach to the new runway. Less than 30 seconds before the collision, an air traffic controller asked the helicopter if it had the plane in its sight. So it asks the Blackhawk, do you have the plane in the sight? The military pilot responded, yes. And then 30 seconds later,
4:34 Stephanie Harlowe? The controller made another call to the helicopter, apparently telling the copter to wait for the, the American Airlines plane to pass. And there was no reply and then the aircrafts collided.
4:45 Derrick Levasseur? I almost wonder if they were, that the helicopter pilot, because when you look at other angles and, and obviously there's no depth perception on these videos, right? Like you don't know how far away something is from the camera lens when you're watching it. But I almost wonder, just from my angle, it looked like there was another plane as well. And I wonder if when the air traffic controller said, hey, do you have the plane in sight? This helicopter pilot was actually referring to a different plane and that they're probably, you know, potentially looking behind them and going, yep, I got it in sight, not realizing there's a plane in front of them that they're going directly towards. That's the only thing, that's the only way I can justify this.
5:21 Stephanie Harlowe? Listen, at this point, obviously there's an investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board, they are going to be investigating, they're going to use things like flight data recordings, cockpit voice recordings, the helicopter's black box, they're going to download all this information. Now, these kinds of investigations usually take a year, more sometimes. Investigators said they hope to have a preliminary report within 30 days. We don't know what happened. We know that everybody onboard died and these are, are real people who had lives and families and, and things they were coming from and things that they were going back to. Among the passengers were members of the skating club of Boston who were returning from a development camp that followed the 2025 U.S.
6:05 Stephanie Harlowe? Figure Skating Championship in Wichita. Victims included teenage figure skaters Gina Han and Spencer Lane, the teens' mothers, and then two coaches who were Russian. The victims also included a group of hunters returning from a guided trip in Kansas, nine students and parents from Fairfax County, Virginia schools, and four steam fitters, members of a steam fitters local in suburban Maryland and two Chinese nationals. The plane captain was 34-year-old Jonathan Campos. And the Army identified these soldiers on the helicopter as the pilot, who is Captain Rebecca Lobach of Durham, North Carolina, Staff Sergeant Ryan Austin O'Hara, just 28
6:45 Stephanie Harlowe? years old, of Lilliburn, Georgia, and Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Lloyd Eves, 39, of Great Mills, Maryland. O'Hara was the crew chief and Eves and Lobach were pilots. So, obviously, they started right away trying to recover.
7:03 Stephanie Harlowe? Passengers from the water.
7:05 Derrick Levasseur? Yep.
7:05 Stephanie Harlowe? Um, I remember watching the news.
7:07 Derrick Levasseur? It's cold.
7:08 Stephanie Harlowe? Very cold, but I was, I was watching the news and the, the reporter was like, well, you know, it's been warming up here the past few days. And I'm like, I don't care how much it's warming up because it's been so unbelievably freezing that that water is ice.
7:22 Derrick Levasseur? Well, like I just said, the divers are, are literally getting hyperthermia. And I don't know how true this is, but I saw one news reporter say that the water in that area is only like waist deep. I don't know if that's true or not. It doesn't seem like it would be deeper than that.
7:34 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah.
7:35 Derrick Levasseur? Based on what I saw just in the videos and photos, it feels like it'd be deeper than that. But I, I was talking to my mother about this and, and she was saying how some expert who came on and was like, oh, you know, how long would they have lasted when, you know, as far as the passengers in the plane, would they have known what was happening? And he's like, no, within like eight seconds, it would have been lights out. And I just, I just hope that was the case because when, when I look at the video, it almost looked like the most of the, the plane stayed intact. It was just kind of spinning.
8:02 Stephanie Harlowe? I agree, actually.
8:03 Derrick Levasseur? Hit the water.
8:03 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah.
8:04 Derrick Levasseur? And so I, you know, I hope now with the outcome that we have that he's right and that they weren't still alive in that water. Cause that's, that just compounds the how terrible this whole situation really is to think that they, they might've been in that water trying to get out. And because of the way the plane struck the water, they weren't able to do so.
8:24 Stephanie Harlowe? So we are filming this on Monday, the Monday after.
8:27 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah.
8:27 Stephanie Harlowe? This crash, um, as of yesterday afternoon, they said they have recovered the remains of 55 victims. So almost
8:35 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah.
