We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rossana D’antonio a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Rossana thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?
On a stormy late May morning in 2008, TACA Airlines Flight 390 crashes at one of the most dangerous airports in the
world, Honduras’s Toncontin International Airport. Five people die in the crash—among them my brother, pilot Cesare D’Antonio. Suspecting Cesare will be made a scapegoat for the accident, as so often happens to pilots, I decided to leverage my decades of experience as an engineer and set out in search of the truth.
My research interweaves other parallel accidents with my own story. Six months after the TACA crash, Captain Sully Sullenberger lands his plane on the Hudson River. Although authorities call his landing a miracle, they also blame him for its necessity. One year after the TACA 390 tragedy, Air France 447 falls from the sky. Again, pilot error. Fast forward to 2018 when two Boeing 737 MAX 8’s plummet into the ground killing hundreds. Pilot skills are questioned until an investigation finally reveals Boeing’s cover up of a faulty aircraft design.
As I dig deeper, I expose a culture that is too quick to conclude pilot error and an industry that experiences systemic weaknesses, chooses profits over safety, lies to its customers, and is willing to risk lives to get its planes back up in the sky. Ultimately, I uncover the smoking gun I’ve been looking for—revealing the truth about TACA 390, exposing aviation cover-ups, and challenging us all to question the very systems we’ve been told we can trust with our lives.
This journey was the impetus for my upcoming book — part memoir, part exposé — “26 Seconds: Grief and Blame in the Aftermath of Losing My Brother in a Plane Crash” but also inspired in me a newfound purpose to advocate at the highest levels in government for aviation safety in hopes that no other family suffer a similar tragedy.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m an engineer, speaker, advocate, and author whose life was upended by a personal tragedy, the TACA 390 plane crash that killed my brother, Captain Cesare D’Antonio. As an engineer, I decided to use my skills and embarked on a journey in pursuit of the truth as to the true cause of the crash. This journey resulted in an upcoming memoir, to be released in May 2025, but also provided me a newfound purpose in advocating for aviation and infrastructure safety.
Having dedicated over 30 years in pursuit of safe and sustainable infrastructure design, the irony is not lost on me that my brother would die on a runway that was known to be flawed and unsafe. Today, I leverage my experience in infrastructure design and emergency management to promote how complex systems work and how deficient infrastructure can result in disasters.
As part of the American Society of Civil Engineers, I advocate for infrastructure investments including the Federal Aviation Authority Reauthorization. The bill increases funding for aviation infrastructure and advances the safe and efficient delivery of aviation projects.
I’m extremely proud of a life in public service committed to improving the quality of life for individuals who cannot advocate for themselves. In 2020, I was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom to the California Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists where I currently work to ensure the protection of the public with competent and ethical professional services. In 2024, I was appointed to serve on the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council’s Disaster Response and Resiliency Committee. I’m also a Fellow with the American Society of Civil Engineers and serve as a member of the Board of Directors.
Six months after TACA 390 crashed, Captain Sully Sullenberger landed his plane on the Hudson River. Although authorities called his landing a miracle, in the early days following the crash they also blamed him for its necessity. I was obsessed with the Miracle on the Hudson and the hero pilot. At the time, although I’d never met Sully, I was bursting with pride in him. After all, he had managed to pull off the unimaginable. Years later, I had the honor to meet Sully and to tell him about my story. Although the media had elevated him to almost god-like status, Sully was everything I imagined a hero should be — humble, kind, and empathetic.
Writing this book has been the hardest thing I have ever done. Along this 15-year journey, there were countless people who were instrumental in helping me get this labor of love out into the world and into people’s hands. Perhaps the most pivotal influence has been my brother, Cesare, who served as my muse. On days when I thought this project would never take flight, Cesare would peer at me from his picture frame nestled amongst my most prized possessions on the bookshelf in our home office. The snapshot, taken in an Airbus 320 cockpit, is of a uniformed Cesare seated at the captain’s chair sporting his Prada sunglasses, his crooked smile displaying a chipped front tooth. He is forever in his happy place, at 35,000 feet over Mother Earth, and he would nudge me to keep at it. I could almost hear him reminding me this story needed to be told. Though he’d never know it, Cesare’s death led to impactful changes that saved countless lives. Cesare never set out to be a hero. But that’s what he is. I thank him every day for being my inspiration, my teacher, my pesky little brother. I miss him every single day.
I’m a product of a very close-knit family. My Italian and Salvadoran immigrant parents instilled in me a deep-rooted and unbreakable bond for family which served as the impetus for my mission to clear my brother’s name and reputation. My upcoming memoir is a testament to them. And I hope I’ve made them proud.
