By Christine Hauser, Isabella Kwai and John Yoon
A passenger jet carrying 64 people and a U.S. Army helicopter on a training flight carrying a crew of three collided in midair Wednesday night and crashed into the Potomac River near Washington, D.C.
No survivors had been found and rescuers said they had switched to a recovery operation Thursday.
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, Kansas, with 60 passengers and four crew members onboard. As the plane was approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport at about 9 p.m., the two aircraft collided.
Teams, including emergency personnel in boats and divers, searched the dark, frigid water overnight and into Thursday.
Here is what to know about the crash.
No survivors have been found.
The dark, cold and windy conditions heightened the challenge of the search.
By Thursday morning, 27 bodies were recovered from the passenger plane and one body from the helicopter, said Chief John Donnelly of the Fire and EMS Department in Washington at a news conference.
With 64 people on board, the commercial jet, a Bombardier CRJ700, was nearly full. Two Army officials confirmed that two pilots — one man, one woman — and a male staff sergeant crew member were on board the helicopter, a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk.
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 a clear night, the two aircraft are seen on the stream 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.
The plane’s fuselage was found inverted, and broken in three sections in about waist-deep water, officials said. Donnelly said the debris was spread across an area of less than a mile.
It was ‘not unusual’ for both aircraft to fly there, an official said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said there was no “breakdown” in communication between the two aircraft and the control tower.
“This was not unusual with a military aircraft flying the river and an aircraft landing at DCA,” the code for Reagan Airport, he said. 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, CEO of American Airlines.
The moments before the collision appeared to have been captured in an audio recording, according to LiveATC.net, which streams air-traffic control radio transmissions. In the recording, an air traffic controller is heard instructing the helicopter to pass behind the jet.
Shortly before the collision, the plane’s pilots were asked to pivot its landing route from one runway to another, according to a person briefed on the event and conversations between an air traffic controller and the pilots overheard on audio recordings.
Staffing at the air traffic control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to a preliminary FAA safety report that was reviewed by The New York Times. The controller who was handling helicopters in the airport’s vicinity was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways, performing jobs that are typically assigned to two controllers.
Army officials for the U.S. military’s Joint Task Force-National Capital Region said the helicopter had been on a military training flight. It was operating out of Davison Army Airfield in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, south of Washington.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said his department and the Army were investigating. He also said 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 on board 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 over the weekend.
Russian nationals, including figure skaters, were also on board. Skating champions Yevgeniya Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were among them as coaches, according to the Skating Club of Boston.
The club also said that Jinna Han, a skater, and her mother, Jin Han, and another skater, Spencer Lane, and Christine Lane, his mother, were on board.
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.
