Chad de Guzman and Rebecca Schneid
A total of 67 people are presumed dead after a regional American Airlines operated by PSA Airlines, collided with an Army helicopter in midair on Wednesday night when it was about to land at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
President Donald Trump said Thursday that there are no survivors, and hundreds of responders had been deployed to the nearby Potomac River, where the crash occurred, for recovery efforts. “We are now at a point where we are switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation,” John Donnelly, chief of D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services, said in a briefing Thursday.
In a follow-up news briefing on Friday morning, Donnelly said 42 sets of remains have been recovered so far, and the recovery team is continuing their work on recovering the rest. The commercial jet had 64 people aboard, while the Army helicopter had three people on board, District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser earlier confirmed.
The collision happened in one of the most monitored airspaces in the U.S., with its proximity to the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and other government buildings. The cause of the collision remains unknown, but the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which leads the investigation, has since recovered the commercial jet’s “black boxes”—the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder—for analysis, according to Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board. Inman told ABC News that the helicopter’s black box was also recovered.
No comments:
Post a Comment