8:35 Stephanie Harlowe? Everybody.
8:36 Derrick Levasseur? Getting close.
8:37 Stephanie Harlowe? Still, yeah. But they, they're obviously going to keep looking until they've recovered. You know, everybody they can, everybody hopefully. Or until, you know, they've been looking long enough where they know that, that whatever they can't find, they can't find at that point.
8:54 Derrick Levasseur? I think when they get out all the wreckage too, they, they may find more, you know, it's, they're still probably pulling things out of the water.
8:59 Stephanie Harlowe? There's a lot of wreckage getting pulled out. I saw a video, they were taking something massive. It just looked so massive and it's the plane's engine and it keeps it into perspective, you know? How small the planes look in the air, but these are massive, you know, pieces of machinery and. Obviously, right now, they're going to first focus on retrieving the mangled passenger plane before turning to the helicopter and its associated debris. And officials said the bodies of several victims remain in the aircraft and their dignified removal is top priority. So, you know, I do appreciate the efforts of these people who are out there, these search and rescue teams, law enforcement officials that are trying to bring these people home. It's not the best homecoming, but they want to bring them home so they can have burial,
9:44 Stephanie Harlowe? so they can be mourned by their families, so that their loved ones have a place to go and see them. It's going to take a while. You know, they said it'll probably take a few more days. And once the airliner and the Black Hawk are removed, they're going to be taken to a designated hangar where they're obviously going to be a part of the investigation.
10:01 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, NTSB will get them. They'll all be going, yep.
10:04 Stephanie Harlowe? And then they're going to just start, obviously, working on identifying everybody based on the manifest, the flight manifest.
10:11 Derrick Levasseur? Where they were sitting, all that stuff. I mean, listen, people are already talking, as you would expect, as far as who's to blame here? What happened? Before I even dive into that, I think what I said at the top of the show is important, which you're seeing the photos of the passengers from the plane who, right before taking off, they're taking like photos of like them traveling from Wichita back to DC. And I know I'm sitting there going, wow, I take those flights all the time. You know, I've been on the CRJ 700.
10:40 Stephanie Harlowe? All the time.
10:41 Derrick Levasseur? A thousand different times because I fly out of Providence to DC, usually in DC's a hub. And Providence is more of a smaller airport, so you usually have to fly to the hub before you go to your main destination. But I think we see ourselves in each and every one of these passengers and you realize, again, it's such a cliche comment, but like, how fragile life is and you just, you really never know. I mean, they were, they were five minutes away from landing. Five minutes.
11:04 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah, minutes away.
11:07 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, and then you think about how big the, I mean, obviously, there's a lot of traffic in the air at the around DC, but just to think about how vast of an area the sky is and just the perfect timing for this to happen. And and that's where we transition to who's at fault because when you have a tragedy like this, you want to you want to figure out what happened so you so that it doesn't happen again. And initially, people were saying, oh, you know, this could be the air traffic controller. They weren't they weren't monitoring the airs properly and they they misdirected the aircraft. And that's what happened. They showed like a basically the the radar of it. And you can see there's like a a CA warning that pops up like a flashes
11:47 Derrick Levasseur? orange or red on the screen when there's two aircraft on a similar flight path that this at a similar altitude.
11:54 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah.
11:54 Derrick Levasseur? And and it showed it. You could see CA.
11:56 Stephanie Harlowe? There's things in place to prevent this from happening, obviously. Yeah.
12:00 Derrick Levasseur? Correct. And and I think that's when you were referring to the air traffic controller saying, hey, are you seeing this plane? And they're going, Yep, I see it. That's what they're referring to. So the ATC.
12:09 Stephanie Harlowe? They saw each other. They knew that they, you know.
