The US Coast Guard investigates aircraft wreckage on the Potomac River in Washington, DC. There were no survivors among the 67 people on the aircraft. Photo / Getty Images
The US Coast Guard investigates aircraft wreckage on the Potomac River in Washington, DC. There were no survivors among the 67 people on the aircraft. Photo / Getty Images
American Eagle Flight 5342 from Wichita, with 60 passengers, two pilots and two flight attendants aboard, was a few hundred feet up, preparing to land at Reagan National Airport. An Army Black Hawk helicopter carrying a crew of three was on a training flight in the same airspace, at the same moment.
The crash horrified witnesses and astonished those tasked with overseeing the most tightly controlled and monitored airspace in the world, just over 5km south of the White House and the Capitol.
Aviation officials, military officers, political leaders and public safety authorities, wearing stunned expressions at news briefings in the sleepless hours afterward, promised answers. Investigations will be conducted. Hearings will be held. Lessons will be learned.
They seemed buoyed only by this: rescuers had mobilised swiftly and braved the winter elements, the cold and wind and darkness on the river, many working through the night and into the morning.
“At this point, we don’t believe there are any survivors,” the district’s fire chief, John A. Donnelly snr, told reporters Thursday. As of 7.30am, the confirmed dead numbered 27 from the jetliner and one from the Black Hawk, a figure that has since climbed to 41, the fire department said Friday. “We will continue to work to find all the bodies,” Donnelly vowed. “We are searching every square inch of space.”
The sky along the Potomac poses some of the most complex challenges in the country for pilots.
They must rely on layers of procedures and electronic safeguards to avoid calamity. Military helicopters fly low over the river, sharing the airport’s heavily used takeoff and landing routes with commercial planes. Congestion in the air and on runways and taxiways has long worried aviation analysts and others. National was built for 15 million passengers annually; it now handles 25 million.
Year after year these travellers safely got where they were going, until the night they didn’t.
Emergency personnel set up a staging area just south of Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge after a helicopter and commercial airliner collided near Reagan National Airport. Photo / Washington Post
At the time of the collision, staffing levels were “not normal” inside National’s control tower, with no single controller dedicated to managing helicopter traffic, according to an air traffic safety report described to the Washington Post. It was not immediately clear who or what was responsible for the wreck.
“Tower, did you see that?” a pilot asked in a recorded transmission as the fireball ignited above the Potomac.
“Fire command, the accident occurred in the river,” said another voice, sounding calm. “Both the helicopter and the plane crashed in the river.”
Ari Schulman, a journalist in DC, was driving home to Alexandria, Virginia, on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, near the airport, when he saw the fireball.
He said he saw sparks trailing a jetliner at low altitude as the aircraft banked sharply right.
“I couldn’t make sense of what I saw because it didn’t seem like they were coming directly out of the plane,” Schulman said. “They were underneath its belly and separated a little distance.”
He said late Wednesday, “I pray that there are many survivors,” but there were none.
Reagan National Airport the day after a fatal crash. Photo / Washington Post
Courtney Cain, 28, said she was at home at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Southeast DC, across the Potomac from the airport, when she heard a thunderous boom.
She saw flames in the sky, which at first she thought she was imagining. Then she walked to the riverfront and beheld a nightmare.
“I’m honestly still shaking,” Cain said later.
Her 5-year-old son told her, “I’m worried about the people”.
In the Buzzard Point section of Southwest Washington, where the waters of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers meet, not far from the airport, Abadi Ismail was getting ready for bed shortly before 9pm when he heard a “bang-bang” that sounded to him like something from “a war zone”, he told the Reuters news agency.
“I looked at the sky,” Ismail, 38, said, and “all I could see at that moment was smoke.”
“It’s horrific.”
At 8.48pm, an urgent announcement went out from National Airport’s control tower.
“Crash, crash, crash. This is an alert 3. Crash, crash, crash.”
Alert 3 is the highest alert, broadcast directly to the radios of DC police officers and firefighters assigned to a nearby marine unit.
