Air traffic controllers in Washington and the pilots of President Donald Trump’s helicopter met to discuss communication issues one week before a jet was allowed to take off just as Marine One left the White House, federal investigators said Thursday.
Controllers reported not receiving the standard three-minute warning call ahead of Marine One flights and both sides agreed to an alternative in those instances — but that plan to relay the radio call through someone else was also unsuccessful on the day of the Aug. 4 incident near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report shows.
Having both the jet and helicopter in the air at the same time seemed to violate safety procedures put in place after last year’s midair collision near the busy airport that killed 67 people, but officials stressed that the president was never in danger. The Pentagon also has a longstanding agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration to provide controllers with a three-minute warning before the president’s helicopter takes off that predates last year’s crash.
The NTSB said recordings from the tower showed that the controllers never heard the calls from Marine One's pilot that day warning that the helicopter was getting ready to take off, but separate recordings posted by ATC.com show the helicopter did make those calls.
The helicopter pilots tried to relay their three-minute call through the helicopter facility at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, but that was also unsuccessful.
The FAA decided after an airliner collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter on Jan. 29, 2025, that all takeoffs and landings at the airport would be halted anytime a helicopter passes by on a conflicting route. The airspace near the White House and Reagan is heavily congested with military and commercial aircraft.
The FAA has acknowledged that the helicopter and airliner briefly got too close before the two aircraft started to move away from each other. The airplane quickly climbed above the helicopter after Marine One’s pilots saw the plane and paused until it safely left the area.
The NTSB said preliminary estimates show the helicopter and plane were just over 0.8 mile (1.3 kilometers) apart laterally and about 700 feet (215 meters) apart vertically at their closest. The crew of the Envoy Air flight told investigators they received a traffic warning from their collision avoidance system right after they took off, but they never saw the helicopter.
The official FAA recordings from the tower at Reagan did not include the warnings that Marine One was getting ready to head to Andrews Air Force Base with the president aboard that day.
A recording posted by ATC.com showed the Marine One pilot telling the tower that the helicopter was “three minutes to life” just like the 2013 agreement between the FAA and the military calls for. But the controller seemed surprised a few minutes later when the helicopter took off.
“Uh, Marine One, you said, uh, you’re proceeding as briefed?” the controller asked before giving the helicopter directions and commenting, “OK, no three minutes, roger, proceed as briefed.”
After the controller warned the helicopter about the plane taking off, the Marine One pilot said he saw the traffic and declared, “We’ll be doing a momentary delay.”
After last year’s midair collision, it became clear that poor communication between air traffic controllers and the military had been a longstanding issue. During a congressional hearing, it came out that a hotline connecting the Pentagon to the tower at Reagan hadn’t been working for more than three years, and the FAA hadn’t even realized it.
The NTSB said that after this incident involving Marine One, FAA technicians determined that there wasn't adequate line of sight between the radio receiver at the airport and the location where the helicopter takes off at the White House. So those radios were moved from the neighborhood where they had been located to the top of the tower at Reagan. Subsequent tests showed the radios working well after that change.
President Donald Trump arrives on Marine One at the Ellipse near the White House, Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
President Donald Trump, left, walks from Marine One to board Air Force One, Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md., en route to South Carolina. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Ratko Mladic, the bullish Bosnian Serb general whose forces besieged the Bosnian capital for several years in the 1990s and carried out the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, died Thursday while serving a life sentence for his crimes, U.N. officials said. He was 84.
Mladic died at a hospital in The Hague, Netherlands, U.N. court officials said. A Mladic relative who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation confirmed the reports and said Mladic’s son, Darko Mladic, was on his way to the Dutch city.
The U.N. tribunal for war crimes committed during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s sentenced Mladic to life in prison in 2017 in what was considered a key step toward bringing justice to the victims. He had been in custody since 2011 after many years on the run.
The ruthless, blue-eyed former communist officer-turned nationalist warlord was one of the most notorious figures of the conflict that left more than 100,000 people dead and over 1 million homeless. He commanded his troops to “scorch the brains” of the Bosnian Muslims and boasted of being a “Serbian God.”
When the ethnic war in Bosnia and Herzegovina started in 1992, Mladic became the commander of the Bosnian Serb troops and took control of large swaths of the country to form a Serb mini-state.
Serbs under Mladic’s control laid siege to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and other cities and villages, established concentration camps for detained non-Serb civilians and enemy soldiers, and systematically killed prisoners.
In Sarajevo, Serb troops kept the city isolated while killing civilians with snipers and heavy artillery. In 1995, Mladic’s troops slaughtered more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica — the first case of genocide in Europe since WWII.
But Mladic and his admirers have never repented. He was seen by many as a patriot fighting for the first pan-Serbian state. Defiant, Mladic acted bullishly during his trial and yelled at the judges when sentenced to life in prison.
Munira Subasic, from the Mothers of Srebrenica group, said she had mixed feelings about Mladic’s death and deplored that Mladic’s crimes are still being denied by many Bosnian Serbs.
“Today, a major war criminal died, the criminal of the Balkans,” Subasic said. But while mothers of victims “are still carrying the pain in our souls" 31 years later, “we are still listening to denials, we are still listening to how Ratko Mladic was a hero for the Serbs,” she said.