12:11 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, the the ATC had it covered. From what we're gathering, and I can't imagine how hard it is to fly a helicopter in general, but this was a night vision, a night operation. And it's a very difficult operation to conduct because you really you don't have a lot of peripheral vision because you're wearing night vision goggles. So they they equate it to like having two like paper towel rolls on your eyes. And that's the type of that's your that's your field of view. And now you're trying to also fly this massive helicopter that's got all this advanced technology in it. And they said, it's very difficult. It decreases your ability to see by like 40%. So they practice this so that you're prepared for in an act an actual situation. And just initially, and this could change, it does look like this
12:56 Derrick Levasseur? was a user error by the pilot of the Black Hawk. The the pilots flying the American Airlines flight were doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. They were on approach. They were landing. They were on the right path. It was the helicopter. You can see from the video, the helicopter cuts right across the flight path and and hits the hits the. The plane. So initially, that's what I'm gathering from it. And now it's kind of taken its on a life of its own, which we're not even going to address here. But then you always have the politics that come into it because initially they didn't identify the pilots of the helicopter. And now they are, and you mentioned Rebecca, and they're going into her political affiliations and who she was supporting. To me, it's just a lot of nonsense. And you and I
13:39 Derrick Levasseur? were talking about this before we hit record. And it, to me, it's like, either she was qualified enough to fly the helicopter, or she wasn't. We're going to find that out. I can guarantee you at this point, people that she was in school with and all that are probably going to come out and start saying, yeah, she was a great pilot, or she wasn't. And then we can get into that. But at the end of the day, on that Wednesday night, she, from, again, from what it looks like so far, she made an accident. I don't think it was intentional. I don't think she did this deliberately. This isn't some type of terrorist attack, at least from what I'm hearing so far. It looks like she just made a mistake, and it was a big mistake because it cost a lot of people their lives.
14:18 Stephanie Harlowe? Including hers, yeah.
14:19 Derrick Levasseur? Including her own. So I'm going to wait to hear all the facts and how they come out. And I think from what we've heard so far, it is leaning that way. But that's like you said, it could take up to a year to do this investigation.
14:30 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah.
14:30 Derrick Levasseur? I would just say, respect everybody involved because that pilot as well, her family's mourning her loss as well. And they got to hear about their daughter in this light and how she might not have, she shouldn't have been flying that helicopter. It's kind of ridiculous.
14:43 Stephanie Harlowe? Derek, you're talking about the internet. They,
14:45 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah.
14:46 Stephanie Harlowe? These, when they go nameless and faceless on the internet, nobody, I mean, not nobody, but a lot of people don't have respect and they don't, they don't care and they're not thinking.
14:54 Derrick Levasseur? They do not care.
14:55 Stephanie Harlowe? They do not care and they're not thinking about that. So, yeah. And I've even seen, I've even seen jokes made about this based on like, who the passengers were and how they could have been, you know, connected at like higher levels. And it's like, oh, now when I get on a plane, I'm going to ask who's on the plane that that might, you know, be connected or have like money and then I'm not going to, it's just absolutely, I'm already terrified of flying. You know this.
15:17 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, you are not a good flyer.
15:19 Stephanie Harlowe? Not a good flyer, already terrified.
15:21 Derrick Levasseur? I remember getting on a flight with you and I was walking by and you didn't even know I was on the same flight with you. And I just saw you leaning out, looking out the window, kind of zoned out. And I could tell like, oh, she's not doing it.
15:30 Stephanie Harlowe? My knee was probably going 100 miles an hour too, than the knee bounce thing. But yeah, I didn't see you because I was completely fixated on just, you know, praying to, I always do that before we take off. I'm like, please get me to where I'm going safely, you know, like. Especially when I'm on a trip without the kids, I'm like, get me back to my kids safely, please. This is, that's all that I want. And I, you know, so it's like, let's not, this was an accident.
15:53 Derrick Levasseur? Of course.
15:53 Stephanie Harlowe? It shouldn't have happened. It's crazy that it did because like we said, there are things in place to stop this from happening. But let them do their investigation and then if there's something that we need to speculate on, we can speculate then it's far too early to do that.
16:07 Derrick Levasseur? Let's get, let's recover everybody first. Let's reunite them with their families.
16:11 Stephanie Harlowe? Let people mourn, you know, yeah, but.
16:13 Derrick Levasseur? It's not gonna change the outcome.
16:14 Stephanie Harlowe? Let's take our first break, our only break, and then we're gonna come back and talk about another plane crash that happened.
16:20 Derrick Levasseur? Only be one this week, right?
16:21 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah, it just happened two days later and this one's incredibly sad too. So we'll be right back.
16:29 Derrick Levasseur? Alright, so we're back and this is another video that has been making the rounds. The video I saw, I don't know how many videos there are.
16:36 Stephanie Harlowe? Was it a guy walking out of his house and then behind him, there just looks like there's an explosion?
