Man’s Wife Texted Minutes Before Plane Crash. He’s Speaking Out 1 Year Later (Exclusive)

In the immediate aftermath of the D.C. plane crash — before officials had confirmed that all 67 people on American Airlines flight 5342 and a Black Hawk helicopter were dead — one of the first heartbreaking stories to emerge was from Hamaad Raza, whose wife sent him a final text just 20 minutes before she was scheduled to land.

One year later, Raza, 26, is opening up to PEOPLE about their final moments — and how he’s thrown himself into advocacy work to try and prevent a similar tragedy.

Throughout the flight from Wichita, Kan., to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Jan. 29, 2025, Raza says his wife, Asra Hussain, a 26-year-old healthcare consultant, texted him continuously.  

“She was a very nervous flyer,” he says.  “She didn’t like flying at all.”

When he arrived at the airport to pick her up, the night sky was filled with flashing red lights from emergency responders. He’d soon learn that her flight had collided with the Army helicopter while approaching the airport.

“The plane was on final approach and it was landing, the landing gear was engaged – all signs pointed to this flight being over — you could see the literal runway,” Raza says. “In a lot of ways, I think about my life being like that.”

He was married, he had a good job, the couple was talking about starting a family, he explains. “I could see the proverbial runway,” he says. “And in an instant, this happens and my life is completely turned upside down.”

“I try to pick up the pieces and move forward — but it’s been really rough,” he adds.

The couple, both members of the Muslim Student Association at Indiana University, met during Raza’s freshman year and married in the summer of 2022.

After the wedding, they went to New York, where she earned a master’s degree in health administration from Columbia University. Their move to D.C. came about six months before the fatal plane crash.

“She was such an amazing person,” he says. “She inspired me every single day. I feel like she would do more in a day than I would do in a week or a month.”

On her flight home from a work trip to Wichita that fateful January day, Hussain was keeping busy: working, planning a break-the-fast menu for Ramadan and asking her husband to track her progress, since there wasn’t an onboard flight map. She was eager to know how close she was getting to home — and to him.

When she was about 20 minutes from landing, she texted him “Jaani,” an Urdu word that means “My love” or “My life.”

That was her last message to him.

Immediately after his wife’s funeral, Raza moved back home to his parents’ house in St Louis. The house is filled with memories of her.

On his nightstand, he keeps the flowers his wife bought him when he returned from a trip to India the week before she died (a cousin preserved them in acrylic), while his bedroom is filled with birthday cards and notes she wrote him over the years,

He finds other ways to keep her a part of his daily life, too.

“The shoes I wear every day, they’re kind of breaking down, but they were a gift from her,” he says of his Nike sneakers. “The gifts that she gave me, I try to treasure and keep forever.”

Whenever he finds a video of his wife talking and laughing, he and his father-in-law “watch it on repeat” — and he often re-reads the texts she wrote him from the airplane and listens to “Ishq Hai,” a Bollywood song she sent him shortly before the crash.

As he grieves, Raza has thrown himself into advocacy work on Capitol Hill.

“I was at the airport the night of the crash, and I remember standing there in the terminal and feeling very helpless and not able to do anything,” he says. “I also felt like if I was in that seat and Asra was here, she would fight in my honor.”

He adds, “We’re not going to let this tragedy go without fixing what led to it.”

This is actually the second time his family lost someone in a plane crash. His maternal grandfather died in Saudi Airlines Flight 163 in August 1980. At the time, his mother was just 16 years old.

To commemorate the one-year anniversary of his wife’s death, Raza and his family are flying to D.C. — and although he knows the trip itself will be difficult, he’s not worried about flying into the same airport where his wife was headed when she died.

As he puts it, after two family airline tragedies, “I have to imagine my luck probably isn’t that bad.”

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He also looks forward to connecting with the other family members at memorials this week.

“It’ll be hard to be back in D.C. on that day,” he says. “But at the same time, it’ll be a way to feel closer to her again.”