Arlington, Virginia — On Wednesday, a jet with 60 passengers and four crew members crashed into an Army helicopter while arriving at Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington. This led to a big search-and-rescue effort in the nearby Potomac River. There were several deaths, but it’s not clear how many victims there were as relief teams searched for survivors.
An Army official said there were three troops on the helicopter.
The reason of the collision is not yet known. All flights at the airport have been stopped while dive teams search the area, and helicopters from local law enforcement are flying over the scene to look for bodies.
“At a sad news conference at the airport on Thursday morning, District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser said, ‘We are going to recover our fellow citizens,’ but she did not share how many bodies had been found.”
Sen. Roger Marshall from Kansas said, “One person’s death is a tragedy, but when many people die, it’s a deep sadness.”
President Donald Trump said he was completely informed about the tragic accident and added, “May God bless the passengers’ souls.”
The Federal Aviation Administration reported that the midair crash happened before 9 p.m. EST. A regional jet leaving Wichita, Kansas, collided with a military chopper that was on a training flight while approaching an airport runway. It happened in one of the most closely watched airspaces in the world, a little over three miles from the White House and the Capitol.
Investigators will look into what happened right before the planes crashed, focusing on their communication with air traffic controllers and the passenger jet’s drop in altitude.
American Airlines Flight 5342 was approaching Reagan National Airport at around 400 feet high and traveling at about 140 miles per hour when it quickly lost altitude over the Potomac River, based on information from its radio tracker. The Bombardier CRJ-701 is a twin-engine jet made in Canada in 2004. It can hold as many as 70 people.
A few minutes before landing, air traffic officials asked the pilots of a commercial jet if they could use the shorter Runway 33 at Reagan National, and the pilots agreed they could. Controllers allowed the plane to land on Runway 33. Flight tracking websites showed that the plane changed its approach to the new airport.
Less than 30 seconds before the crash, an air traffic director asked the helicopter if it could see the incoming plane. The controller called the chopper again a short time later: “PAT 25, fly behind the CRJ.” Seconds after that, the two planes collided.
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