Plane carrying over 60 collides with helicopter while landing at airport near Washington
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA: A jet carrying 60 passengers and four crew members collided with an Army helicopter while landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington on Wednesday, triggering a substantial search-and-rescue operation in the adjacent Potomac River. There were multiple fatalities, according to a source familiar with the matter, although the exact number of victims remains unclear as rescue teams search for any survivors.
An Army official confirmed that three soldiers were aboard the helicopter.
There was no immediate word on the cause of the collision, but all take-offs and landings at the airport were halted as dive teams scoured the site, and helicopters from law enforcement agencies across the region conducted a methodical search for bodies.
“We are going to recover our fellow citizens,” District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser said at a sombre news conference at the airport on Thursday morning, where she declined to specify how many bodies had been recovered.
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas stated, “When one person dies it’s a tragedy, but when many, many, many people die it’s an unbearable sorrow.”
President Donald Trump said he had been “fully briefed on this terrible accident” and, referring to the passengers, added, “May God Bless their souls.”
The Federal Aviation Administration reported that the mid-air crash occurred just before 9:00 pm. EST when a regional jet that had departed from Wichita, Kansas, collided with a military helicopter on a training flight while approaching an airport runway. The incident happened in some of the most tightly controlled and monitored airspace in the world, just over three miles south of the White House and the Capitol.
Investigators will attempt to reconstruct the aircraft’s final moments before the collision, including any contact with air traffic controllers and the loss of altitude by the passenger jet.
American Airlines Flight 5342 was inbound to Reagan National at an altitude of approximately 400 feet and a speed of about 140 miles per hour when it experienced a rapid loss of altitude over the Potomac River, according to data from its radio transponder. The Canadian-made Bombardier CRJ-701 twin-engine jet, manufactured in 2004, is capable of carrying up to 70 passengers.
A few minutes before landing, air traffic controllers asked the arriving commercial jet if it could land on the shorter Runway 33 at Reagan National, to which the pilots agreed. Controllers then cleared the plane to land on Runway 33. Flight tracking sites showed the plane adjusting its approach to the new runway.
Less than 30 seconds before the crash, an air traffic controller asked the helicopter if it had the arriving plane in sight. The controller made another radio call to the helicopter moments later: “PAT 25 pass behind the CRJ.” Seconds after that, the two aircraft collided.
By RSS/AP
