A resolution 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. 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

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.

I thank the gentleman from Virginia. Mr. President, with your permission, I would like to yield to my colleague from Kansas, Senator Marshall.

Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from Virginia, Senator Warner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.