[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 24 (Wednesday, February 5, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S765-S767]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HONORING THE MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS OF THE TRAGIC MID-AIR COLLISION
BETWEEN AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 5342 AND UNITED STATES ARMY AVIATION
BRIGADE PRIORITY AIR TRANSPORT 25 ON JANUARY 29, 2025
Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I appear before the U.S. Senate today to
ask for support and for adoption of a resolution honoring the memory of
67 lives that were lost in a tragic accident that occurred last week
over the Potomac River and to recognize the heroic efforts of hundreds
of first responders who supported the rescue and the recovery
operations in the aftermath.
Last Wednesday, January 29, American Airlines flight 5342 traveling
from Wichita, KS, to Washington, DC, and
[[Page S766]]
U.S. Army Aviation Brigade Priority Air Transport 25 collided over the
Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National. There were no
survivors.
This collision is the deadliest aviation incident America has
witnessed in nearly 25 years, and I am heartbroken at the loss of life
and the pain experienced by family, friends, and loved ones of the
victims.
This loss is personal. It is Kansas. This loss is personal; I have
taken this flight many times. My wife and I have taken this flight, as
have thousands of other Kansans traveling from our home State to the
Nation's Capital.
Since this crash we have learned that, as expected, Kansans were
among the victims. And I extend my prayers and deepest condolences to
the friends and family of all 67 victims from across the country and
even around the globe.
Among the victims are husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons
and daughter, friends and coworkers. There are not words we know to
express the devastating loss that families and friends of victims are
now experiencing.
Even as we mourn the 67 killed in this tragedy, we are reminded of
the American spirit of solidarity and support displayed over the course
of the last 8 days. I trust that this spirit will persist as we
continue to mourn and to heal.
I am joined by several of my colleagues whose constituents are among
the victims. Their participation demonstrates that this loss is felt
not only at home in Kansas but across country. We are all grieving and,
together, we can help bear each other's burdens.
Immediately following the crash, hundreds--hundreds--of first
responders from more than 40 local, State, and Federal Agencies
responded to the scene, working tirelessly through the night and into
the days that followed on rescue and recovery operations.
The first responders from the District of Columbia, from Virginia,
from Maryland, along with various Federal Agencies, acted bravely,
swiftly, and courageously in harsh conditions.
This resolution commemorates the victims and acknowledges their loved
ones' deep loss. And we will promise, in this resolution, to continue
to help carry those burdens for them.
This resolution also expresses gratitude to law enforcement and to
emergency medical personnel, to all the first responders who arrived to
try to make a difference. And they did.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to join my colleagues from Kansas,
and Senator Warner, I believe, will be here in a few minutes to support
the resolution described by Senator Moran. This is personal to me in
two ways. Obviously, as the Senator from Virginia, many of the victims
on the American Airlines flight and two of the three soldiers who were
killed in the military helicopter flight deployed from Fort Belvoir in
Virginia were Virginians, and so our community has been very touched by
this.
I was at a vigil on the riverbank in Alexandria last night with
members of the community, the first responder community, local
officials, and others who feel this wound very deeply.
And so that is the first personal connection that I have to this
tragic event. But I also rise as a kid who grew up in Kansas. And my
mother grew up in a town--actually, went to the same high school as
Senator Marshall. It is not far from Wichita, the airport from which
the flight departed.
So as I read the stories of the 67 who died, the Virginians and the
Kansans, they were stories that seemed very familiar to me.
It is hard to find words to sum up the many feelings that I have and
that others have, and I said last night at the vigil that I attended
that when words fail and you can't find the words, usually there are
words of ancient wisdom that do the trick, and I used a phrase from
Psalms 90 that I love: Teach us how short our lives are so that we may
become wise.
There were a lot of youngsters on that flight, but we are all young
in the sense of our lives are short. And the psalmist who wrote those
words was trying to make a point: All of our lives are brief. All of
our lives are temporal. All of our lives are mortal. And in that
realization, there can be the beginning of wisdom.
