Weston family killed in N.Y. plane crash laid to rest in funeral service
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The crash is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The cause of the crash has not been determined. NTSB officials said
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NTSB officials said the pilot 'reported a missed approach' and asked air traffic control for a new approach plan. Traffic controllers reached out to the pilot three additional times to relay a low altitude alert, but there was no response, officials said. No distress call was made from the plane.
Michael Groff
was certified to pilot commercial aircraft as well as private aircraft, according to Federal Aviation Administration records. Groff's family said flying was his longtime passion, learning from his father when he was 16.
Groff and Saini were longtime surgeons in Boston. Groff was a top neuroscientist at Mass General Brigham until last summer when he took over as the executive medical director of neurosciences at
Their children, Karenna and Jared, were accomplished student-athletes embarking on their careers.
Karenna Groff was a four-year starter for MIT's soccer team and in 2022 was named NCAA Woman of the Year. While studying at MIT, she worked with Dr. Mustafa Sahin at Boston Children's Hospital, searching for a genetic understanding — and possible cures — for epilepsy. Groff followed her academic successes at MIT with admission to New York University Medical School's highly selective program for accelerated study in neuroscience.
Jared Groff graduated from Swarthmore College in 2022, where he was a member of the basketball team and helped squads that won a Centennial Conference championship and reached the NCAA Division III National Championship game for the first time in program history. Before college, Groff was a 1,000-point scorer in his basketball career at Weston High School. Groff was working as a paralegal in New York and was preparing to enter law school next fall.
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The family's youngest daughter, Anika, who was not on the plane, is set to graduate high school this year.
Jared Groff and Alexia Couyutas Duarte were both graduates of Swarthmore College.
Couyutas Duarte Family
Alexia Couyutas Duarte, Jared Groff's partner, also graduated from Swarthmore and planned to attend Harvard Law School this fall. Couyutas Duarte began her career as a legal intake specialist at the Rian Immigrant Center in Boston and most recently worked as a paralegal in the pro bono initiative unit at MetroWest Legal Services in Framingham, Swarthmore officials said.
James Santoro, Karenna Groff's boyfriend, was also a recent MIT graduate, earning a bachelor's degree in finance in 2022 and playing lacrosse. They met when they were MIT freshmen, and Santoro planned to propose to Groff this summer, according to his father, John Santoro. Santoro grew up in Tewksbury, N.J.
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Boston Globe
18 hours ago
- Boston Globe
NTSB hearings will focus on fatal Army helicopter-passenger jet crash. Here's what to know.
NTSB officials have already said the FAA failed to recognize a concerning pattern after there were 85 near misses in Washington airspace in just three years. The FAA has since banned some helicopter routes to make sure helicopters and planes no longer share the same airspace, but there have still been additional near misses in recent months. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Investigators have also said that the Army helicopter may have had inaccurate altitude readings, and the crew may not have heard key instructions from air traffic controllers. Advertisement Meanwhile, federal officials have raised concerns over the nation's overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system. During January's mid-air crash above Washington, one controller was handing both commercial airline and helicopter traffic at the busy airport. The hearings come at a time of heightened scrutiny of the safety of air travel amid the growing list of aircraft tragedies, mishaps and near misses in 2025. They include an Air India plane crash in June that killed at least 260 people as well as two unrelated Advertisement Here's a look at the crash, the investigation so far and other notable aircraft incidents this year. What happened? American Airlines Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, was carrying 60 passengers and four crew members as it approached to land on a clear night at Ronald Reagan National Airport. Nearby, the Army Black Hawk, with three soldiers on board, was practicing emergency evacuation routes that would be used to ferry out key government officials in an emergency. Investigators have said the helicopter crew was wearing night-vision goggles that would have limited their peripheral vision. A few minutes before the twin-engine jet was to land, air traffic controllers asked if it could use a shorter runway. The pilots agreed, and flight-tracking sites show the plane turned to adjust its approach. The FAA has since permanently banned that particular helicopter route when planes are using that runway. Shortly before the collision, a controller got an alert saying the plane and Black Hawk were converging and asked the helicopter if it had the jet in sight. The military pilot said yes and asked for 'visual separation' with the jet for a second time, allowing it to fly closer than if the pilots couldn't see the plane. Controllers approved the request roughly 20 seconds before the collision. The NTSB has said there were 85 dangerous close calls between planes and helicopters near Reagan National in the three years before the crash, and collision alarms had been ordering pilots to take evasive action at least once a month since 2011. Advertisement The investigation NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy told reporters in February that the Black Hawk's cockpit recorder suggested an incomplete radio transmission may have left the crew unable to hear air traffic control tell them, just before the crash, to move behind the jet. She said the crew was unable to hear the words 'pass behind the' because its microphone key was pressed. The radio altitude of the helicopter was 278 feet at the time, which would put it above its 