No survivors after the plane, the military helicopter collided on DC, 67 dead – National

An outdoor collision between an army helicopter and a American airlines The flight killed the 67 people on the two planes, officials said on Thursday, while they were examining the actions of the military pilot and reported that the endowment of the control tower was “not normal” at the time of The deadliest aviation disaster in the country in almost a quarter of a century.

At least 28 bodies were taken from the frozen water from the Potomac river after the helicopter has apparently stolen on the late evening jet while he landed at Ronald Reagan National Airport, just opposite Washington , officials said. The plane was carrying 60 passengers and four crews. Three soldiers were aboard the helicopter.

An air traffic controller was working normally assigned to two people in the tower when the collision occurred, according to a report by the Federal Aviation Administration obtained by the Associated Press.

“The position configuration was not normal for the time being and the volume of traffic,” said the report.

President Donald Trump told a press conference at the White House that no one has survived.

“We are now to the point where we are moving from a rescue operation to a recovery operation,” said John Donelly, head of the firefighters in the national capital.

5:37
No survivor expected after the American Airlines plane, a blackhawk helicopter accident from the army in Washington

The plane was found upside down in three sections in the water to the waist, and the first speakers were looking for an area of ​​the potomac to the south that the Woodrow Wilson bridge, about 3 miles (4, 8 kilometers) south of the airport, said Donelly. The helicopter wreck has also been found. Images of the river showed boats around the partially submerged wing and the mutilated wreckage of the plane fuselage.

The collision was the deadliest American air accident since 2001.

Officials said the flight conditions were clear when the jet arrived from Wichita, Kansas.

“On the final approach in Reagan National, he collided with a military plane on a differently normal approach,” said the CEO of American Airlines, Robert Iso.

A senior army aviation official said that the Black Hawk crew was “very experienced” and familiar with the congestioned flight that occurs daily around Washington.

“The two pilots had already talked about this specific route at night. It was not something new for one or the other, “said Jonathan Koziol, chief of staff of the aviation army.

The maximum altitude of the helicopter allowed at the time of the 200-foot accident above the ground, said Koziol. It was not immediately clear if the helicopter exceeded this limit, but the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said that altitude seemed to be a factor in the collision.

Koziol said investigators must analyze flight data before drawing conclusions on altitude.

“The two planes will have recorders on board that will give us all this information once we have recovered it, to give us the real truth about what these planes did,” he said.

Get daily national news

Get the best news of the day, the titles of political, economic and current affairs, delivered in your reception box once a day.

Trump opened the White House press conference after the accident with a moment of silence honoring the victims, calling him an “hour of anxiety” for the country.

But he spent most of his time to blame political, unleashing himself in the efforts of the administration and diversity of former President Joe Biden at the Federal Aviation Administration, saying that they had led to sliding standards – Even if he recognized that the cause of the accident was unknown.

Without evidence, Trump blamed air controllers, helicopter pilots and democratic policies in federal agencies. He said FAA “actively recruited workers who suffered from serious intellectual disorders, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions in the context of a hiring and inclusion hiring initiative”.

Inside the Reagan National Airport, the atmosphere was dark Thursday while the blocked passengers were waiting for the flights to resume, bypassing the teams of cameras and watching the windows of the Terminal to the Potomac, where the recovery efforts were pain visible in the distance.

Aster Anemecael had been at the airport since Wednesday evening with his elderly father, who was flying in Indiana to visit his family. She spent much of the long night thinking about the victims and their families.

“I have been crying since yesterday,” she said, her cracking voice. “It’s devastating.”

The flights resumed at the airport around noon.

Transport Secretary Sean Duffy, who was sworn in earlier this week, said that there were “the first indicators of what had happened”. He refused to develop.

Wednesday’s accident has been the deadliest in the United States since November 12, 2001, when a flight from American Airlines crashed into a beautiful Harbor residential area, New York, just after takeoff of the Kennedy airport, killing the 260 people on board.

The last major fatal accident involving an American commercial airline took place in 2009 near Buffalo, New York. Everyone aboard the Bombardier DHC-8 propeller plane was killed, with a person on the ground, bringing the total number of deaths to 50.

Experts often point out that plane trips are extremely safe. The National Security Council estimates that the Americans have a chance of 1 in 93 to die in a motor vehicle accident, while deaths in the planes are too rare to calculate the chances. The figures from the Ministry of Transport tell a similar story.

The passengers on Wednesday flight included a group of artistic skaters, their coaches and their family members who returned from a development camp that followed the American craft skating championships in Wichita.

Two of these coaches were identified by the Kremlin as the Russian artistic skaters Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who won the title of pairs at the 1994 World Championships and participated twice in the Olympic Games. The Boston skating club lists them as coaches and their son, Maxim Naumov, is a competitive artistic skater for the United States

The CEO of the club, Doug Zeghibe, said that their loss would resonate through the skating community for years.

“People are just amazed by that,” said Zehibe. “They are like a family for us.”

The accident has devastated Wichita, the Kansas City who prides himself on being in the American heart. He welcomed the figure skating championships this year for the first time.

The city is a major hub for the aircraft industry since the first days of the commercial flight, and it houses the American seat of Bombardier, which made the jetliner. So many regional workers have industry -related jobs that the region’s economy collapses when sales decrease.

After the accident, several hundred people gathered in the chambers of the municipal council for a prayer vigil led by the mayor Lily Wu and the religious leaders.

Carla Lee, a retirement nursing professor at the Wichita State University, brought a vase of red roses. She should go to Washington next week for a conference, taking the same flight.

“It strikes you, how short life can be,” she said.

The FAA said that the air accident had taken place before 9 p.m. in some of the most closely controlled and monitored air areas in the world, just over 3 miles south of the White House and Capitol.

Flight 5342 of American Airlines was incoming on national Reagan at an altitude of about 400 feet (122 meters) and a speed of around 140 mph (225 km / h) when it quickly lost altitude on Potomac, according to data from its radio transponder. The CRJ-700 bombardier of Canadian manufacturing from CRJ-700, manufactured in 2004, can be configured to transport up to 70 passengers.

A few minutes before landing, air traffic controllers asked the commercial jet arriving if he could land on the shorter track 33 in Reagan national, and the pilots said they were able. The controllers then released the plane to land on track 33. The flight tracking sites showed that the plane adjusts its approach to the new track.

Less than 30 seconds before the accident, an air traffic controller asked the helicopter if he had the plane arriving in sight. The controller made another radio call to the helicopter a few moments later: “Pat 25, go behind the CRJ.” A few seconds after that, the two planes collided.

Gomez Licon reported to Miami. The writers of the associated press Zeke Miller, Meg Kinnard, Chris Megerian, Michael Biesecker in Washington; Claudia Lauer in Arlington, Virginie; Brian Melley in London; And Sarah Brumfield in Cockeysville, Maryland, contributed to this report.