16:41 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, no, there's even a better angle where it's, there's a guy like at a Wendy's.
16:45 Stephanie Harlowe? Oh my god.
16:46 Derrick Levasseur? And he, he, you see like, you don't see the plane hit, but you see like the explosion as it's hitting and he's like, whoa. I mean, it's like, he's like, probably a couple hundred feet away from it and Uh, this one's a little different though. This one, and, and I don't know All the details on how this happened. This is another one they're gonna have to investigate, but this, it was a much smaller aircraft. There were six passengers. It was a medical jet and it crashed in the northeast Philadelphia area on Friday night. And the plane, the medical company.
17:14 Stephanie Harlowe? Residential area.
17:16 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, yeah. This was a Mexico-based company that was operating this small plane. It was a Learjet 55 aircraft. And it included a pediatric patient who had recently finished treatment at Shriners Children's Hospital. So this was a young child.
17:30 Stephanie Harlowe? 11 years old.
17:31 Derrick Levasseur? 11 years old that just went on, went through some life-saving surgery.
17:36 Stephanie Harlowe? Saving medical surgery. She's 11 years old. Valentina Guzman Murilo, along with her mother. And then obviously the other people on there were the captain, the co-captain, uh, paramedic. And, uh, yeah.
17:51 Derrick Levasseur? Doctor too, wasn't there?
17:52 Stephanie Harlowe? Hmm, yes. And, and obviously all six of these people did, um.
18:00 Stephanie Harlowe? Well, all six of these people did, did pass away as well as one person on the ground and there's many, many more injured.
18:09 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, no, the, the, the crime scene that they're having to go through is horrific. It's, it's vast. It's gonna take a while. They've kinda got it all shut down right now. This was Friday night after 6:00 PM. So you could see it's like a tr- high trafficked area. The fact that only one person on the ground was killed is an absolute miracle.
18:25 Stephanie Harlowe? So far. There's a lot of people injured going to the hospital. So obviously that, that could change.
18:30 Derrick Levasseur? Could, that number could climb.
18:31 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah.
18:31 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah. And there's another video that's further away. That's, that's like a far distance away and you see the plane and, and it takes like a, it almost looks like a comet. It, it takes a complete nosedive. So.
18:42 Stephanie Harlowe? It exactly looks like a comet. It's.
18:44 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah.
18:45 Stephanie Harlowe? That's the one I think I saw. There was a man and a woman leaving their house with their ring doorbell.
18:49 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah.
18:49 Stephanie Harlowe? Captured it and it's far away, but you can see it sort of coming down and you're like, what is that? And then all of a sudden, and just like fire flares up. And I think they said that something like 11 homes, it, it kind of got into the, the area and at least 11 homes and some businesses were significantly damaged. 22 people were injured. Five remained hospitalized following the crash. And the National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, they revealed they recovered the black box eight feet underground at the site of the impact. So now they have this, this crash over the Reagan Airport to investigate and this new crash now to investigate. And the NTSB has to be like, what the hell's going
19:31 Stephanie Harlowe? on at this point? Like, what are, what are we doing here? This is crazy. And obviously, these are completely two different planes, two different situations. You know, one is a commercial flight, one's private, a medical flight. Two, two different reasons, but still, plane crashes are not common. I, my mom has always told me, cause I've always been afraid of flying and she's like, hey, you're more likely to die in a car crash than you are in a plane crash. But what we have here, this years of events, is very stressful for everybody. And this poor little girl, 11 years old. Went to this hot, went to Shriners to get this life-saving treatment. So now things are going great, you know, we have this, this treatment that you needed.
20:17 Stephanie Harlowe? Only to die in a plane crash on the way back.
20:19 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, no, it's brutal and, and as far as the actual flight itself. They, they've given a little bit of detail on it. So the, the plane flew into Philadelphia, was on the ground for a couple hours. It took off at 6:06 PM. Okay. It climbed to 1500 feet. Before making a slight right turn and then a slight left turn, and then it began a deep descent and crashed. And the entire flight was less than one minute. And so just initially, and by all means, no expert here, but it seems like there was some type of mechanical. Failure there where as the plane was climbing. Something went wrong, maybe with one of the flaps on the wings or something where. The plane went right into the ground and it didn't really try to make any like. Life-saving measures to, to save the flight. Something happened where the pilot lost control. It seems like.