200-foot limit for that location. Cockpit conversations a few minutes before the crash indicate that the crew may not have had accurate altitude readings, with the helicopter's pilot calling out that they were at 300 feet but the instructor pilot saying 400 feet, Homendy said. That generation of Black Hawks typically has two types of altimeters: one relying on barometric pressure and the other on radio frequency signals bounced off the ground. Helicopter pilots typically rely on barometric readings while flying, but the helicopter's black box captures its radio altitude. Almost immediately after the crash, President Trump faulted the helicopter for flying too high. He also blamed federal diversity and inclusion efforts, particularly regarding air traffic controllers. When pressed by reporters, the president could not back up those claims. A few days later, he blamed an 'obsolete' air traffic control system. January's crash prompted the Federal Aviation Administration in March to announce that helicopters would be permanently restricted from flying on the same route where the collision occurred. However, concerns over Washington's airspace have persisted. On May 1, military air traffic controllers lost contact with an Army helicopter for about 20 seconds as it neared the Pentagon on a flight that caused two commercial jets to abort their landings. After that incident, the Army paused all flights into and out of the Pentagon as it works with the FAA to address safety issues. Advertisement The victims The Army identified the Black Hawk crew as Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, 28, of Durham, North Carolina; Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O'Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Georgia; and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Maryland. O'Hara was the crew chief, and Eaves and Lobach were pilots. Among the jet's passengers were several members of the Skating Club of Boston who were returning from a development camp for elite junior skaters that followed the 2025 US Figure Skating Championships in Wichita. A figure skating tribute event in Washington Others included a group of hunters returning from a guided trip in Kansas; four members of a steamfitters' union in suburban Maryland; nine students and parents from schools in Fairfax County, Virginia; and two Chinese nationals. What about other crashes this year? Besides the midair collision above Washington, a string of other recent crashes have brought attention to air travel, which remains overwhelmingly safe. The crashes include: On Jan. 31 a medical transport jet crashed into a Philadelphia neighborhood, killing seven. On Feb. 6 a small commuter aircraft went down off western Alaska, killing 10. On Feb. 17, a Delta plane crashed and flipped over upon landing in Toronto but everyone survived. Two small planes collided in midair in Arizona on Feb. 19, killing two people. On April 10, a New York City sightseeing helicopter broke apart in midair and crashed upside-down into the Hudson River, killing the pilot and a family of five Spanish tourists. Advertisement On April 11, three people were killed and one was injured when a small plane crashed in Boca Raton, Florida. The crash of the Air India passenger plane in June occurred in the northwestern city of Ahmedabad, killing more than 240 people bound for London and others on the ground, officials said. A single passenger survived. The same month, a small plane crashed off the San Diego coast shortly after takeoff, killing all six people on board. July included at least three fatal plane crashes. Two student pilots died when their single-engine planes crashed in midair south of Steinbach, in the Canadian province of Manitoba. A small plane crashed shortly after taking off from London Southend Airport, killing four people. A North Carolina family of four, including two school-age children, died when their small plane crashed as they flew back from Florida.
Washington Post
19 hours ago
- Washington Post
Hearings will dig into unanswered questions in deadly D.C. plane crash
Army and Federal Aviation Administration officials are expected to face tough questions this week over their management of the crowded skies around Washington's Reagan National Airport, as safety investigators hold public hearings about January's deadly midair collision that killed 67 people. For three days starting Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board will grill witnesses and release thousands of pages of documents as it strives to answer crucial questions about the cause of the nation's first fatal commercial airline crash in more than 15 years. The Jan. 29 collision — between an American Airlines regional jet arriving from Wichita and an Army Black Hawk helicopter on a training mission — killed 64 passengers and crew on the airliner and all three crew members aboard the helicopter. The helicopter was flying on a dedicated helicopter route that follows the Potomac River and passes beneath a landing path for one of the runways at National. The NTSB has said it is examining why the helicopter was flying too high as it sped south over the river. Also unclear is whether its crew mistook another airliner in the night sky for the American Airlines flight. Even under normal circumstances, there was little margin for error between the helicopter route and the landing path; a Washington Post examination found the gap was as little as 15 feet. But on the night of the crash the helicopter was flying 78 feet higher than the 200-foot altitude limit on the helicopter route, investigators have found. The hearing is a key part of the NTSB's investigation but a final determination on the causes of the crash will probably not be reached until next year. The Army has disclosed little about its own review of the accident, frustrating family members of the victims, many of whom were figure skaters returning from a development camp in Wichita. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy has previously said she was angry that the FAA had not identified the risks in the busy shared corridor, despite having evidence of the dangers available in its own records. She has also said she is seeking information about a government working group set up in the years before the crash to manage the risks of helicopters in the area. 