For years, air traffic controllers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport raised alarms about potential safety threats. These warnings came long before the tragic midair collision on January 29, 2025, over the Potomac River, which resulted in the deaths of 67 people when a military training helicopter collided with a commercial airliner.

“The warning signs were all there,” said Emily Hanoka, a former air traffic controller at Reagan National, in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday. She explained that local safety councils were formed by controllers, and every safety concern reported was backed by data from fellow controllers. Despite numerous recommendations for improvements, these concerns were largely unheeded.

Hanoka detailed the immense pressure experienced by controllers to maintain a steady flow of air traffic at the busy airport, which manages approximately 800 flights daily. The airport’s operations are often tightly scheduled on its limited runway system.

“There are times when the number of flights exceeds what the airport can safely accommodate,” Hanoka noted. She had completed her shift shortly before the catastrophic accident occurred that evening.

In a related development, a graphic timeline of the tragic plane crash near Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., was featured by Fox News.

“There was definitely a pressure. If you do not move planes, you will gridlock the airport.”

Notably, it was not the air traffic of the commercial airlines, but a military training aircraft flying at the incorrect altitude through “helicopter alley” that crashed into the unsuspecting airliner.

A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into the side of an American Eagle regional jet approaching Reagan National just before landing, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. Federal investigators later issued urgent safety recommendations focused on separating helicopter and fixed-wing traffic near the airport.

Since the disaster, regulators have moved to tighten procedures.

There were multiple near-misses just a day before the disaster, according to CBS, and 85 near-collisions reported between 2021 and 2024 during the Biden administration.

“There were obvious cracks in the system, there were obvious holes,” Hanoka said. “You had frontline controllers ringing that bell for years and years, saying this is not safe. This cannot continue. Please change this. And that didn’t happen.”

Rescue and salvage crews pull up a plane engine as cranes work near the wreckage of an American Airlines jet in the Potomac river from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, on Monday, Feb. 3, in Arlington, Va.  (Jose Luis Magana)

The airport’s 25 million airline passengers a year is reportedly 10 million more than its intended capacity.

To handle the load, Hanoka described “squeeze play” maneuvers unique to that crammed airspace and three runways where two aircraft are on one runway within seconds of each other.

“A squeeze play is when everything is dependent on an aircraft rolling, an aircraft slowing, and you know it’s gonna be a very close operation,” she said. “And that is a really common operation.”

Air traffic controllers coming from other locales give the airport’s stress work a hard pass, she said.

“So you’ll get new controllers come in, so they’ve transferred from other facilities and they’ll look at the operation and say, ‘Absolutely not,’” she continued. “And they’ll withdraw from training. And that, when I was there, was about 50%.

“About half of the people that walked in the building to train would say, ‘Absolutely not.’”

The father of the crash victim pilot, Tim Lilley (inset), said the Jan. 29 mid-air collision near Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., was “so preventable.” (FOX Business/AP/Ben Curtis)

“It was surprising walking into that work environment, how close aircraft were,” Hanoka said.

Reporting last week said the FAA suspended the use of visual separation between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in that airspace and shifted controllers toward radar-based separation, while restrictions were also imposed on certain helicopter operations near Reagan National.

The safety concerns Hanoka described align with broader findings from investigators. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed systemic FAA failures and found the crash was preventable, with concerns including overreliance on visual separation and longstanding risks in the airspace around Reagan National.

New York City is at the forefront of a transformation, as its iconic office towers embark on a new chapter. However, this evolution may not align with the expectations of prospective renters.

The city has long been a beacon of reinvention, and this time, the change is unfolding floor by floor within the once-bustling office corridors now echoing with the absence of in-person work.

The statistics are remarkable. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 16,000 apartments have emerged from office space conversions, an increase that nearly doubled in just one year. This surpasses every other city in the United States, as highlighted in a recent RentCafe study.

Trailing far behind, Washington, DC, claims the second spot with approximately 8,500 units. Meanwhile, the combined efforts of Chicago and Los Angeles fall short of New York’s achievements within a single year.

When considering all types of conversions, including hotels, retail spaces, and warehouses, the scope of New York’s adaptive reuse projects expands dramatically, with over 26,000 future residential units on the horizon.

