Sixty passengers and four crew members from the plane and three Black Hawk helicopter personnel are feared dead as a recovery mission is underway.
While driving home, Ari Shulman said a "spray of sparks" in the sky caught his attention as he watched in horror the midair collision unfold.
According to the FAA, an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided into a 60-passenger flight landing at DCA midair.
Officials: Likely no survivors from plane, Army helicopter crash in D.C. A passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter collided in midair Wednesday night and crashed into the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport near Washington,
WASHINGTON — More than a dozen bodies have been pulled from the Potomac River after a plane collided with a military helicopter in midair and crashed into the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) on Wednesday night.
I don’t know of any other accident that has had this amount of impact on aviation but also in other industries,” one expert said of the 1982 crash.
U.S. authorities said on Thursday it was not yet clear why a regional jet crashed into a U.S. Army helicopter at a Washington airport, killing 67 people in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in more than 20 years.
An American Airlines regional jet went down in the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from the American Airlines jet that collided with the Black Hawk helicopter have been recovered from the wreckage in the Potomac River and are now at the NTSB labs for evaluation.
As many as 60 passengers and four crew members were aboard American Eagle Flight 5342, and the Black Hawk helicopter was carrying three soldiers. There were no survivors.