By Lolita C. Baldor, Tara Copp, Adriana Gomez Licon and Lea Skene, Associated Press
Arlington, Virginia (AP) – Police boats returned to the Potomac River on Friday as part of recovery and investigation after A collision in the air killed 67 people in the most fatal aviation disaster in the United States in almost a quarter of a century.
More than 40 bodies from the river have been taken as the mass recovery effort continued, two officials in charge of enforcing the law to The Associated Press on Friday said. The officials were not authorized to discuss the details of the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.
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The teams worked under cloudy skies on Friday morning with the rain that is expected throughout the day. The planes continued to take off and landing in Reagan National, and the airport operations gradually returned to normal after a series of flights canceled and delayed after the accident.
The researchers have already recovered the voice recorder of the cabin and the flight recorder of the American Airlines plane that collided with an army helicopter while the plane landed on Wednesday night at Ronald Reagan National Airport with Washington DC officials are analyzing a variety of factors in what National Transport Security Board President Jennifer Hommendy has called for an “event of all hands on the deck.”
All on board The two planes They were killed, with officials who examined the actions of the military pilot, as well as air traffic control after the helicopter apparently flew to the jet American Airlines.
Air accident investigations can take months and Federal researchers told journalists on Thursday They would not speculate on the cause.
The authorities were still looking for the Black Caja del Helicopter recorder, said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday at Fox News Channel. Other factors in the accident, including the altitude of the helicopter and if the crew was wearing its night vision glasses, they are still under investigation, Hegseth said.
Military aircraft frequently make such flights in the capital of the nation and its surroundings to familiarize the routes that would fly in case of an important catastrophe or an attack against the United States that would require the relocation of key officials of the capital region.
“You need to train while fighting, you must rehearse in a way that reflects a real world scenario,” said Hegseth. He stressed that he was still the duty of the Pentagon also mitigate the risks, while performing such training. But he stressed the US forces they need “to ensure, if unfortunately, there was a real world event in which things should happen, we could respond day or night.”
The plane He took 60 passengers and four crew membersand three soldiers were aboard the helicopter.
An air traffic controller was responsible for coordinating helicopter traffic and arriving and leaving airplanes when the collision occurred, according to a report by the Federal Aviation Administration that was obtained by Associated Press. These tasks are often divided by two people, but the airport usually combines roles at 9:30 pm, once traffic begins to decrease. On Wednesday, the tower supervisor directed that they combined before.
“The position configuration was not normal for the time of day and the traffic volume,” the report said.
However, a person familiar with the matter said that the tower staff that night was at a normal level. The positions are combined regularly when the controllers must move away from the console to rest, during shift changes or when air traffic is slow, said the person, talking about the condition of the anonymity to discuss internal procedures.
FAA has long fought with a shortage of air traffic controllers.
The authorities said the flight conditions were clear when the plane arrived from Wichita, Kansas, which leads, among others, A group of skillors from young elite figureshis parents and Trainersand four Steamfitters union in the Washington area.
A senior army aviation official said that the helicopter crew, a black hawk, was “very experienced” and was familiar with the congested flight that occurs daily around the city.
“Both pilots had flown this specific route before, at night. This was not something new for any of them, ”said Jonathan Koziol, head of the Army Aviation Cabinet.
The maximum allowed altitude of the helicopter at that time was 200 feet (approximately 60 meters), Koziol said. It was not clear immediately if it exceeded that limit, but Hegseth said the altitude seemed to be a collision factor.
Koziol said researchers must analyze flight data before reaching conclusions about altitude.
President Donald Trump said in a Friday morning on his social platform of truth that the helicopter was “flying too high” at the time of the accident.
“It was well above the 200 feet limit. That is not really too complicated to understand, right? Trump said. His comments come the day after him questioned the actions of a American army helicopter pilot involved in the collision in the air with a commercial plane, while blaming the diversity initiatives for undermining air security.
The flights in Reagan National resumed around noon on Thursday.
Wednesday accident It was the deadliest in the United States since November 12, 2001, when an American Airlines flight crashed into a residential area of Belle Harbor, New York, just after takeoff from Kennedy airport, killing the 260 people on board and five people on the ground.
He Last important fatal shock Involving an American commercial airline occurred in 2009 near Buffalo, New York. All aboard the Bombardier DHC-8 propeller plane were killed, along with a person on the ground, which raised the dead of the dead to 50.
However, experts often emphasize that the plane trip is overwhelmingly safe. The National Security Council estimates that Americans have a probability of 1 in 93 to die in a car accident, while the deaths in the airplanes are too rare to calculate The probabilities. Figures of Department of Transportation Tell a similar story.
But airspace around Reagan National You can even challenge the most experienced pilots No matter how ideals are the conditions. They must navigate hundreds of other commercial airplanes, military airplanes and restricted areas around sensitive sites.
Little more than 24 hours before the fatal collision, a different regional plane had to continue for a second chance to land in Reagan National after a military helicopter was near, according to flight tracking sites and trunks of control. He landed safe minutes later.
Gómez Licon reported from Miami. Associated Press writers Lindsay Whitehurst, Zeke Miller, Meg Kinnard, Chris Megerian, Aamer Madhani, Michael Biesecker in Washington; Claudia Lauer in Arlington, Virginia; Brian Melley in London; John Hanna in Wichita, Kansas; and Sarah Brumfield in Cockeysville, Maryland, contributed.
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