21:02 Derrick Levasseur? And, and I hear this a lot. I don't know how true it is, but they say that most. Plane crashes like this happen within the first like five minutes because it's usually during takeoff. Um, where you get up there, something goes wrong and then. That's it. Hopefully it's not something that's. Going to completely disable the plane, but in this case, that appears to be exactly what happened. So the fact, the fact that it happened within one minute tells me. When they, when they left the ground, they were already doomed. Something had already broken on that plane.
21:30 Stephanie Harlowe? But they didn't, they didn't know.
21:31 Derrick Levasseur? There's no way to know. There's no way to know. That's what's so scary about flights. I think for all of us, right? Is you're so hopeless. Like I always hear the argument, oh, you know, you're more likely to. Be injured or die in a car accident than you are a, a plane. And, and I'm like. Okay, but there's also another argument, argument to be made because in a, in a plane accident. Or if there's something that goes wrong up there, more than likely.
21:53 Stephanie Harlowe? You're not getting out. Yeah.
21:54 Derrick Levasseur? Where most at car accidents. They'll happen, but you'll still survive. There's a chance you're going to make it, especially if you're wearing your seatbelt and depending on the. The circumstances of the crash itself, but there's a, there's a likelihood that you're going to walk away from it where. If something goes wrong on this plane, you are absolutely hopeless. There's nothing you can do.
22:14 Stephanie Harlowe? You're not in control at all.
22:16 Derrick Levasseur? You're strapped into that seat. And you're there for the ride, no matter what happens. And I think that's what scares people.
22:21 Stephanie Harlowe? I, yeah, that's why I have an issue with it, putting my life. In somebody's hands, and not only just somebody's hands, but
22:28 Derrick Levasseur? The mechanics hands.
22:29 Stephanie Harlowe? The pilot, all the mechanics that have ever touched this plane, the manufacturer, like air traffic control, all of these people that you're just hoping are doing everything right.
22:40 Derrick Levasseur? Doing their job.
22:40 Stephanie Harlowe? And, and based on what I know about people, I'm not, I don't have a huge amount of confidence in anybody to do everything right all the time, which is scary, it's scary, it is scary. And that's why I usually drive when I go to CU, you know, I could hop on a flight and be in, in Boston in 45 minutes, but I'd rather take a six hour drive.
23:01 Derrick Levasseur? I love the train.
23:02 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah.
23:03 Derrick Levasseur? When I go to New York, I take the train.
23:05 Stephanie Harlowe? But obviously with this case, you, that's not what you, she's coming from Mexico, she's got to go to Shriners, there's no choice here.
23:11 Derrick Levasseur? No choice.
23:11 Stephanie Harlowe? Uh.
23:12 Derrick Levasseur? Uh, I mean, we'll see what happens with it. Like Stephanie had said at the top of the show, these two cases, it's, there'll probably be some like preliminary results where they'll come out and try to, you know, dispel any of the like the rumors that are out there, but it could take a while. I, I think we're going to find that more than likely it was user error in the first incident where the, the Blackhawk pilot just made a mistake. As far as the second incident, I, I think it's going to end up being a mechanical failure. So we'll have to wait and see.
23:39 Stephanie Harlowe? Apparently the crew, um, that was top of the line, like they, they grabbed their best people for this because it was a long and important flight.
23:47 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah. Well, our thoughts are with all the pilots, all the passengers, it just, this doesn't happen often, and yet in one weekend, we have two of them. So, uh, when you see it, people are starting to question like, oh, should I fly now? I would say overall, it's never going to make you feel good. There's nothing we're going to say that's going to make you feel great. But my mother's actually going on a flight tomorrow to DC and, uh, and I said, listen, you just, you can't stop living. You gotta get there.
24:12 Stephanie Harlowe? Is she stressed?
24:13 Derrick Levasseur? What do you think?
24:14 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah.
24:15 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah. She's like, I think I'm going to get into it.
24:17 Stephanie Harlowe? Maybe your mom's just like a badass and she's like, I'm not scared of anything, you know?
24:20 Derrick Levasseur? No, she's like, me and your dad were thinking about driving. I'm like, I mean, you do whatever you gotta do, whatever makes you feel comfortable, but I'm flying in a couple of weeks. I'm flying LA and you just gotta do it. You just gotta hope. There's a million ways you can go, you know?