'We never want this to happen to anybody else,' Homendy said in an interview Monday. She said she and other board members have met multiple times with family members of the victims, who will be briefed ahead of the hearings on what to expect. She added she hopes to have the investigation wrapped up by the anniversary of the accident. Aviation safety expert John Cox, who spent decades flying in and out of the airspace around National Airport as a commercial pilot, said he anticipates investigators will be training their attention most closely on what happened aboard the Black Hawk. 'I think everything will focus on the helicopter crew because the jet was pretty much where it was supposed to be,' Cox said. The first session, on Wednesday, will examine the systems on board the helicopter, including its altimeter — the device that tells pilots how high they are flying — while a second panel includes an overview of the helicopter routes. On Thursday, the NTSB reviewers will examine air traffic control procedures and training at National. On the final day, Friday, the safety board will examine safety data and safety management by government agencies. Here's what to watch for as the hearings unfold: On older Black Hawks, like the one involved in the crash, there are two main ways to determine the helicopter's altitude. The first is through a barometric altimeter, which measures altitude based on air pressure changes. The second is through the radio altimeter, which measures altitude through the time it takes for signals from the Black Hawk's antennas to hit the ground and bounce back. The barometric altimeter has to be manually adjusted by the crew before and during each flight. Former Army Black Hawk pilot Brad Bowman vividly remembers twisting the knob to set the reading as a standard part of the procedure before takeoff. Bowman flew in the 12th Aviation Battalion — the same unit involved in the crash — in the early 2000s and is acutely aware of the small margin of error in the vicinity of National Airport. 'It really, really matters,' Bowman said. The Black Hawk's altitude reading can be 'off significantly if you don't have the right setting.' If the barometric altimeter wasn't set or was set incorrectly, it would affect the altitude the crew was seeing in the cockpit. Summaries of cockpit voice recordings previously released by the NTSB indicate that moments earlier during the helicopter's southbound flight along the Potomac River, the instructor pilot said that the Black Hawk was at 400 feet, while the pilot under evaluation during the training flight said the helicopter was at 300 feet. The two crew members did not flag or discuss the altitude discrepancy, the NTSB has said. Shortly after the crash, NTSB investigators reported that the Black Hawk's radio altimeter was reporting the helicopter at 278 feet at the moment of impact, but investigators have cautioned that they found conflicting data in the flight recorder. They have not released the barometric altitude reading the pilots may have seen. The public also has not been told if the crew had the most accurate readings available on the altitude and location of the commercial jets around them. Some older Army helicopters do not have an integrated ADS-B system, which stands for 'Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast.' There are two elements to ADS-B: 'out,' which would have broadcast the Black Hawk's position, and 'in,' which could have provided the crew with real-time information on the aircraft around them. The crew was not transmitting ADSB-out because it had spent part of that night flying sensitive routes. It had checked out an ADSB-in device to have on the flight, but it was still not clear if it was using it at the time of the accident, three Army officials told The Post. Flying into National at night can be magical, with the national monuments, White House, Capitol Hill and city development lit up on either side of the Potomac River. But it can also add up to a lot of light pollution. That's not an ideal setting for night vision goggles, which the NTSB believes the crew was wearing at the time of the crash. At the time of the crash, the Army's policy was that if one of the crew was in night vision goggles, all of them had to be. The Army said that policy has not changed. The goggles amplify the light and make it brighter. In the case where there's multiple ground- or air-based sources of light, it can create a situation in which it's hard to discern between different sources of light. But most importantly, night vision goggles limit a crew's field of view, much as wearing a swimming mask can reduce your field of view. 'And field of view in aviation is everything,' Bowman said. Mark Tomicich, a former FAA attorney who worked on several high-profile aviation accident investigations, said a reconstruction of what happened in the moments before the collision will offer important information about what went wrong. While many experts have focused on the Army helicopter and its three-member crew, he said he is interested in detail about what took place in the cockpit of the regional jet, after pilots were instructed by the tower to shift course and land on Runway 33 rather than Runway 1. The regional jet had a collision warning technology known as TCAS, an automated cockpit warning system that advises about conflicts with nearby aircraft. According to the preliminary report released by the NTSB in March, about 19 seconds before the collision, the cockpit crew for the operator of the American Airlines regional jet, PSA, received a TCAS alert that should have signaled the need for heightened awareness, Tomicich said. 