“I am sorry that he died and that he did not suffer for a little while longer, that he didn’t wait for more and dream about the eyes of our children,” she said.
Residents of Pale, a Bosnian Serb stronghold just outside of Sarajevo, mourned Mladic.
“He was murdered there, in those dungeons,” said Janko Seslija, a former Bosnian Serb soldier. “I feel sorry for Gen. Mladic. He was an honorable man, honorable soldier and commander.”
Mladic was born March 12, 1942, in the tiny Bosnian village of Bozinovici, in the hills 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Sarajevo. Like other protagonists in the Yugoslav conflict, he imbibed nationalism from his family’s fate in WWII — his own father was killed by Croats.
A communist-era officer, Mladic sided with the Serbs as Yugoslavia disintegrated into war. Mladic first led a Serb insurgency in Croatia before taking over the Bosnian Serb army that was backed by Serbia and then-President Slobodan Milosevic, who also died in the custody of the Hague court in 2006 while on trial for genocide.
Mladic was known for his obsession with his nation’s history. He saw Bosnia’s war as a chance for revenge against the onetime 500-year-long Ottoman occupation of Serbia. He often referred to Bosnia’s Muslims as Turks and boasted of revenge when his troops overran the protected U.N. enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
Carried away by Serb dominance in firepower and international ignorance, Mladic was convinced of his final victory.
“The time has come ... for revenge against Turks in these regions,” Mladic said after taking over Srebrenica.
A U.N. “safe haven” for Muslims, Srebrenica ended up overrun by Serbs who separated the men and boys, forced them to strip, killed them and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves in a brutal rampage that lasted for over a week.
The Srebrenica survivors said one image forever will be imprinted in their minds: Mladic handing out candy to Muslim children who had been rounded up on the town’s square and reassuring them that everything would be all right — even patting one child on the head.
Convinced of the power of his army, he used to tell his soldiers: “When I give you guarantees, it’s as if they are given by God.” To clear the way for his helicopter to land, he would tell air traffic controllers: “Here speaks Ratko Mladic — the Serbian God.”
Sarajevans still remember his commands to the Serb gunmen pounding the Bosnian capital in early 1992. He issued his orders through a military radio system, not bothering to scramble the signal, which was picked up and taped by the Sarajevo police.
“Turn toward Velesici, there are no Serbs there,” Mladic said as he ordered his artillery to pound the Sarajevo suburb.
“Scorch their brains,” he told his gunmen.
Faced with the U.N. tribunal’s genocide indictment, Mladic in 1996 began his fugitive years in Han Pijesak, a military compound in eastern Bosnia built for Yugoslavia's longtime communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, and designed to withstand a nuclear attack.
With his wife, Bosa, Mladic settled down to imposed domesticity, passing the time caring for bees and goats. His 23 goats reputedly bore the names of foreign dignitaries he despised, such as Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. secretary of state.
Surrounded by security guards, he occasionally ventured out of the dense pine forest to mark events such as the anniversary of the Bosnian Serb army and St. Vitus Day, a religious festival marking the 1389 Serb defeat by the Turks at Kosovo.
When his trail grew too hot in Bosnia in the late 1990s, Mladic moved with family to a villa near the Serbian capital, Belgrade. There, he was seen at his son’s wedding, soccer games and fancy restaurants, refusing to give interviews and smiling quizzically when photographed.
When Milosevic was ousted from power in 2000, and Serbia's new pro-democracy authorities signaled they might hand Mladic to the tribunal, tabloids reported he had left Belgrade for Bosnia.
But true to his style, Mladic countered those rumors and others that said he was terminally ill, and before going underground in 2002, he was repeatedly seen driving around the Serbian capital in a Yugo.
He completely disappeared from public view in 2008 and was finally arrested in May 2011 in a village near Belgrade where he was hiding at a relative’s house.
The frail-looking old man who appeared in court at the Hague was a far cry from the robust image Mladic exuded in wartime. But his defiance was intact.
“Everything you said is pure lies. Shame on you!” he yelled at the U.N. judges when they handed down the conviction.
Already in poor health upon arrest in 2011, Mladic is believed to have suffered multiple strokes during his years on the run and was hospitalized on several occasions while in custody.
FILE - Former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic sits in the court room in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, June 8, 2021, where the United Nations court delivers its verdict in the appeal of Mladic against his convictions for genocide and other crimes and his life sentence for masterminding atrocities throughout the Bosnian war. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, Pool, File)
FILE - Nura Mustafic, one of the Mothers of Srebrenica and other Bosnian organizations, wipes away tears as she reacts to the verdict which the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, ICTY, handed down in the genocide trial against former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday Nov. 22, 2017. (AP Photo/Phil Nijhuis, File)
FILE - A mural of former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic vandalized with paint in Belgrade, Serbia, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic, File)
FILE - Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, center, speaks with Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, right, in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, in 1994. (AP Photo/Radivoje Pavicic, File)
FILE - Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, right, talks on the phone next to Russian Army General Vladimir Zurbenko, center, during the visit of a Russian Army delegation to the Bosnian town of Banja Luka in Oct. 1995. (AP Photo/Radivoje Pavicic, File)
