New Delhi: No one is expected to have survived the mid-air collision between an American Airlines passenger jet carrying 64 people and a US Army Black Hawk helicopter with three soldiers near Reagan National Airport, just outside Washington D.C. Wednesday night.
After an overnight search in the Potomac River where both wreckages fell, Washington’s fire chief John Donnelly said: “At this point, we don’t believe there are any survivors from this accident and we have recovered 27 people from their plane and one from the helicopter.”
“We are switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation,” he said, adding 300 people had been mobilised as soon as the control tower sounded an alarm at 8.48 pm local time.
Donnelly also said he was confident that all bodies would be recovered. “I’m confident that we will do that, and that will take us a little bit of time, though. It may involve some more equipment,” he said of the effort, adding the next phase of the operation would be led by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Flight 5342, operated by PSA Airlines—an Ohio-based regional subsidiary of American Airlines—was traveling from Wichita, Kansas to Washington. The crash occurred when the plane was preparing for landing. The Black Hawk helicopter was on a training flight.
Both aircraft fell in the freezing Potomac River in a ball of fire. The passenger plane was reportedly in pieces.
US Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, from where the flight was travelling, had earlier suggested that most, if not all those on board, had been killed.
Passengers on the flight included ice skaters, coaches and families returning from an event in Wichita, including Russian-born former world champions Yevgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov.
CBS News reported that a dive team had recovered one of the two data recorders or the black boxes, from the plane. The Pentagon has launched an investigation into the crash.
American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said they did not know “at this time” why the military aircraft came into the path of the PSA aircraft.
Newly sworn-in Transportation Secretary Dean Duffy said the mid-air collision of the passenger jet and the military helicopter was “preventable”. “We are going to wait for all the information to come in from this vantage point, but…what I’ve seen so far, do I think this was preventable? Absolutely,” Duffy told reporters Thursday morning.
Earlier in the day, President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented… NOT GOOD!!!”
Meanwhile, the Reagan National Airport, which has been closed since the deadly collision, will reopen at 11 am on Thursday, even as the wreckage of the aircraft was being recovered.
Also read: Russian ex-world champs, US figure skaters aboard plane that crashed near Washington