Roberto Marquez digs a hole for a cross as part of a memorial for the victims of the midair collision between an American Airlines plane and a military helicopter earlier this week over the Potomac River. Photo / Getty Images
As hundreds of emergency personnel from all over the Washington metropolitan area converged on National and its surrounding roads, bridges and riverbanks, a sea of strobe lights bathed the evening in red and blue for miles around.
Dispatchers summoned more and more help as the scope of the disaster became clear. Soon more than 300 first responders were at the scene or en route from as far as Baltimore; so many that not enough boats were available for all the rescuers arriving to look for survivors and bodies in the frigid river.
The Army sent people. So did the Coast Guard, the FBI, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, the Maryland and Virginia state police, the Maryland Transportation Authority. So did suburban police and fire departments.
A DC police officer and a fire department colleague saw a dinner-cruise yacht at a pier with its lights on, said David Hoagland, president of the DC firefighters association, who was briefed on what happened next. They ran to the pier and banged on the heavy steel gates.
“We need to get on your boat,” one of them said.
The boat, with room for 150 passengers, had just docked after a river cruise. A janitor unlocked the gates of the pier. The first responders told the captain and crew that 60 or more people had been aboard the two aircraft and that some or most of them, alive or not, were in the water.
Ten minutes later, the yacht was two and a half kilometres upriver in the area where the wreckage had plummeted down. The debris field stretched nearly 12km along the Potomac, south from the airport to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
“A large black spot,” as one official described it. Hazardous ice chunks littered the murky water, and wind gusts buffeted the rescuers like frozen needles.
Remnants of the helicopter were upside down in the river, as was the fuselage of the jetliner, broken into three pieces, officials said. It was a Bombardier CRJ700, operated by a subsidiary of American Airlines, designed for up to 78 passengers.
Hoping survivors would be found, the yacht crew lined up chairs and turned tablecloth linens into blankets. A chef, without being asked, cooked chicken.
Others in the crew brewed coffee and handed the pots to smaller boats carrying divers who emerged from the water exhausted and covered in aviation fuel. The pungent odour of the fuel hung so thick in the air that some divers vomited.
They pulled mangled remains and body parts from the water. Blood pooled on the deck of a fireboat. For some of the rescuers, the carnage was worse than anything they had seen before.
Then some made their way to the yacht, where they rested on decks and benches and perched on an upholstered chair meant for smiling brides on wedding excursions, said Chad Barth, a vice president of City Cruises, the boat’s owner.
Emergency services workers move a stretcher to a morgue tent. Photo / Washington Post
Morgue tents sprung up along a bank of the Anacostia.
Some of the dead were transported to a National Airport facility; some were carried to the DC police department’s helicopter base near the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, where the DC fire department’s medical director, physician David Vitberg, waited with a city medical examiner.
One by one on the pier in the cold the victims were formally pronounced dead.
Then the rescuers who had delivered the remains turned in their boats and went back on the river to search for more.
“Our first responders are resilient,” said Donnelly. “But, yes, this call will be hard for them.”
“The investigation and recovery efforts remain active and our divers have searched all areas that are accessible,” the fire department said on social media.Divers will continue to work with the National Transportation Safety Board “to conduct additional searches to locate aircraft components, to support the investigation, and begin operations to salvage the aircraft”.
A memorial inside the Ashburn Ice House remembers Inna Volyanskaya, a skating coach at Ashburn Ice House and is thought to have been on Flight 5342. Photo / Washington Post
Many bodies were still out there, and so were many responders.
Many loved ones still waited for news they know is coming.
Mourners left flowers at a memorial in Ashburn, Virginia, honouring members of the Ashburn Ice House skating community who died in the crash. US President Donald Trump said he planned to speak with families of some of the victims.
Asked by reporters whether he would visit the crash site, he said: “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”
“I fly enough and know the statistics enough not to be afraid today,” said Jared Kathcart, 37, who was boarding a flight home to Kansas City after a business trip to DC. “If I personalise this, it’s not through fear for myself, but by feeling sympathy for the families of the victims and what they are going through.”
