- Trump suggested DEI policies played a role in collision
- Two Black Hawk crew named as Andrew Eaves and Ryan O’Hara
The Pentagon identified two of the three US soldiers killed when their UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter
collided with a commercial airliner, but withheld the name of the third at the request of the victim’s family.
The two identified soldiers were named as Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Loyd Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Maryland, and Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Georgia, according to an Army statement. The third soldier’s name “will not be released at this time,” it said.
The remains of Eaves and the unidentified soldier still haven’t been recovered, and they were listed as “duty status-whereabouts unknown.” The Army said earlier that one of the pilots — believed to be Eaves — had 1,000 hours of flying experience and was overseeing a training mission when the collision occurred. The other pilot had about 500 hours of flying experience.
No other reason was given for the decision not to release the third soldier’s name. A US defense official said earlier that one of the three crew members was a woman.
The politics around the crash have become charged since President Donald Trump suggested that diversity, equity and inclusion policies may have played a role in the accident. Trump suggested in a post to Truth Social on Friday that the helicopter was to blame for the crash, which also killed all 64 people on the passenger jet, because it may have been flying too high.
“The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot,” Trump wrote. “It was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???”
In a briefing with reporters on Thursday, Army aviation official Jonathan Koziol called both pilots, who were conducting a routine training mission, “an experienced crew.” He said the instructor pilot, who had more flying hours, “was flying the aircraft with a fellow pilot in command.”
“The 1,000 hour instructor pilots — that’s a lot of iterations of flying when the helicopter flies about two hours of flight,” Koziol said. “So, lots of flying time for that. And then, the pilot in command, the 500 hours, I can confirm that’s what we are tracking, is an experienced pilot in command.”