Former office buildings now account for nearly 62% of that total, a share that has climbed sharply as landlords face an uncomfortable reality: in a post-pandemic world, not every tower has a future as a workplace.

That pressure is heaviest in Midtown, which has quietly overtaken the Financial District as the epicenter of the conversion movement.

For years, the downtown corridor was ground zero — older stock, looser zoning, smaller floor plates that made residential retrofitting more feasible. Now it’s the mid-century towers of central Manhattan taking their turn, as owners who once waited out the office slump finally stop waiting.

The projects are arriving at serious scale. At 111 Wall St., a gut renovation is expected to yield more than 1,500 apartments. At 5 Times Square, a building that spent years more vacant than occupied, over 1,200 units are planned, with a slice earmarked for below-market renters. The former Pfizer headquarters at 219-235 E. 42nd St. in Midtown East is undergoing the largest office-to-residential conversion in New York City history, expected to finish around 2026 or 2027 and bring roughly 1,600 apartments with 100,000 square feet of amenities. The addresses alone would have seemed absurd as residential addresses a decade ago. 

On paper, it looks like a meaningful dent in the housing shortage. In practice, the impact is more complicated. 

Here’s what the numbers don’t tell you: turning offices into apartments costs a fortune. The structural gymnastics involved, which includes reconfiguring deep floor plates designed for cubicles, threading plumbing through buildings never meant to carry it, cutting windows into cores that were built to block daylight, push development costs into territory that makes affordable rents nearly impossible to pencil in.

Developers aren’t doing this as a public service. They’re doing it because premium rentals can justify the bill. The result is a conversion wave priced for a specific kind of New Yorker.

Studios and one-bedrooms in many of these projects are expected to list in the $3,500 to $5,500 range. Larger units or those in more desirable locations will push well past $6,000 a month.

Even buildings that include mandated affordable units tend to price the bulk of their inventory well beyond what a median-income renter can sustain. 

The more durable transformation may be geographical rather than economic. Midtown blocks that have operated on a strict weekday schedule for generations are starting to acquire something they’ve never really had: residents. That shift, subtle now, more pronounced as more units come online, rewires the logic of an entire district.

Retailers recalibrate for evening foot traffic. Transit patterns adjust. The case for the next residential conversion becomes marginally easier to make. Meanwhile, the office market gets a pressure valve. Every building that exits the commercial inventory is one fewer vacancy dragging on rents and property values across the sector. It doesn’t solve remote work. But it manages the hangover.

Nationally, the office-to-apartment pipeline has reached a record of approximately 90,000 units — roughly four times the volume of just a few years ago. New York’s outsized share of that figure reflects two things simultaneously: the severity of its commercial real estate distress, and the intensity of its housing demand. Both are extreme. The conversion boom is where they collide.

“What’s actually being built here is less a housing rescue and more a high-end stratum grafted onto a city that already has plenty of high-end strata,” a developer source told The Post. “The pressure it applies to top-of-market rents is real, even if modest. The relief it offers to someone priced out of Brooklyn or The Bronx is theoretical at best.”

Iran has issued a stern warning, threatening to target American educational institutions in the Middle East as a countermeasure to US-Israeli actions against Iranian schools.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard has set a deadline for the US administration to publicly denounce the recent bombings of Iranian universities by noon on Monday, or they vow to retaliate against American students studying in the region.

Officials from the Iranian regime have advised those connected to US universities in the Middle East, including staff, professors, and students, to maintain a distance of at least one kilometer from their respective campuses.

Iran alleges that airstrikes have hit the Tehran University of Science and Technology over the weekend, causing damage to surrounding structures but thankfully resulting in no injuries.

The regime conveyed through Iranian media that if the US wishes to protect its educational facilities in the region from potential retaliation, it must issue an official condemnation of the university bombings by 12 noon on Monday, March 30, Tehran time.

Multiple American universities operate campuses abroad, where thousands of students often study with financial support from host governments.

New York University has a campus in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, while Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern and Texas A&M each have satellite campus’s in Qatar’s Education City, a research hub based in Doha.

Texas A&M said it closed its Qatar campus, moving to remote learning and with most international staff returning home amid the war.

Regime officials warned that employees, professors, and students affiliated with American universities in the region should stay at least one kilometer away from their campuses

Numerous American universities operate campuses abroad, where thousands of students often study with financial support from host governments

Since the start of the war, deadly missile strikes have hit Iranian education facilities, including an elementary school attack on February 28 in the city of Minab that killed 175 people, most of them children

The elementary school attack sparked a US military investigation with preliminary findings concluded that American forces were likely responsible due to outdated intelligence.

Around 5,000 Americans studied in the Middle East and North Africa in the last academic year, with around half in Israel and roughly 1,000 in the UAE, according to the State Department.

Since the start of the war, deadly missile strikes have hit Iranian education facilities, including an elementary school attack on February 28 in the city of Minab that killed 175 people, most of them children.

The attack sparked a US military investigation with preliminary findings concluded that American forces were likely responsible due to outdated intelligence. The building was once part of a regime naval base.

Reports have also emerged suggesting that a newly made US missile was used in an attack on a sports hall and a nearby elementary school in southern Iran, according to The New York Times.

Local officials have told Iranian media that the strike in the city of Lamerd killed approximately 21 people.

The recent threats to attack US schools in the region comes as Trump weighs greenlighting a highly complex and potentially explosive military operation to send US special operations forces deep inside Iran to seize its stockpile of enriched uranium.

The move could drag American troops into hostile territory for days – or even a week – and risk a dramatic escalation of the war. It was reportedly one of many being proposed by the Pentagon.

US officials say the stealth plan would target nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium at either one or two nuclear sites in Natanz and Isfahan.

Smoke and flames rise at the site of airstrikes on an oil depot in Tehran on March 7

Iran has responded to US-Israeli strikes by launching suicide drone and ballistic missile assaults against oil infrastructure and civilian areas in the Middle East

Israeli strikes in Gaza earlier last week

The objective would be to remove the radioactive substance entirely from Iranian control, eliminating any pathway to a nuclear weapon.

The proposal remains under review, and Trump has not signed off on it. But officials told The Wall Street Journal he is seriously considering the option, even as advisers warn of the dangers to American forces and the possibility of a broader conflict.

Military experts say the operation would be among the most difficult missions the US could undertake.

American forces would likely need to fly into heavily defended territory, potentially under fire from Iranian air defenses and drones, before securing the nuclear sites believed to house the material.

Once on the ground, combat troops would be tasked with locking down the perimeter while specialist teams locate, secure and prepare the uranium for transport.

‘This is not a quick in and out kind of deal,’ retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former commander of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, told the Journal about the potential mission.

In Louisville, Kentucky, a federal judge has dismissed charges against two former police officers who faced allegations of falsifying the warrant that led to the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson issued a concise ruling to drop the charges against Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany. These officers were previously involved in drafting the warrant for the raid on Taylor’s apartment.

Federal prosecutors had recently requested the dismissal of charges against Jaynes and Meany, citing “the interest of justice” as their rationale. They also noted that several felony charges had already been dismissed in earlier court proceedings.

In 2022, former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced legal action against the officers during a prominent press conference in Louisville, emphasizing that “Breonna Taylor should still be alive today.” Garland highlighted that the officers involved in the shooting were unaware of the “false and misleading statements” contained in the warrant.

The tragic incident occurred when Taylor’s boyfriend fired a shot at police as they forcibly entered her apartment. Officers returned fire, tragically hitting Taylor multiple times in the hallway. Her death, along with the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, ignited widespread protests advocating for racial justice throughout the summer of 2020.

Jaynes was facing charges for conspiracy and falsification of records and misdemeanor civil rights violations. Meany was facing a charge for allegedly lying to federal investigators.

The warrant used to enter Taylor’s apartment alleged she was receiving packages for a suspected drug dealer and former boyfriend. The document said Jaynes had confirmed with the postal service that packages for the ex-boyfriend were going to Taylor’s apartment. Investigators later learned that Jaynes had not confirmed that information with the postal inspector. Meany, a former police sergeant, signed off on the warrant.

Jaynes was fired by Louisville police in 2021 for being untruthful about the warrant. Meany was fired after he was charged in 2022.