At 8.45pm on Wednesday night (1.45am GMT, Thursday), American Eagle Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, was descending calmly into Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport.
The skies were clear, the wind moderate, and among the 60 passengers were several top junior US figure skaters, who had just taken part in a training camp on the ice rinks of the Midwest.
A web camera positioned above the John F Kennedy centre on the other side of the Potomac River captured grainy footage of the Bombardier CRJ701’s flashing wing lights as the plane came into land.
But also visible in the footage are the beacon lights of another aircraft, a US army UH-60 Black Hawk, flying low on a training mission.
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At 08.47pm, the two dots of light can be seen for a second on an apparent collision course.
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A recording from the air traffic control tower captures a panicked message to the pilots of the helicopter, under call-sign PAT25.
“PAT25, do you have a CRJ in sight? PAT25, pass behind the CRJ,” a controller says.
But the pilots of the Black Hawk, which had three soldiers on board, were unable to reply.
Credit: LiveATC.net
In footage from the dash-cam of a passing car, a sudden, orange explosion lights up the night above runway 33, seconds after the controller’s message was relayed.
The passenger plane can be seen falling out of the sky.
“Oh God,” says the driver of the car, Ari Schulman, who was on his way home from work. “Oh my God.”
Gasps can also be heard from air traffic control: “Oh, oh my God” says one controller, her voice breaking.
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Flight path data reveals that the nose of the passenger jet ploughed into the port side of the helicopter, with the crash sending the flaming wreckage of both aircraft into the river below.
“Tower, did you see that?” another nearby aircraft calls in by radio. “Crash, crash, crash, this is an alert three,” says an air traffic controller, before beginning a frantic effort to redirect landing planes away from runway 33.
“I just saw a fireball and then it was just gone. I haven’t seen anything since they hit the river. But it was a CRJ and a helicopter that hit.”
Rescue services immediately headed towards the river to search for any survivors among the 67 people pitched into the dark water.
Inflatable rescue boats were launched into the Potomac from a point along the George Washington Parkway, just north of the airport, and first responders set up light towers from the shore to illuminate the area near the collision site.
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At least a half-dozen boats were scanning the dark water using search lights.
Responders conducting the search and rescue operations were facing “extremely rough” conditions in the river, an official said early Thursday.
The helicopter was upside down in the water, one city official told the Washington Post, while the passenger jet was broken into pieces.
By 7am, more than thirty bodies had been pulled from the river, where current temperatures in the water are two degrees Celsius following several days of icy weather.
On the banks of the Potomac, authorities asked camera crews and bystanders to turn the lights off their cameras so boats could focus on the water.
The smell of fuel wafted up from the crash site as bits of debris floated on the surface, reporters said.
“We don’t know if there are survivors,” DC fire chief John Donnelly announced, adding that 300 rescuers were working on the river.
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Inside the Washington National Airport where he was waiting for his wife, Hamaad Raza said he had lost contact with her after she texted him to say she was coming into land.
“[I’m] just praying that someone is pulling her out of the river right now,” he told CNN affiliate WUSA.
“That’s all I can pray for, I’m just praying to God.”
Credit: WUSA9
None of the texts he sent in reply to his wife, whose last message was “landing in 20 minutes”, have been delivered, he said.
At 7.30am, Mr Donnelly told a news conference he did not believe there were any survivors. “We are now at a point where we are switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation,” he said.
American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said he does not know why the helicopter came to be in the jet’s path.
“This is devastating,” he added. “Our focus right now is to do everything we can to support everyone involved”.
Credit: Earthcam
National Airport closed for the night after the crash, redirecting traffic to Dulles or Baltimore’s Thurgood Marshall Airport.
Russia’s state news agency, Tass, said high-profile figure skaters from the country were on board the American Airlines jet, including Yevgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, a pair who won the world championships in 1999.
Their son Maxim, who competed for the United States in singles, was also feared to have been on board the plane, Russia’s TASS and RIA news agencies reported.
“Bad news from Washington today,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. “We regret and offer condolences to the families and friends who lost those of our fellow citizens who died in this plane crash”.
Roger Marshall, a Republican senator for Kansas, expressed “heartbreak beyond measure” at the crash.
“When one person dies, it’s a tragedy, but when many, many, many people die, it’s an unbearable sorrow.”
But Donald Trump, the president, turned his focus on who was to blame, suggesting the helicopter pilots and air traffic control failed in their duties. He wrote on Truth Social:
“The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport,” he wrote on Truth Social.
“The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time.”
“It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn.”
“Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.”
“This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”
Air traffic controllers have recently feared that a deadly crash was inevitable, with a series of near-misses in recent years amid a nationwide staff shortage.
The airspace along the Potomac River poses some of the most complex challenges in aviation safety across the entire United States, with military craft sharing the space with a huge volume of passenger jets.
A New York Times investigation from 2023 found that human error was to blame for passenger jets being put on apparent collision courses.
“Is it going to take people dying for something to move forward?” one controller said in January of that year, after barely preventing a mid-air collision.
The crash on Wednesday night is already the deadliest in the US for 23 years, and the first involving a passenger jet for 16 years.
Built in 1941, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was expected to handle 15 million annual passengers at its maximum capacity. Today it hosts more than 25 million.
In the early hours of Thursday morning, a handful of families waited in dreadful suspense in the arrival lounge, reaping the aftermath of a crash that was long seen coming.
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