Despite the tragic circumstances I’ve experienced, I try to live a life of gratitude. After all, I have a lot to be thankful for. Love. Peace. And a newfound purpose that may actually save lives.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
May 30, 2008
Exhausted and happy, we returned to our quaint hotel a short block from Barcelona’s lively La Rambla, Spain’s most famous promenade. Freddie and I were in Spain celebrating our third wedding anniversary, which we’d toasted two days earlier over a bottle of local red wine produced along the coastal hills of the Catalonia region. We’d selected a quiet tapas bar for our farewell dinner and were seated at a candlelit table for two in the corner by a window, where we watched the bustle outside while embraced by the calm of the seascape canvas paintings indoors. After two glorious weeks in a country of flamenco dancers, Spanish guitar, sangria, and colorful outdoor festivals, we were deliciously spent and maybe a bit heavy-hearted to leave. Romance, art, culture, and architecture filled every day. Picasso and Miró had been our tour guides, their art depicting human beauty in all its imperfect forms. But it was the spirited colors and fantastical designs of the brilliant architect Antoni Gaudi that held us captive for days. His daring and whimsical multi-story structures of inanimate stonework seemed to take on life in the forms of dragons, gladiators, and budding flower gardens. Angular, skeletal buildings with undisciplined undulating floors and facades that seemed to melt hearkened to fun houses and seemed oddly misplaced in the middle of the bustling city. As engineers and admirers of the father of modernism, my husband Freddie and I roamed Barcelona’s vibrant streets mesmerized by that enchanted land that shouted “Gaudi!” all across the city.
I was exhausted from a day of walking and sightseeing. We’d spent a large part of the day in a mad-dash, last-minute shopping spree to find the perfect replica of Gaudi’s mosaic chimney, a trademark of the region’s architecture. When we finally found the ideal one, we didn’t even calculate what it would cost in dollars—we happily grabbed it, knowing it would look striking sitting in our glass display case at home, surrounded by other family treasures. In the months that followed, the trinket served as a colorful, vivacious reminder of those glorious days in Spain when we’d been so playful and carefree. We followed that purchase by buying a Hard Rock Café T-shirt we’d agreed would be perfect for my brother, Cesare, and I couldn’t wait to give it to him the next time he flew through LA. As with all things, he had no patience, so I knew he’d immediately pull it over his head and find the closest mirror to admire himself in his Spanish keepsake. The image of it made me smile.
I flopped back on the bed, reached for the TV’s remote control, and turned on CNN. It was the only channel we’d been able to find in English, so for two weeks, it had been our link to home. On the screen were images of an airport, and a newscaster reported, “A commercial airplane has crashed in Honduras after overshooting the runway. The pilot and two passengers are confirmed dead.” At first glance, the jumbo jet appeared to be intact, but when I looked closer, I could see something was terribly wrong. The fuselage had broken into three large segments, their edges crumpled like discarded sheets of paper. The jet’s main body lay askew and rested unnaturally on its belly, its wings slightly sagging, as if defeated. The cockpit was crushed where it had come to a violent stop on a dirt embankment. As the camera panned across the crash site, I saw the initials TACA on the plane’s blue tailfin.
TACA Airlines.
I felt hot lightning shoot through my stomach.
TACA Airlines was the flag carrier for El Salvador and one of the biggest airlines in Central and South America.
My brother, Cesare, was a pilot for TACA Airlines.
The scene on TV was chaotic. Throngs of people swarmed the plane, pulling injured passengers out. Ambulances with flashing red lights and wailing sirens were being loaded with people on stretchers. There appeared to be a crushed vehicle under the jet. I couldn’t turn away from the TV. My brain was already tinkering with hypothetical root causes for the crash even as I battled the wave of anxiety and the air of fascination for the disaster before me.
Plane crashes had always fascinated me in a morbid way. Spain’s Tenerife Airport disaster, the bombing of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the explosion of TWA flight 800 off the coast of New York had made significant impressions on me. I always fixated on the randomness of a plane crash, the extraordinarily bad luck of those who had boarded the wrong plane on a given day, and how in a flash of a moment, each of those catastrophic incidents had claimed hundreds of lives. It rattled me that all those human beings had boarded those particular flights when they might have selected any one of hundreds of other options that weren’t destined for disaster. A roll of the dice. Suddenly, their time was up.
When my little brother Cesare had become a pilot in 1993, anxiety joined my disturbing attraction to these kinds of phenomena. After Cesare got his wings, at the news of any plane accident, I’d watch the story unfold, worried that Cesare might be involved even if I knew he was thousands of miles away from it. I’d sit glued to the TV waiting for details to emerge that would reveal my brother was safe. History had always proven my worry had been yet another instance of a protective sister clutching her pearls.
