Ari Schulman, a magazine editor, was driving to his home in Virginia on Wednesday evening past Ronald Reagan National Airport when he saw a plane coming in for landing — wings level, lights flashing.
He looked back at the road, and then glanced up again a moment later. This time, something was wrong. The plane appeared to have banked sharply to the right, and Mr. Schulman saw sparks.
What followed was a shared moment of shock for residents of Washington, D.C., and Virginia who witnessed the deadly midair collision of an American Airlines jet carrying 64 people and a U.S. Army helicopter with three crew members. No one survived.
Eyewitnesses described an initial sense of disbelief — uncertain whether they had truly seen a catastrophe unfold — followed by grim confirmation as reports of the crash emerged.
When Mr. Schulman looked back a third time, the plane was gone, but he hadn’t seen any sign of a collision. Doubting what he had just viewed, he turned around on the highway and drove back by the same spot, scanning the water. Again, nothing.
“I had a moment of wondering if I had actually seen what I thought I did,” he said. “It seemed impossible.”
Once he was farther down the road, he pulled over and began scanning social media. The first reports came in: A plane had crashed near Reagan. He now believes that he didn’t see any wreckage because the aircraft had plunged into the Potomac River.
Abadi Ismail, a 38-year-old sports commentator, was getting ready for bed in his high-rise apartment overlooking the river when he heard a bang — so loud, he said, that it reminded him of something out of a movie.
He rushed to his window, where he saw smoke. “It was hard to tell what had happened,” he said.
Living near Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, a military installation in Washington, his first thought was that it might be a drill.
“That was the wildest thing I could think of,” he said. “But a plane crash? I was horrified. It’s just hard to process all of this.”
Roy Best, 48, witnessed the crash from the other side of the river from the rooftop of his apartment building in Arlington, Va., where he was enjoying the warmer weather after a stretch of freezing temperatures. Watching planes take off and land at Reagan is part of his routine — something he does “almost daily.”
That evening, he was talking to a neighbor, when a sudden, loud noise cut through the air. It sounded like an explosion, he said. He turned and saw wreckage falling from the sky into the river. His neighbor exclaimed, “Oh my God, that’s a plane.”
“I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing,” he said. “Or I didn’t want to admit to it.”
Even now, he said, the reality of the crash hasn’t fully sunk in.
“I know we’ve had a couple of close calls,” he said. “But you never think it’s actually going to happen.”
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