'In some respects, with TCAS, the PSA crew had an electronic advantage over the helicopter crew and over the controller's radar,' Tomicich said. The controller managing the helicopter's journey past the airport first alerted the Army crew to the landing jet about two minutes before the crash. The helicopter crew, at that point more than six miles from the plane, said they had the jet in sight, and the controller approved their request to continue using 'visual separation.' That means it was the pilots' responsibility to avoid the plane. The controller received a conflict alert about 20 seconds before the crash, according to the NTSB — a sign that something was amiss. Within a few seconds, the controller provided instructions to the Army pilots to 'pass behind' the jet, and they again responded that they had it in sight. Visual separation is widely used near airports, experts said, and it allows for greater volumes of traffic to navigate busy airspace. But Scott Dunham, a former NTSB investigator, said the hearing could be an opportunity to scrutinize how it is applied. While the helicopter crew reported having the jet in sight, experts have said they might have confused two aircraft, and it's impossible for controllers to know for certain whether pilots are looking at the right aircraft. Controllers could have directed the helicopter to pause while allowing the incoming jet to land. Former Army pilots who have flown those routes said they have been directed to fly ellipses about a mile north of the airport when airspace is congested. The NTSB has indicated that the controller's instruction to 'pass behind' the airliner might not have been heard from the helicopter crew because they had briefly pressed the button on their own microphone, blocking the transmission. Information that the jet was 'circling' to Runway 33 was also not audible on the helicopter. Experts said what the helicopter pilots understood should become clearer with the release of the full transcript of their conversations as logged by the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder. In March, the NTSB urgently recommended that the FAA make changes to its helicopter routes, saying the corridors near National posed an 'intolerable risk.' The FAA swiftly closed the corridors to all but emergency and other essential flights. The Post reported in February that in the decade before the crash airline pilots had received more than 100 warnings about helicopters from their collision avoidance systems — incidents that were also logged by the FAA. Controllers at the National tower had raised questions about the helicopter route past the airport, including proposing shifting it over land to the east, The Post has also reported. That would have moved it further from the landing path, but no changes were made. At a Senate hearing in March, Homendy said she had been seeking information about a Washington-area helicopter working group but had been unable to determine who served on it or obtain minutes of its meetings. If investigators have now obtained those records, they could provide vital insight into how the FAA, the Army and other agencies that fly in the area collaborated on safety. Alex Horton and Brian Perlman contributed to this report.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Too Much Moose Meat Blamed For Fatal 2023 Plane Crash That Killed Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola's Husband
While it definitely feels like it's been happening more frequently lately, commercial airline crashes are incredibly rare, especially considering how many miles they fly every year. Small, private planes, however, are a completely different story. So when former Alaska Representative Mary Peltola's husband, Eugene, crashed a Piper Super Cub in southwest Alaska back in 2023, it was tragic but also far from unheard of. Recently, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded its investigation into the crash and believes it knows why the plane crashed — it was overloaded with moose meat. According to the NTSB's final report, while on a hunting trip, Peltola attempted to fly out of a remote airstrip carrying moose meat and antlers. Unfortunately for Peltola, he loaded too much weight onto the plane, putting it 117 pounds or 6% over its maximum takeoff limit. He also had a set of antlers strapped to the right wing strut, which investigators said likely contributed to the crash. Had the plane not been overloaded, the antlers may have been less of an issue, but the combination of added weight and drag ultimately proved fatal. Wind was also reportedly a factor, with Clint Johnson, the NTSB's Alaska Region Chief, telling Alaska's KTUU, "Number one was, obviously, the overweight condition — no ifs, ands, or buts there. The parasitic drag from the antlers that were attached to the right wing, and then also the last thing would be the wind, the mechanical wind turbulence at the end of the takeoff area, which unfortunately, led to this accident. If you would have been able to take one of those items out, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. But those things all in combination led to this tragic accident." Read more: These Are The Best Engines Of All Time, According To You Allegations Of Negligence Strapping antlers to the exterior of a small plane is reportedly fairly common in Alaska, but, at least on paper, you're still required to get approval from the Federal Aviation Administration before doing so. According to the report, though, there is no evidence that Peltola's plan had been approved to do so. And while a plane's maximum takeoff weight can be the same as its maximum landing weight, that's not always the case. According to the NTSB's report, the plane likely would have still been 180 pounds over the Super Cub's landing weight, even when accounting for the fuel consumed in the air. In addition to Peltola overloading the plane, the report also states that it had undergone extensive repairs throughout its seven decades of service, and much of that work was done before the FAA updated its guidelines on repairs and restorations. The report didn't draw a conclusion one way or the other as to whether or not those repairs contributed to Peltola's crash, however, KTUU reports a lawsuit has been filed, claiming Bruce Werba and the two companies he controlled, Alaska Pike Safari's & Wilderness Adventures and Neitz Aviation, Inc., behaved negligently and caused Peltola "to fly excessive hours, to fly without adequate sleep or rest, to fly under unreasonably dangerous conditions, and to carry an external load without the required permit." The lawsuit also alleges that neither of the companies named in the suit had gotten a certificate of self-insurance from the Alaska Division of Workers' Compensation and thus deprived Peltola of the appropriate compensation. The lawsuit reportedly seeks at least $100,000 in damages, as well as a jury trial. Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox... Read the original article on Jalopnik.