But this one was way too close to home, literally. Honduras, border country to El Salvador, where most of my family lived and out of which my pilot brother was based. And right there onscreen was the wreckage of a TACA Airlines plane. I grabbed my Blackberry and dialed Mom. The line was busy. Damn!
I wondered if Cesare knew the pilot, if he was a friend, if the pilot’s family had heard the news. I wondered if my brother was somewhere suffering over the tragic loss of a colleague.
I could hear the faucet running in the bathroom as Freddie brushed his teeth. “Sweetie, it’s a TACA flight,” I murmured, trying to hide the uneasiness building inside me.
I dialed my mother’s number again. Still busy. Shit!
Suddenly, Freddie’s Blackberry buzzed to life, and he lunged toward the bed to grab it. My attention was on the TV, but I heard him say, “Hi Andres.”
My head snapped in Freddie’s direction as he slowly sat on the bed, slightly crouched over. Why was Andres, my nephew, my sister’s eldest son, calling Freddie? My insides were suddenly ablaze. A wave of burning heat raced through my chest and toward my extremities.
“Oh my god, no. Oh my god, no. Oh my god, no!” was all I could utter.
Then my mind shot off into magical thoughts, as if this panicked chant could change the events I instinctively knew were unraveling before me. I could hear my heart pounding in my eardrums, and I flailed my legs as if trying to fend off the inevitable reality that was trying to creep into my safe haven.
Freddie’s face was a mask of artificial calm. “Yes, we’re watching it on CNN. Has it been confirmed?”
“Oh my god, no. Oh my god, no. Oh my god, no!” I wailed. The images continued to flash on the screen. People swarming the broken plane. Chaos. A passenger freed from the wreckage, his face stamped with pain. Panic. Tears washing down people’s faces. Heartbreak.
“Can I speak to Mami?” Freddie asked Andres. My husband had adopted my mom as his own and called her the Spanish version of mommy. I loved that. It was typical of his warmth and his love of family. Mami was probably the only Spanish word he knew, aside from the four-letter words Cesare had taught him. Quietly, Freddie said, “Okay, we’ll call you later.”
“Oh my god, no. Oh my god, no. Oh my god, no!”
Freddie dropped the phone, sat next to me on the bed, and wrapped his arms around me. But I couldn’t feel him there. I couldn’t feel anything, and all I could hear was the pounding of my heart. The pounding of my heart, which somehow told me I was alive, and Cesare was dead.
Freddie and I sat like that, oblivious of space and time. I stared at the TV, but the recycling images were now a blur.
Somehow, I was supposed to make it through the night. And the next day, my husband and I would have to get on a plane.
Then another. And another.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
I’m an engineer by training and have always felt comfortable exercising my left brain. Creativity was not something I had ever explored. This story was born on May 30, 2008, while vacationing in Spain. That night, my travelogue, its cover stamped with vibrantly colored wildflowers and butterflies, its pages filled with glorious memories, was instantly transformed into one of many journals which chronicled the tragedy and its aftermath. The early journals are pretty non-sensical — documenting people, events, timelines, sights, sounds, and raw emotions. I literally wrote anything that came to mind whether it made sense or had any substance. Random words or thoughts. One of the pages in my early journals is filled line after line with Cesare’s name on it. Nothing else.
With time, I would revisit that raw material and discovered nuggets, gems that had potential. It was like finding pieces of a puzzle and I would string them together to make sentences that now had slightly more meaning. I found myself literally cutting and pasting passages into paragraphs scattering the pages of new narrative across the floor. Standing amongst these disjointed thoughts on sheets of paper strewn about, I’d allow myself to crawl back into the dark recesses of the past conjuring a tale, a tale of epic proportions. Suddenly and without intention, I was creating a story.
Inspired by what could be, I enrolled in the UCLA Writer’s Program and tested out this new material and behold, the feedback came back as positive. I remember so clearly my teacher, Barbara Abercrombie, who first proclaimed me a writer as she intently listened to me read an excerpt of my initial draft, her hand over her heart, her eyes a well of tears. So, I kept at it. Looking back, I’m not sure if I persisted because it was cathartic or because I was driven to clear my brother’s reputation or because for the first time ever, I was actually creating something that could be beautiful.
Creating this book, my book, has taken 15 years and I am so proud that I am on the brink of sharing it with the world. The creative process has been messy and frustrating and yes, painful. But it has been the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done. Maybe because I believed I was not capable but along this journey discovered that creativity has always lived within me, patiently waiting for me to discover it. And maybe that is the most rewarding aspect of this entire journey.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://rossanadantonio.com/
- Instagram: rossanagdantonio
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rossana.dantonio/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossanadantonio
- Twitter: @RossanaDAntonio
- Other: BlueSky
@rossanadantonio.bsky.social
Image Credits
Photography credit Dana Rubin (personal/author photo)
All other images are mine