24:33 Stephanie Harlowe? I know whenever, whenever I, like I've only been to Vegas twice, but whenever I fly to Vegas, I get super stressed because there's a Huge portion of this flight, they're just flying over desert. Nothing to be seen for miles and miles and miles. And you're like, man, how am I even going to be saved? You know, if, if something does happen and you manage to survive, like who's gonna even be able to know we're out here? At this point and
24:54 Derrick Levasseur? Well, I mean, you're not on a desert island.
24:56 Stephanie Harlowe? Feels like it. Feels like it.
25:00 Derrick Levasseur? Okay.
25:01 Stephanie Harlowe? Vegas is scary, man. The like, it's just like this tiny little dot. And then for like hundreds of miles around, it's just desert. And, and it's, it's scary. You feel like you get a, you know, and, and I've heard about plane crashes before, you know, I, I think it was, um, were they hikers or something or climbers and they like crashed? In, in the snow and then they, they had to, they, nobody came to save them for a long time. So, I just saw a movie about it. But anyways.
25:29 Derrick Levasseur? Talking about they, they were the Russian, were they, were they Russian or?
25:32 Stephanie Harlowe? Something. I just saw a movie and, and they basically, you know, know they couldn't be found because they had stopped transmitting the location. And you just hope that somebody's gonna fly over the right place and, and locate you. And they're sending off flares and they're writing things in the snow, but.
25:46 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, there was a movie I, I watched recently, not recently, but there was a whole entire flight of like, uh, it was all men and it was like, uh, it was like, I don't know if it was a sports team or something.
25:57 Stephanie Harlowe? I think like skiing or something. Yeah, they made a movie. I can't remember what it is, but.
26:01 Derrick Levasseur? Okay. I just, I just found the movie. We just had to cut, I had to look it up. So it's called The Society of the Snow.
26:06 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah.
26:07 Derrick Levasseur? Which is the movie that I watched and it was an entire flight. There were 72, they were out there for 72 days.
26:11 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah.
26:12 Derrick Levasseur? Um, and it was, if you haven't seen the movie, it's on Netflix.
26:15 Stephanie Harlowe? Did they have to eat each other? I, I feel like I remembered that.
26:17 Derrick Levasseur? They were eating each other.
26:18 Stephanie Harlowe? Yeah. I'm never, I never want to be put in a position where I have to decide if I'm gonna eat or be eaten. I all, that's all I'm saying. I don't, I don't want it.
26:26 Derrick Levasseur? Yeah, definitely. It's a, it's a great movie. It was a really, really good movie based on a true story too. So.
26:31 Stephanie Harlowe? Yes.
26:32 Derrick Levasseur? But I don't know how we got there, but we did.
26:34 Stephanie Harlowe? It was a very good movie, but yeah, those are the things I think about. Every time I board a plane is what I'm saying.
26:38 Derrick Levasseur? That does not surprise me.
26:39 Stephanie Harlowe? Do you not?
26:41 Derrick Levasseur? No, no, I know, I know that if the plane has a problem, at that point I just should just text my family and that's it.
26:49 Stephanie Harlowe? Well, Derek's in charge of his intrusive thoughts. I am not.
26:52 Derrick Levasseur? We're thinking about everybody involved in this and you know, I know it's going to affect some people and they may second guess their, their decision to travel. My, my thought is you gotta live your life and if it's going to happen, it's going to happen. You do the best you can to prevent those things, but in some instances, there's just nothing you can do. You just gotta go with fate and hope for the best. If it's your time, it's your time, but.
27:15 Stephanie Harlowe? Our thoughts are with the family members, the loved ones, obviously. There's a lot of people suffering. As many people that died in these two flights, there's dozens more who loved them and cared about them who are suffering right now and our thoughts are with them.
27:29 Derrick Levasseur? That's going to do it for us, guys. Uh, we're going to be back later this week with Ray Rivera, part three. This is going to be part three of four. So until then, everyone stay safe out there and we will see you soon.
27:39 Stephanie Harlowe? Bye.
Previous S3 Ep271: Rey Rivera: The Belvedere Hotel (Part 2) Next S3 Ep273: Rey Rivera: A Cryptic Letter (Part 3) Page updated November 4, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated