How do you tell your 12-year-old son that his mother and older brother most likely died in a plane crash?
That was the question facing Douglas Lane on the evening of Jan. 29 as his cellphone was filling up with alerts about an American Eagle plane colliding with an Army helicopter over the Potomac River, a plane that he knew his wife, Christine Lane, and son Spencer Lane were aboard.
“I looked at Milo, I didn’t really know what to tell him,” Lane, who lives in Rhode Island, told NBC News in his first interview since the tragedy. “In my gut, I knew what the outcome was. But I didn’t want to say that they were gone until I knew they were gone.”
Tune in to “Legacy on Ice,” a figure skating tribute to support the families and loved ones affected by this tragedy. Sunday at 3 p.m. ET on Peacock.
“I had to really kind of word it very carefully so that he would still have some hope, but I also didn’t want to create false hope,” Lane said.
Milo “took it pretty well,” he said. “He’s pretty resilient.”
Final confirmation that the mother and son had perished, along with the 62 other people on the plane and the three soldiers on the Black Hawk helicopter, came the next day when Lane and his sister took the train to Washington, D.C.
“That was tough,” Lane said, about leaving Milo behind with relatives. “Certainly the decision to leave him the next day was the hardest of my life.”
A 16-year-old figure skating prodigy, Spencer, like many of the other passengers aboard American Eagle Flight 5342, was flying home from a training camp following the 2025 Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas, where the flight originated.
His mother, who was 49, had been chaperoning him on the trip. They were supposed to catch a connecting flight to Providence, Rhode Island, after landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, Lane said.
Spencer was one of six members of the Skating Club of Boston, one of the nation’s top figure skating programs, aboard the plane.
Before taking off from Wichita, Spencer posted a photo on his Instagram Stories page of the view from his seat over the wing of the plane as it waited on the tarmac.
Lane said he and Spencer had exchanged texts several times while his son was in Wichita but “he was busy doing his thing.” He said he spoke to his wife shortly before she boarded the plane about what it’s like to fly into this particular airport “over the Potomac” and how “you’re going to see the Pentagon and all that.”
“But I was still tracking the flight because that’s who I am,” Lane said.
Several hours later, Lane said his flight tracker “showed that they landed.”
“But they weren’t responding to my texts,” he said. “I know Spencer would have turned his phone on even if he was sitting on the tarmac somewhere … so the fact that they were not in communication struck me as odd.”
It was then, Lane said, that he saw the first news alert on his phone “that a small plane had crashed in the Potomac.”
“My heart was literally pounding out of my chest,” Lane said.
A month later, Lane said both he and Milo are adjusting to their new reality. He said organizing a memorial for his wife and older son helped him cope with the loss. He said Milo is back in school and taking comfort in familiar routines.
“Parenting Milo, knowing when to give him space, has been challenging,” he said. “There’s not really a blueprint for the kind of situation I’ve found myself in.”
Lane said he met Christine in 1999 and they got married three years later. An avid quilter who graduated from Syracuse University in 1997 and who had previously worked as a graphic designer, Christine Lane loved bright colors (especially orange). But above all, Lane said, she adored her sons.
They adopted Spencer in South Korea in 2009, Lane said. And Spencer, who was then 9 months old, was already full of charisma, he said.
“We would go into a restaurant and all eyes would be on him immediately,” Lane said, chuckling slightly at the memory.
Spencer was also a natural athlete who fell in love with figure skating shortly before the 2022 Winter Olympics.
“It’s pretty rare for people to start that late and be as good as he was,” Lane said.
In particular, Spencer idolized Asian American figure skaters such as Nathan Chen and Vincent Zhou, as well as Maxim Naumov, whose parents, Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, were coaches at the Skating Club of Boston and also died in the plane crash.
Lane said figure skating became an all-consuming passion for the entire family and they spent a lot of time driving Spencer to and from practices in Norwood, Massachusetts.
But the memory Lane said he cherishes most was of their return to Seoul a few years after Spencer joined the family to adopt Milo. He said it was around Christmastime and it felt odd to be celebrating “in a foreign country.”
Spencer, he said, “was excited to be in Seoul. He got to meet his brother.”
Their family, Lane said, was “complete.”
