A passenger jet carrying 64 people crashed into the Potomac River near Washington, D.C., after colliding midair with a military helicopter on a training flight while approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday night.
The plane was being operated as American Eagle Flight 5342 by PSA Airlines for its parent carrier, American Airlines, and had taken off from Wichita, Kan., with 60 passengers and four crew members onboard. At about 9 p.m., it collided with a U.S. Army helicopter carrying a crew of three.
Early on Thursday, officials said they believed that no one had survived the collision. Rescue teams, including boats and divers, had searched the dark, frigid water overnight.
Here is what to know about the crash.
All on board are feared to have died.
Helicopters, police boats and crews of divers mobilized quickly after the crash to search for survivors in the water near the airport. The dark, bitterly cold and windy conditions heightened the challenge.
By Thursday morning, local and federal officials said that they believed no one had survived the midair collision and crash. Twenty-seven bodies had been recovered from the aircraft and one body from the helicopter, said Chief John Donnelly, of the Fire and EMS Department in Washington, at a news conference on Thursday.
With 64 people on board, the commercial jet, a Bombardier CRJ700, was nearly full. Three U.S. Army service members were onboard the helicopter, a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk.
It may be the most serious air disaster involving a commercial jet in the United States since 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed into a house near Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people.
The collision caused an explosion.
The collision was captured in a video from a live webcam operated by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a few miles north of the crash site.
At 8:47 p.m. on the stream, two aircraft are seen hitting each other, resulting in an explosive fireball followed by a trail of smoke. Before the collision, the plane had been on approach to Runway 33 at Reagan National Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
Multiple agencies in Washington said they had received calls about a plane crash above the Potomac at 8:53 p.m. Washington’s fire emergency department said the plane had crashed into the river.
Flight paths appeared normal before the collision.
The flights of the jet plane and the helicopter had been normal leading up to the collision, according to Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. Helicopters and planes typically fly near each other in D.C. airspace, he said on Thursday.
“This was not unusual with a military aircraft flying the river and an aircraft landing at DCA,” the code for Reagan Airport, said Mr. Duffy, adding that it had also been a clear night. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration would analyze the debris, he said. The pilot was also experienced, according to Robert Isom, chief executive of American Airlines.
The moments before the collision appeared to have been captured in an audio recording, according to LiveATC.net, a website which streams air-traffic control radio transmissions. In the recording, an air traffic controller is heard instructing the helicopter to pass behind the jet. There was “not a breakdown” in communication between the two aircraft and the control tower, Mr. Duffy said.
Army officials for the U.S. military’s Joint Task Force-National Capital Region said that the helicopter had been on a military training flight. It was operating out of Davison Army Airfield in Fort Belvoir, Va., south of Washington.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that his department and the Army had launched an investigation. He also said that the military helicopter was taking part in an annual proficiency training flight with “a fairly experienced crew” that had night vision goggles.
Figure skaters were among the plane’s passengers.
Figure skaters, their family members and their coaches were among those onboard the plane, according to U.S. Figure Skating, the American governing body for the sport. They were returning from a training camp that followed the national figure skating championships, which were held in Wichita, Kan., over the weekend.
Russian nationals, including figure skaters, were also onboard, the Kremlin said. The skating champions Yevgeniya Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were feared to have been among them, according to Tass, the Russian state-owned news agency.
The Skating Club of Boston said they were coaches. The club also said that Jinna Han, a skater, and her mother, Jin Han, had been onboard, as well as another skater, Spencer Lane, and Christine Lane, his mother.
As of early Thursday, it was unclear how many of the people on the flight were from Kansas, said Mayor Lily Wu of Wichita. The flight manifest had not yet been released.
Emergency responders are searching the debris.
The plane’s fuselage was found inverted, and broken in three sections in about waist-deep water, officials said on Thursday.
Mr. Donnelly said that search crews were going by “touch and feel” in the wreckage, and that the debris was spread across an area of less than a mile.
About 300 emergency responders worked in dangerous and “highly complex” conditions to find survivors or bodies, Mr. Donnelly said earlier. The dark, bitterly cold and windy conditions heightened the challenge, as meteorologists warned of the risk of hypothermia.
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