Short, remarkable life of D.C. pilot Jonathan Campos so much more than Trump’s hateful words
The true story of a Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn and his American dream of flight reveals the moral emptiness of the 47th president.

From the age of 3, growing up on the densely packed streets of a neighborhood called Gravesend in the ever-bubbling cultural gumbo that is south Brooklyn, a young Jonathan Campos dreamed of flying planes like the jumbo jets that soared over the Belt Parkway on their final approach into JFK.
By the time he was a 14-year-old freshman at John Dewey High School, Campos didn’t pause for a second when his new girlfriend Nicole Suissa asked what he wanted to do with his life. He was going to be a pilot. “He wanted to do all things fast, all things badass, all things nearly impossible,” she told me by phone Saturday.
But this irrepressible New Yorker, raised by his stepmom and his aunt after his New York Police Department cop father fell ill and died when Campos was young, made that impossible American dream happen — right up until his last seconds.
At 8:58 p.m. Wednesday, Campos, a six-year veteran pilot for an American Airlines affiliate, was captaining a nonstop flight from Wichita, Kan., on its final approach into Washington, D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when an Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into his Bombardier CRJ700 airliner, plunging the jet into the Potomac River. Campos, 34, was killed along with his three crew members, 60 passengers, and the three soldiers aboard the helicopter.
Suissa, an ex-fiancée who has remained close with Campos and his family, had watched TV news of the first U.S. commercial air disaster in 16 years without a thought about her former boyfriend. She was on the phone with her boyfriend around 11:45 p.m. when her phone rang and it was Campos’ stepmother, screaming in anguish: “He’s gone! Jonathan! He’s gone!”
Yet, this heart-wrenching moment wouldn’t be the last shock for the friends and family of an adventure-seeking man who’d lived every one of his 12,400-plus days on — or flying over — Planet Earth with the throttle pulled wide open.
Suissa and others who knew Campos in Brooklyn, or in his adopted Florida where he lived after graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, or in the flying community, were horrified the next day to watch President Donald Trump speculate — even as divers were still frantically searching for the body of Campos and the others who’d perished — that diversity-hiring programs known by their “DEI” acronym were somehow to blame for the collision 400 feet above the icy river.
When a reporter in the White House media room pressed the 47th president on how he could make such a claim when federal accident investigators had barely arrived, and when — to the extent it matters, which is not at all — neither Trump nor the American public knew much, if anything, about the race or gender of those involved, he snapped, “Because I have common sense, OK.” The quiet part of that was deafening. The president of the United States on Thursday was echoing right-wing bottom feeders on social media who believe the rarefied air of American aviation is reserved for white men.
The words were infuriating to Suissa — they were what prompted her to write about Campos on Facebook, which is how we connected — and others in a way that is ironic and complicated. The Puerto Rican heritage of Campos and his late father was something the pilot was certainly proud of, but it was also just one small ingredient in his rich life in which the identities that mattered much more to him were as a skilled aviator, as a native New Yorker (college friends even called him “Brooklyn”), and — as he told Suissa one time when they’d argued about politics — simply as “an American.”
“He was proud of his name,” Suissa, now an attorney in New Jersey, told me. “But at the end of the day, Puerto Ricans are Americans. They are bona fide Americans! It doesn’t matter what their complexion is, or their language is, or their name. It doesn’t make him any less merited as a pilot because he happens to be named Jonathan Campos.”
Others who came to know Campos as an adult — after his Embry-Riddle degree and his certifications not just as an airline pilot but as a flight instructor and for flying a helicopter — were just as frustrated and baffled that a president would inject race into a tragedy.
“You don’t just show up and become the captain of an airline,” said Nick Shaw, a part-time Spirit Airlines pilot and friend of Campos who contacted the Daytona Beach News-Journal in Florida to share his anger over the DEI comments. “You have to earn it through seniority and through rigorous training.”
Indeed, early accounts from the probe into Wednesday’s disaster show Campos and first officer Sam Lilley successfully making a last-minute switch to a shorter landing runway at Reagan National Airport, and that they may have made a belated effort to avoid the Black Hawk helicopter before it rammed their jetliner.
For now, Campos’ grieving loved ones would much rather talk about his brief but joy-filled life than the headlines over how he died, let alone the inane conversation about DEI. And there’s a lot of stories to tell about a loud and boisterous Brooklyn kid who dove into the murky water with scuba gear at age 13 and tried helicopter skiing in the Canadian Rockies just two weeks before the D.C. collision.
Suissa, who has been helping raise money via a GoFundMe page for Campos’ burial expenses, would much rather hold on to the happy teenage stories of their first love. She told me about her ninth-grade memories of being “a nerdy pip-squeak” at first intimidated by the lanky Campos in a black hoodie who “looked like the Grim Reaper” before falling inevitably for his big smile and his persistence, which led to asking Suissa’s parents’ permission to go out on their first date to Central Park.
“He brought his skateboard that day, and I almost fell into the pond because I have no balance,” she remembered. “All the talents he had, I did not have.” In her Facebook tribute and our conversation, she noted that Puerto Rico was little more than a code in his DNA. “He didn’t even like to dance,” she said, didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and he loved rock ‘n’ roll, not salsa.
“He always wanted to soar like a bird,” his aunt, Beverly Lane, told USA Today. The America I thought we aspired to, at least for most of my life, was one where a brown-skinned kid from a working-class neighborhood making that dream come true was the thing that made us a great nation. Not the despicable words of Trump and his MAGA minions who want voters in a constant state of fear, who want them to be afraid when a Black or brown face or a woman’s voice comes from the cockpit or the control tower. In reality, their warped white-privilege vision of locking out the next generation of pilots who look like Campos is the regime that rewards mediocrity, and not their “DEI” boogeyman.
“His body hasn’t even been pulled out of the river yet and you’re questioning him … after he devoted half his life to his craft,” Suissa said of Trump’s comments. “I thought that was just abhorrent, outrageous — it’s entirely insensitive, and frankly, the president of the United States owes the Campos family an apology.”
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I couldn’t agree more, even if it will never happen. As I write this, Trump’s presidency is less than two weeks old, and there are more outrages — firing the career prosecutors and FBI agents who investigated him, a bat-guano crazy trade war with Canada and Mexico, releasing water onto California farmland because of Caligula-sized delusions — than there are days of the week to write about them.
But nothing is more outrageous than a wannabe dictator trying to get away with his schemes by using the bully pulpit of the White House to conjure up America’s original sins and continue to divide us over race. Trump had the nerve to promise the nation in his first address as POTUS that he would fulfill the dream of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and yet he judges Jonathan Campos and aviators who look like him not by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin. How dare he!
Forget what this small man in search of a balcony said, and remember how Campos lived — as the kind of man our current president will never, ever be. Said Suissa: “At 34 he’s awfully young, and this is no age to be dying, and yet I can’t think of a single regret he might have had. I can’t think of a single thing he didn’t get to do. He did everything he wanted to do. That was remarkable.”
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