STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Did CNN report the January 29, 2025, plane crash in the Washington, D.C., area hours before it occurred? No, that's not true: A spokesperson for the news outlet refuted the claim. CNN published and aired the news for the first time roughly 40 minutes after the crash.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on January 30, 2025. It said:

Why did @CNN report the plane crash in DC 5 hours before it happened???

This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:

(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Jan 30 22:20:35 2025 UTC)

On January 31, 2025, a spokesperson for CNN told Lead Stories via email:

CNN covered the tragic news on the Potomac after it happened and after local sources and the FAA learned about it and confirmed the news. This is a completely false conspiracy.

The January 29, 2025, midair collision between a commercial jet and a military helicopter occurred around 8:50 p.m. EST, according to the statement (archived here) issued by the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington roughly an hour later that day.

In a follow-up email on January 31, 2025, the spokesperson for CNN added, referring to the January 29, 2025, broadcast:

We reported the news at 9:32pm on both CNN.com and television.

The recording of CNN's broadcast on the Internet Archive confirms that. The beginning of the fragment where the host, Kaitlan Collins (archived here), first announced the breaking news is 6:31 p.m. PST (time stamps are shown in the Pacific Time Zone). When that is converted to Eastern Standard Time, that becomes 9:31 p.m.

Lead Stories reviewed previous segments aired on the same day but found no earlier mentions of the crash.

The "proof" of the claim offered in the post on X was what looked like a screenshot that suggested that CNN published a story titled "FAA issues ground stop at Reagan National Airport after plane crashes in Potomac River" (archived here) six hours before the 10:43 p.m. timestamp in the top left corner, between 4 and 5 p.m. shown below:

(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Jan 30 22:19:25 2025 UTC)

(At the time this fact check was written, the story headline had been updated to, "What we know about the passenger plane collision near Washington, DC.")

Timestamps on the internet, however, may be imprecise.

A Google spokesperson told Lead Stories via email on January 31, 2025, that its "systems automatically make the best determinations possible on timestamps" but added that "sometimes dates listed in Search may be wrong," in part, due to the time zone settings, among other factors.

The company's website (archived here) says that "all factors" that go into those estimations "can be prone to issues."

In 2022, when several media organizations including USA Today (archived here) and the Wall Street Journal (archived here) tried to address the issue of their news articles appearing on Google to be older than they actually are, Google's liaison Danny Sullivan said (archived here) that the company was still working on improving the accuracy of timestamps.

Nevertheless, Lead Stories did not observe such issues with the CNN news article about the plane crash.

As of 6:28 p.m. EST on January 30, 2025, a Google search for the CNN article circled in red in the image from the post on X showed that it was published 21 hours ago, which is about 9:30 p.m. EST on January 29, 2025:

(Source: Google screenshot taken on Thu Jan 30 23:28:04 2025 UTC)

Flight background

American Airlines reported (archived here) that a Bombardier CRJ700 plane (Flight 5342), flying for their regional airline American Eagle, was involved in an accident over the Potomac River while approaching Reagan National Airport. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (archived here), the plane collided with an Army UH-60 helicopter carrying three crewmembers. There were no survivors.

Read more

More Lead Stories fact checks on claims concerning the Flight 5342 plane and helicopter crash can be found here.