And one of the most powerful bits of wisdom that we gain from that
knowledge is the realization that we have to bind together. In good
times, yes, but especially in bad times, we have to join in community
to help those who are suffering.
I have been very, very pleased to see the reaction, just as my
colleague in Kansas has seen, the volunteers in Northern Virginia, the
Red Cross volunteers who have been out day after day, the first
responders who did a difficult job in the middle of the night in frigid
temperatures in an ice-strewn river to conduct, first, search and
rescue and then, ultimately, recovery missions.
I see people coming together, as we often do, in times of tragedy.
And that is heartening, if you can take anything heartening from a
situation so drastic.
So I strongly support the resolution, and I support, with my
colleagues, the notion that we have to learn from this. The National
Transportation Safety Board is doing a study. Their study will make
recommendations about how we can reduce the chance that this will ever
happen again.
Thank goodness air accidents of this kind are not common in the
country. And yet this tragedy has to energize us to learn the lessons
of it and make improvements so that we reduce the chance this will ever
happen again.
And I am very devoted, in the memory of those who lost their lives,
to that mission.
I yield the floor.
Mr. MORAN. I thank the gentleman from Virginia. Mr. President, with
your permission, I would like to yield to my colleague from Kansas,
Senator Marshall.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas.
Mr. MARSHALL. Mr. President, what is truly a humble moment standing
here with my senior Senator from Kansas and a couple gentlemen Senators
from Virginia. I wish we weren't having to stand here together.
It has been more than a week since that horrific night, but it feels
as if it just happened hours ago. It doesn't seem possible.
It doesn't seem possible. Yet, in the blink of an eye, we lost 67
brave souls.
Each morning, I wake up hoping it was all just a nightmare, that
somehow it wasn't real, but we all know it was and it is.
Psalm 34:18 reminds us:
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who
are crushed in spirit.
``The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are
crushed in spirit.'' It is times like these, when grief is
overwhelming, that we hold on to the promise of Scripture and the faith
passed down from generation to generation, a faith that has carried
Kansans through hardship and loss.
We remember 1955, a tornado leveled the little city of Udall, and 75
Kansans lost their lives; another horrific plane crash in 1970 carrying
the Wichita State University football team, and 31 souls were lost. The
tornadoes and storms, the floods, the wildfires--all these disasters
have taken too many lives and left so many hearts shattered. Yet,
through it all, one thing has remained: our faith and the love and
support of our families and our communities. That is what has carried
us before, and that is what will carry us now.
But I do feel the hurt. We all feel that hurt. It is a pain that
feels like a gut punch, an ache that disappears when we distract
ourselves, only to return without warning.
But I fear for the loved ones left behind because I know this pain
never truly goes away. And I know, like my colleagues have said, there
are truly no words that can capture the depth of our sorrow that we all
feel right now, and we can't begin to imagine the grief of these family
members.
Yet we want you each to know you don't stand alone. We are with you.
We stand beside you. We are mourning with you. Our communities are
wrapping their arms around you in prayer and support.
Just to speak to the families specifically: We, too, are
brokenhearted just like you, and we are also crushed in spirit. Yet
there is hope, and we want you to know this, that even in this tragedy,
God has not deserted us. He walks with us through these darkest of
valleys, and He weeps with those who weep.
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We are praying for your strength. We are praying for God's comfort
and peace to cover you all as we, again, mourn together.
Again, like my senior Senator expressed, I want to express my deepest
gratitude for all the emergency responders and especially the divers,
who I really believe risked their own lives by jumping into a dark,
vast, cold river in search of survivors. Thank you so much for doing
that, for doing your job so well. Your courage will not be forgotten.
I will close with this, and I said this the night of the tragedy:
When one life is lost, it is a tragedy. When many are lost at once, it
is an unbearable sorrow. It is a heartbreak beyond measure.
Again, to the families, we are with you, and so is our Father in
Heaven.
I yield the floor.
Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from Virginia,
Senator Warner.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. I recognize the Senator from Virginia.
Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, let me first of all thank my colleagues
from Kansas. I know you were there that night. I want to thank as well,
obviously, my dear friend of 40-plus years from Virginia. We were at
the airport, along with friends from Maryland and DC, by 7 o'clock the
next morning.
The remarkable thing was, this is a route I take home every night. I
have the luxury, frankly--my home is actually closer to the Capitol
than all 535 other Members, even local Congressman Don Beyer by a
couple of blocks. I drive along the parkway each night. I think I
missed the actual collision by no less than 7 or 8 minutes.
Yet we then saw a number of red lights rushing into National across
the river in Maryland, and we all know that the souls on American
Flight 5342 and those pilots in the Army helicopter--awful, awful
collision.
My friends have said it. We can't give you words that would get rid
of that terror of that awful event, but we have seen over the last week
how many young lives--so many folks from the skating world. They were
Kansans, they were Virginians, and they were literally people from,
frankly, around the globe. The contributions to their friends and
families that they will never be able to fulfill are going to leave an
ache in the hearts of those families that I can't nearly articulate as
well as some of my colleagues.
But I also want to acknowledge that even in these moments of tragedy,
there are moments of grace and heroic actions.
Folks that don't live in the Capital region don't know the kind of
messy, bureaucratic, multiple jurisdictions between Maryland, the
District, and Virginia. Senator Kaine and I were both Governors of
Virginia. We used to say the Potomac was the great divide. But at a
moment like this, with this tragedy, it stops being Maryland, Virginia,
the District, Federal. People dropped everything, and literally there
were first responders from 40 different jurisdictions. That is
remarkable.
Everybody else has mentioned, whether it was the divers, the folks
that went into that bitterly cold river and, frankly, what they have
had to do in terms of recovery of remains in the days afterwards--the
emotional toll it is going to take on those men and women literally
probably for the rest of their lives, but they did what was right.
I also want to say we have the safest skies in the world. We have the
pilots. We have valuable air traffic controllers. Clearly, something
went wrong here. I think we owe it to the restoration of that
confidence that the sky is safe in our country. I want to applaud the
brandnew Secretary of Transportation, who was with us--Mr. Duffy, from
Donald Trump's administration--he was with us that morning, at 7
o'clock in the morning.
Those families and those first responders deserve the answers of what
went wrong here. I have great faith in the NTSB. Senator Kaine and I
worked with them in other tragedies in the past. They are going to do
their job. They are going to find out what went wrong and make sure
that kind of mistake is not made again.
I will simply close by saying, again, condolences for the loss of the
families. Thank you to the first responders and all who responded. I
think it is totally appropriate.
I want to thank on a personal basis the fact that Senator Moran
decided to put this resolution together, to bring us to the floor to
kind of get that affirmation that here we are literally 8 days after
this tragedy.
Thank you, Jerry, for what you have done.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. I recognize the Senator from Kansas.
Mr. MORAN. I very much value the remarks of my colleagues from
Virginia and my home State colleague from Kansas.
I would use this moment to thank all the folks in this Chamber.
Colleagues and staff, people I work with and know, people I work with
and sometimes don't know have been so gracious and kind in their care
and concern for people, in most instances, they don't know.
It is this reminder that tragedy brings us together. It is a reminder
that the Senate could use on a daily, frequent basis that there is more
that brings us together than pulls us apart.
But the expression of care and concern for the people who were on
this flight once again demonstrates that in the human heart, there is
something that still exists about how we value and appreciate the lives
of others.
Mr. President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule
XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the
consideration of S. Res. 64, which is at the desk.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the resolution by title.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
A resolution (S. Res. 64) honoring the memory of the
victims of the tragic mid-air collision between American
Airlines Flight 5342 and United States Army Aviation Brigade
Priority Air Transport 25 on January 29, 2025.
There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the
resolution.
Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution
be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider
be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action
or debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The resolution (S. Res. 64) was agreed to.
The preamble was agreed to.
(The resolution, with its preamble, is printed in today's Record
under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')
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